Toy car with lithium-ion battery sparks fire in family home

ABC NEWS (Australia)

A toy car with a lithium-ion battery exploded sparking a fire causing thousands of dollars damage to a Queensland home. It's estimated more than a thousand fires were caused by lithium ion batteries in Australia last year.

Transcript

00:00 The residue of a birthday present.

00:04 I just heard this giant explosion and I could feel it on this side of my face.

00:08 And so I walked over and I could see that this whole side of the cupboard, like there

00:12 was this giant flame and it was going all the way up here to the ceiling.

00:15 It was a close call with a toy car powered by a lithium-ion battery.

00:21 Our neighbour is a fireman and he heard the fire alarms going off and someone called him

00:26 as well and he came and helped but the kids had already taken the still burning car and

00:32 run out the front door and thrown it on the grass.

00:34 The family is still fighting for compensation, with the retailer and manufacturer refusing

00:40 to pay up.

00:42 Damage in total I calculated to be nearly $8,000.

00:49 More than 1,000 fires were caused by lithium-ion batteries in Australia last year.

00:55 The particular issue with lithium batteries is that they're becoming more and more pervasive.

01:01 Under consumer law, if a product is faulty, shoppers are entitled to either a repair,

01:07 replacement or refund.

01:09 Often retailers don't know this or they don't want to know about it really and so they give

01:15 the consumer the run around.

01:17 The ACCC can act where traders mislead consumers about their consumer guarantee rights but

01:25 we want it to actually be a breach of the law, not to honour those consumer guarantee

01:32 rights.

01:33 The Federal Assistant Treasurer says the government has made progress on several consumer-focused

01:38 reforms and it will continue to support customers by delivering appropriate regulation.

01:44 It made me so sick in my stomach because I just realised that we'd had an extremely close

01:50 call.

01:51 The family says it's considering legal action.

01:53 [BLANK_AUDIO]

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