Sean Flood, CEO of Gotcha Bike services, and Don Andrae, director of Parking Services at Auburn University, have responded to last week’s incident where a bike started smoking in front of the Village Dining Hall.
“The bike was out on the rack by Village Dining on Thach Concourse, and someone noticed it was smoking, so they called the fire department and told them to get it away from the rack and the fire department came and extinguished it,” Andrae said. “The bike wasn’t being used, so nobody was hurt.”
Andrae said there has never been an incident like this one before.
“We’ve had over 20,000 rides at Auburn, and Social Bicycles has over 40 or 50 schools and hundreds of thousands of rides and out of all of that usage, they’ve never had an incident like this before,” Andrae said.
Andrae said other universities with similar programs haven't had a smoking incident with their bikes either.
“We talked to the University of South Florida about their SoBi program and they said the bikes had had maintenance issues, but they were standard maintenance issues like the tires going flat or the pedals jamming," Andrae said. "Nothing like this before.”
Gotcha Bike, one of Auburn’s bike-share distributors, is currently investigating the incident, according to Andrae.
“They’re trying to duplicate the incident so they can get a better idea of what happened,” Andrae said. “The bike is on my rack right now until they can replace it, or get the parts replaced.”
Flood said at this juncture they can only assume the fire was caused by the bike's battery.
“We’re digging into the manufacturers of the battery to see if there were any defects or mishandling," Flood said. "The positive thing about this is that after years of service and thousands of rides, this has never happened before.”
The battery packs in the bikes serve more as a back-up, Andrae said.
“There’s a solar panel on the back meant to power the computer and the GPS," Andrae said. "On top of that, once you start pedaling, there’s a generator that does the same thing, so the battery is rarely used."
This battery can wear down even though it's rarely used, according to Andrae.
"That said, they can still wear down eventually, and when they get to that point, that’s generally when the Auburn Bike Shop is meant to come and replace the battery," Andrae said.
Flood and Andrae said that the incident is isolated.
“We have a very rigorous inspection process [at Gotcha Bike]…we do a very regular safety inspection with the seats, the tires, the brakes,” Flood said. “Once we find out exactly what the problem with the battery is, it’s easy to add that to our current safety list so that we don’t have the problem again.”
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