Earlier in December, the UK government had been forced to confiscate over 15,000 hoverboards because they were considered “unsafe” and potential fire hazards.
“Many of the items detained and sent for testing have been found to have noncompliant plugs without fuses, which increases the risk of the device overheating, exploding or catching fire,” said UK’s National Trading Standards
When security tests were conducted on hoverboards as they were shipped from different manufacturers, about 88% of them were declared a safety threat for users. These self-balancing scooters have also been in the news for getting banned by the UK government based on the 1835 Highways Act.
In the wake of accidents related to hoverboard-explosions that have continued to persist despite these measurements by the government, Amazon has finally decided to look into the matter. Not only has it started questioning the safety standards of manufacturers, it has also removed many hoverboards from its website as was reported by Best Reviews.
This little piece of tech has been at the receiving end of many jokes on social media. Users have been tweeting and condemning the “evil” hoverboard all over.
lol all these hoverboards exploding got me like pic.twitter.com/4eDXxPLjBZ
— EYE-SLAY-YA (@kingIsaiah16) December 9, 2015
In the recent weeks, the United States has witnessed ten recorded incidents of hoverboard fires in nine states, leading to active investigation of the situation. Additionally, major airlines all over the world have banned hoverboards from flights as market gets flooded with more and more cheap rip-offs.
The future of hoverboards seems very uncertain at this point. It would be interesting to see how these self-balancing scooters come back after such a major blow. Watch this space for updates.
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