HP issues annual exploding battery recall
If you checked yours before, check it again
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HP came thiiis close to getting out of the month without its traditional May laptop-battery recall – but it didn't quite make it.
Bad batteries! Bad! Bad! (click to enlarge)
The US Consumer Product Safety Commission has announced that HP is recalling another 162,600 lithium-ion batteries that shipped with HP- and Compaq-branded laptops.
These new recalls are in addition to the 70,000 that it recalled in May 2009 and the 54,000 that it recalled in May 2010.
According to the CPSC, since the 2010 recall, HP received 40 more reports of faulty batteries that overheated and burst, resulting in "seven burn injuries, one smoke inhalation injury, and 36 instances of property damage."
The May 2009 recall was instituted after a mere two ruptured batteries and no injuries. Between the 2009 and 2010 recalls, there were 38 failures with 11 minor injuries and 31 reports of property damage.
In case you're scoring at home, that's now a total of 80 reported exploding batteries, 19 injuries, 67 incidents of property damage, and 286,000 recalled bad boys. All of the suspect batteries, by the way, were manufactured in China.
Since the problematic-battery suspects keep increasing, the CPSC helpfully provides an updated list, and notes: "Consumers who had previously checked their batteries and were informed they were not included in previous announcements are urged to check again."
If your HP battery is on the list, you'll get a new one free from HP – find out how on the company's Battery Pack Replacement Program website, which also provides info about recalls in 2005, 2006, and 2008.
And perhaps it might be wise to check again come May 2012. ®
COMMENTS
These dates fit the US fiscal quarterly yearly reports
Since you mentioned “annual exploding battery recall”, I did some brief checking to see if there is a pattern to all the dates?. Here's the battery recall dates:
October 14th, 2005
April 20th, 2006
October 30, 2008
15th May 2009
24th May 2010
31st May 2011
All these dates fit with releasing these bad news stories after news of HP's fiscal Quarter yearly points have passed. For example, The fiscal year (in US) for 2011 is as follows:
* 1st Quarter: October 1, 2010 - December 31, 2010
* 2nd Quarter: January 1, 2011 - March 31, 2011
* 3rd Quarter: April 1, 2011 - June 30, 2011
* 4th Quarter: July 1, 2011 - September 30, 2011
So 4 of the dates are right after the 3rd quarter is reached and 2 are after the 1st quarter has been reached. That way the bad news has the longest possible time to die away before the next financial quarter news is reported. (I guess the April news is more important, so they wait an extra few weeks after each April quarterly news, before then releasing these bad news stories).
As for the safety of these batteries whilst HP wait to get a financial quarter to pass before telling customers the batteries need to be recalled on safety grounds ... Well what is a few customers safety compared with keeping the HP company share price safe and less affected.
It shows these amoral self-interested Narcissistic corporate bastards at HP are more interested in putting their share price first over customer safety whilst they wait for a quarter. A battery fire, if it burned unattended, could cause a house fire and even worse, such a fire could even risk killing the customer and their family as well as obviously destroying their home, but hey, as long as the HP share price is safe and less affected, that's the main thing. :(
These dates show the Narcissistic people in HP are not thinking about customer safety first, they are thinking about themselves first, which is literally Narcissistic contempt for their customers. Flame icon for HP. Its also more than about time they sorted this mess out once and for all, before more harm is caused by them.
Next year.....
......we get the HP 2012 Overture.
I'm looking forward to that.
Da, da, da, da ,da, da, da, da <BOOM>
Spin damage
And what will managing the bad news end up costing HP (or any other large corporation) if delaying the recall results in a major disaster caused by the defective product? How much extra when the claimants prove that the corporation knew of the danger but did not immediately warn?
The scenario that scares me most is a 787 going down because of a cabin fire started by an exploding battery.
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