Latest Chinese Safety Problem: Exploding Cell Phone Batteries

By Michael Santo
Executive Editor, RealTechNews

China must be taking lessons from Sony in terms of battery problems. Though really, if you’ve been tracking the news, this is just the latest in a series of safety problems stemming from products from China, from melamine in dog food, unsafe Thomas the Tank Engine toys, diethylene glycol-laced toothpaste, recalled tires. Now there are exploding cell phone batteries.

Chinese regulators in the southern Guangdong Province, one of the world’s biggest electronics manufacturing centers, said this week that they had found Motorola and Nokia mobile phone batteries that failed safety tests and were prone to explode under certain conditions.

The batteries were said to be manufactured by Motorola and the Sanyo operation in Beijing, and were being distributed by companies based in the Guangdong Province, near Hong Kong - one of China’s biggest export centers. Source: IHT

We Say: Nokia and Motorola suggested the batteries were counterfeit, but it’s unclear if that’s the case. An article in Newsweek shows the extent of the problems in China (as if you didn’t suspect all this anyway). It appears that reporting safety problems or fraudulent goods can get you killed, for one thng.

Here’s a question: based on all these problems, does anyone really want to be one of the first buyers of Chrysler’s upcoming Chinese imports? I wouldn’t.