When Your Amazon Purchase Explodes
Shoddily made lithium-ion batteries can cause serious injury and even death. How do they keep ending up in consumers’ hands?
By Alana Semuels
Nicholas Jones didn’t think twice about purchasing a lithium-ion battery from Amazon in 2016. Like most Americans, he was used to ordering whatever he needed on the site and having it show up at his front door days later. So when his laptop’s battery stopped working, Jones, then a graduate student, went online, found a replacement HP battery for about $15, and bought it.
A few nights later, he was sitting on the couch in his Buffalo, New York, apartment when he heard a sound like a gunshot. His fiancée screamed. The lithium-ion battery in the laptop sitting next to him had ignited, setting his couch on fire. Battery cells were flying all over the living room, leaking acid. “It was like a war zone,” Jones told me. Later, he was treated for first-degree and chemical burns. His computer and hardwood floor were destroyed.
Curious about what had happened, Jones went back online to try to contact the seller and alert Amazon to the problem. Scrolling through reviews, he realized other buyers were reporting fires from the same item. But Amazon seemed unconcerned, he told me: Customer-service…
