While fighting allegations that its bike catch fire, Rad Power store… catches fire

Rad Power Bike is having a tough time. The Seattle-based brand is actually a few years into tough times. But this week it got dramatically worse. Not necessarily significantly worse compared to its ongoing bankruptcy proceedings and still-pending search for a new buyer. But the latest news just, well, looks really bad.

Earlier this week, a Rad Power Bike retail outlet in California, one of the ones not recently closed by the brand, caught fire. Which sucks. But in the context of the brand recently refusing to comply with a USCPSC recall because its batteries were lighting on fire, it’s all just a little too on the nose.

Not actually a Hollywood script

That sequence of events, where a brand refuses to (or can’t, financially, as Rad Power claims) cooperate with a recall of its bikes that are catching fire only for a warehouse of its bikes to … uh … catch on fire, sounds scripted. Before we get ahead of ourselves, the official investigation into the fire at the warehouse part of the Rad Power outlet is still ongoing, with Bicycle Retailer reporting no cause is officially declared by authorities. It might not have been a bike that caught on fire.

If it was a bike that caused the fire – after Rad Power disputed that its bikes were dangerous enough for a recall, arguing that a “fraction of one percent” of bikes that catch on fire –  is not going to be a positive sign for the brand’s future.

Which sucks. Rad Power may not be a perfect brand (and I don’t want to spend too much time defending a company that wouldn’t or couldn’t comply with a safety recall as serious as USCPSC alleges) but it had a big impact. The brand has struggled for a few years now but it was, at one point, the highest selling brand of e-cargo bikes in the U.S.A..

That statistic means Rad Power got a ton of people into cargo bikes that might not otherwise have considered buying an e-cargo bike instead of, say, another car. That’s not hypothetical. I personally know at least one family where that was a very real and direct decision they made. And it sucks that, if Rad Power does end up disappearing, there are fewer options for other families looking to make that choice between a car and an e-bike.

On the other hand, it’d be nice if that e-bike didn’t light on fire seemingly spontaneously. (It’s again worth noting – both for safety and for clarity – that the recall does not apply to Rad Power’s latest generation of Safe Shield batteries.)

So, what are…