Dell Laptops Still Exploding

bl8n8r writes "It 'looked like fireworks, which would have been cool had it not been in my house.' said Doug Brown of Columbus, Ohio. Brown, a Network Administrator, called 911 last week when the Dell 9200 laptop burst into flames in his house. Emergency response units included two pumpers, a ladder truck, a bamalance, the HAZMAT unit, and a battalion chief. When Doug phoned Dell to inquire about liability, he was asked if he had insurance. It's not clear if Doug's laptop is one of the earlier models recalled by Dell; a Macbook is cited in the article for allegedly burning down a house in Australia as well as another instance of a suspect Dell laptop burning out a pickup truck in Nevada. If the burning battery issues are going to continue to be a problem, who's going to be responsible for losses? Insurance companies, Laptop makers, Battery vendors, and consumer negligence could presumably be cited in all cases."

Burst into flames != explode

[Howzer]

Batteries (you know, those little packages of reactive chemicals?) have been bursting into flames ever since they were invented.

In TFA it cites a couple of modern examples. How many laptop batteries are out there?

Hardly a plague of battery burnin's.

Reminds me of SARS -- you remember, that disease that killed a couple hundred people in 2003 -- which basically shut down Asia for 6 months. Everyone suddenly forgot that the regular old "flu" kills 100,000 people every single year.

If we're gonna panic about "things that cause fatal fires" I'd be stomping on cigarette manufacturers before I went after the company that didn't even make the battery that caught on fire.

Cue 200+ comments to the tune of "I used to trust Dell but now..."

Can we get a new tune up in here?

Let's be CLEAR on this

[erroneus]

It's all about the Sony batteries. It's misleading to say "Dell" or "Macbook." They (and many other makers) are using Sony batteries.

Re:Burst into flames != explode

[ookabooka]

Your logic is flawed. I certainly expect a cigarette to cause a fire, so I'm not about to leave a lit one sitting on my desk full of papers. However, I'd think it would be perfectly reasonable to let my laptop sit next to some papers. Basically, Dell's laptops have an interesting tendency to spontaneously combust. . .it's not a freak accident, and not something that all laptops do. That is the reason that this is getting so much attention, no laptop should emit a small fireworks show and then burst into flames spewing all sorts of nasty chemical fumes. . .

Huh?

[MightyMartian]

Consumer negligence? How is the consumer negligent if these guys keep manufacturing batteries that go supernova? I own a low-end HP laptop, and it can get incredibly hot as well. It now has to be sent in for servicing, I suspect that the temperature eventually fried the board. It's under warranty for another couple of months, but I have to fork out over $200 for a year's extended warranty on it. For those kinds of prices, I ought to be leasing them. The growing popularity of laptops have made the manufacturers lazy. They're cutting corners, producing substandard products that are not only more prone to failure, but may very well be dangerous. They'll argue "We're trying to keep the prices down", but that's the same argument Mattel uses for using substandard Chinese factories to produce toys that can potentially poison millions of children. Frankly, I think the time has come to seriously bone-up consumer protection laws. Massive fines, the industry paying for government inspections, and the like. Manufacturers have proven incapable or unwilling to adequately protect the consumer, and we should start nailing their bottom lines severely, so that the fucking shareholders, who seem eager to profit from the crap their companies produce, aren't feeling more directly the pain. Fining Dell or Apple a few hundred million dollars the first time, and then quadruple the second time, will probably raise the price of laptops, but at least we won't be sent out overheating crap.

Re:Editors?!?

[cooley]

There used to be this funny audio clip circulating around of a 911 call (or a comedian pretending to make one, I can't remember which) where a guy hits a deer with his car. He puts the deer into his car (he's gonna use the meat) but it soon wakes up and kicks the shit out of him. He calls 911 from a pay-phone to request a "bambalance" (the rest of the call is equally eloquent).

That is, I *hope* the guy is alluding to the old clip, and not seriously trying to spell "ambulance". It's possible, though, that in regards to your post above "2" answers "a"....

Just because Dell didn't make the battery

[Laebshade]

Just because Dell didn't make the battery, doesn't mean they're not liable. Dell sold him a complete unit, which came with the battery in question (assuming he wasn't using a replacement battery, DNRFTA). Continuing the bad car analogies that roam the savage wastelands of Slashdot: if you bought a used car, under warranty, from a dealer, and a part broke that just happened to be a third-party part (happens often on used cars), would you be ok with the dealer telling you you're SOL? Yeah, I didn't think so.

Re:Insurance

[Chirs]

Sure, you can make a claim to the insurance company. Next time your insurance renewal comes up, suddenly you lose the discount for having a clean record. For myself, a claim like this would probably end up costing $2000 in deductable and increased insurance rates over the next few years.

laptop battery engineering to marketing criteria

[zogger]

cheap powerful non-exploding, pick two

Really, is it that hard to carry an additional one pound and have a safer and probably better battery in a laptop? Has society gotten that wimpy? The great race to see who can have the thinnest lightest laptop causes problems like this, along with cost cutting in quality and emphasis on bling factor. It needs to stop, maybe a few multi million dollar lawsuits might help, who knows, but there has to be something to get their attention on this generation's "pinto".. Lithium ion batts are cool tech, but they apparently need a lot more work on the stability issues and it would help if engineering dictated the size and weight and config, not marketing.

Re:Let's be CLEAR on this

[Headcase88]

So in effect they outsourced their battery production to Sony. They're still responsible for the final product and they have chosen to continue using Sony batteries after several have exploded.

I don't recall people having much patience for companies whose games used particularly bad DRM made by other companies, I think this falls in the same category. Similarly, If x outsources their tech support to shitty company y (to reduce costs), people will still blame x for providing shitty tech support.

That said, the vast majority of these Dell and Macbook batteries have not exploded.

Re:Let's be CLEAR on this

[Mundocani]

I think you're right that there could be many causes, but given the problems in the recent past with Sony's batteries (the problem of them having metal fragments in them causing internal shorts and subsequent flame-outs), I don't think it's too much of a stretch to start out assuming the battery might be the source of the problem.

Would over-temperature detection/shutoff prevent those shorts from destroying the battery, or is it a purely internal thing such that it would continue even if you took the battery out once it started to heat up?

Flu vs SARS mortality rates. (OT)

[liftphreaker]

The mortality rate for flu is around 0.1%. For SARS it was close to 20%. Personally I'd think that was reason enough to panic. You must be really brave. How many times have you had the flu? Care to try out SARS for a change?

Re:Insurance

[iocat]

It is common to bill the homeowner for fire services. I know this from firsthand experience in San Francisco. However, they really don't seem to care if you don't pay (eg -- they didn't turn it over to collections when I didn't). I guess you could get into a lot of debate about this, whether or not taxes should cover everything (yes, IMHO, unless you're dealing with arson, in which case the arsonist shold pay, not the resident), etc.

My position was that since the courts have held that cities don't *have* to provide fire services (you can't sue them for not showing up, for instance) it was just voluntary on their part to show up at my place in the first place, so I figured, hey, thanks guys!

And before you start to yell at me for karmic imabalance, when a fire-hydrant broke in front of my house and, in the process of shutting off, the fire department flooded my basement, I didn't go after them, even though they admitted I could have, so I figure we're even.