If you set out to find one of Lyft’s pink electric bicycles in San Francisco today, you might find it hard to locate one. That’s because the company has decided to pull them from the streets of San Francisco. It has made this decision merely two months after the electric bikes were deployed in the city. It’s having to do this because some of these bikes actually caught fire while they were being used.
Electric bikes are one of Lyft’s new dockless mobility options that are operated by Motivate, a company that’s owned by Lyft. It has decided to pull the bikes from San Francisco after some of them caught fire. Lyft previously pulled its entire fleet of electric bikes off city streets across the United States in April because of a braking malfunction which was proving to be quite dangerous for riders.
There’s no firm estimate of the number of Lyft electric bikes that have caught fire but the San Francisco examiner reports of another case today. This may have caused Lyft to sit up and pay attention. The first order of business has been to pull them from the streets so that the company can look into the matter and come up with a fix while ensuring that nobody gets hurt in the meantime.
“Out of an abundance of caution, we are temporarily making the e-bike fleet unavailable to riders while we investigate and update our battery technology,” said a spokesperson for Lyft. The company hasn’t ruled out the possibility of vandalism as well.
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