‘I lost my family and house to an e-bike fire – they’re a ticking time bomb’

Scott Peden is calling for tougher regulations around e-bikes and the batteries that power them (Picture: Electrical Safety First/PA Wire)

When Scott Peden, 30, woke up from a coma, he had lost everything.

His Cambridge home. His partner, Gemma, 31. Their two children, eight-year-old Lilly and four-year-old Oliver. Their two dogs, Rollo and Bitzy.

In the early hours of June 30 last year, the secondhand lithium-ion battery of Scott’s e-scooter ignited, setting his two-storey home ablaze.

‘I rammed my back door in and all I could see was flames from the hallway and spreading into the living room,’ Scott tells Metro.co.uk, having leapt out of his bedroom window to try and rescue Gemma and their children.

‘As I got closer, I could see my electric bike spitting flames out like a flamethrower.’

More and more e-bikes and e-scooters are zipping up and down British roads every year, welcomed by commuters, delivery workers and environmental campaigners for being an efficient way to get out and about.

But fire officials and safety experts warn that a second trend is rising too; fires caused by e-bike and e-scooter batteries.

Last year, 11 people lost their lives with hundreds injured as a result of fires caused by the lithium-ion batteries powering these devices.

Three of those people were Scott’s loved ones.

Scott is calling for tighter regulations in a campaign backed by the charity Electrical Safety First. Flawed design, shoddy parts or unsafe charging methods (think mismatched equipment or overcharging) can push these batteries to the brink.

A battery fire can start with little warning and even when extinguished the chemicals can reignite.

Scott says his daughter was so chatty, that even the ASDA delivery driver knew her name (Picture: Electrical Safety First/Scott Peden)

Lily had a keen interest in motocross (Picture: Electrical Safety First/Scott Peden)

All Scott wanted was to save a few pennies.

Brand new Lithium-ion batteries run steep, usually having a £600 price tag; a battery half that on eBay was a no-brainer to Scott, needing one after teens pried the one from his e-bike.

With his job in operations at Marks & Spencer about a mile away, an e-bike was Scott’s go-to for commuting. The battery arrived, he charged it half-full and rode before a friend did the same.

‘It started with an almighty bang. It sounded like a bowling ball had been dropped right next to my head,’ Scott says.

It was about 11.45pm on June 29 when the e-bike battery exploded. ‘Even before I got out of bed, I could see the orange glow coming from my bedroom door.’

Leaping out from the window was not an option for Gemma, Scott told his partner he’d be back to rescue her.

Electronic bikes have surged in popularity in recent years, praised for their efficiency and eco-friendliness (Picture: Amer Ghazzal/Shutterstock)

The last words he’d ever hear from her: ‘I can’t get out.’

Shattering his ankle on the garden pavement when jumping out, Scott burst into his house on Sackville Close to find his e-bike under the stairs on fire.

‘The image is something that will never get out of my head, worse than any movie I’ve ever seen,’ he says.

‘At this point, I knew someone wasn’t getting out of our house. Someone was going to die.’

A simple thought entered Scott’s mind: ‘F**k it.’ Just 30cm from the e-bike, Scott decided to chuck the vehicle outside even as chrome-coloured sparks flew out.

‘So I went to unlock the front door, the handle was like touching a red-hot iron. I put my hand on the key and tried to turn it as quickly as I could – the key wasn’t trying because it had melted.

Oliver was a ‘mischief-maker’ who loved cars (Picture: Electrical Safety First/Scott Peden)

‘I realised there was no chance I was gonna get this e-bike out of the house. I ran outside and all I could see was black smoke coming from my bedroom and the window of my living room smashed, getting glass all over me.’

Scott collapsed onto the trampoline as a neighbour sprinted out to put out the flames – Scott, the entire time, had been on fire.

‘I didn’t even realise,’ Scott says. ‘I was in and out of consciousness, I remember waking up and seeing them say my daughter had died.’

Firefighters received calls of the blaze at 1.08am, with 30 officers dispatched. While Lily and Oliver were both rescued they both died in hospital – Gemma died at the scene.

Fire officials concluded that the cause of the accidental inferno was an e-bike, according to a fire report.

Scott was transferred to a specialist burn unit in Broomfield Hospital in Chelmsford, Essex so they could ‘scrape the blackness’ of the battery fumes and smoke out of his lungs. He suffered multiple burns, mainly to his foot.

He and Gemma had been together for years, having met at university (Picture: Electrical Safety First/Scott Peden)

‘I woke up and I was homeless, I had lost all of my possessions and house – even my last pair of pants as the hospital had to cut them off me.’

Scott stayed with his mother in Sutton for half a year before the council placed him in a home in Fen Ditton, a village in south Cambridge.

‘It’s a nice neighbourhood, a big, big improvement from where I used to live,’ he says. ‘But not gonna lie, I hate it. I’d trade it all just to go back to what I had.

‘I walk on crutches and my arms are still scarred. They have faded and are still visible.’

Lithium batteries, introduced in 1990 as a lightweight charging source, have a spotty safety record. While far more secure than they were decades ago, they’re responsible for around 48% of all UK waste fires each year.

Inside each battery are tiny cells that generate an electrical current – but when these cells go into a ‘thermal runaway’ from, for example, being overcharged, they risk overheating.

Scott lost his partner Gemma and their children Lilly, eight, and Oliver, four (Picture: Scott Peden/PA Wire)

E-bikes have seen a massive uptick in sales, with 175,000 e-scooters sold in 2021.

Sales slowed in 2022 amid the cost of living crisis but are expected to bounce back, the research firm Mintel predicts.

‘They’re becoming more popular which is amazing,’ says Scott, ‘but when you start modifying them, or they get old, they’re a ticking time bomb.’

‘If we get tighter regulations in place, it’s going to annoy some people but in the long run, if it’s gonna save your brother, your sister, your aunt, your uncle, your son, it’s not a bad thing,’ Scott says, adding that better oversight on flogging secondhand batteries is needed.

‘America has brought in some laws – we’re even behind America on this.’

With a General Election rumbling, campaigners hope that whichever party comes on top will toughen up e-bike laws.

Lesley Rudd, chief executive of Electrical Safety First, says third-party certification for e-bikes, e-scooters and batteries is needed. (Currently, manufacturers can self-declare products assafe.)

‘Across the country, people are dying because of fires caused by substandard lithium-ion e-bike batteries, and people like Scott are left living with the grief and devastation,’ Rudd tells Metro.co.uk.

‘The number of e-bike fires is rising, as e-bikes become increasingly popular, with a major risk being substandard batteries sold online.

‘When these batteries fail, they cause ferocious fires due to the amount of energy stored inside them.’

Until then, Scott jokes he’ll be single for a while. ‘I haven’t moved on,’ he says.

Scott met Gemma while studying at the College of West Anglia. ‘She was a plain nice girl. Honestly, the nicest girl you’ve ever met. Extremely artistic, loved sewing, looming and colouring,’ Scott recalls.

Sofia Duarte became the first person to die in London as a result of an e-bike fire, with her flat in Bermondsey, London, gutted by the fire (Picture: London Fire Brigade/SWNS)

‘I was always a LEGO fan – I built 18th-century ships – and she would string them up as they would be in real life.’

‘Lily was a very cheeky girl,’ he adds of his ‘popular, girly-girl’ daughter. ‘Probably the most chatty girl you’d ever have met – the ASDA delivery driver knew her by name when he didn’t even know mine.

‘But also a tomboy. Gemma’s dad bought her a motocross bike and was teaching her to ride, she loved it.’

Oliver was a ‘mischief-maker’; the only thing he loved more than cars, however, was Lily. ‘They would be playing 24/7 on the trampoline and around the house,’ Scott says.

If the pair weren’t holding one another, Oliver would be clenching his Finding Nemo blanket and Lily her horse toys.

‘He was absolutely obsessed with cars and monster trucks and all his toys had wheels,’ Scott says, adding he was just a tiny bit envious of his big sister getting to ride motocross.

‘He was so looking forward to having a car when he got older.’

Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.

For more stories like this, check our news page.