Rad Power Bikes Battery Recall: What Canadian Owners Actually Need to Do

Rad Power Bikes Battery Recall: What Canadian Owners Actually Need to Do - Buzzify

If you bought a RadRover, RadCity, RadWagon, RadRunner, or RadMini from Rad Power Bikes any time in the last five years, the company you bought it from no longer exists in the form it did, the U.S. safety regulator has told you to stop using its batteries, and Health Canada has said nothing at all.

That’s the position thousands of Canadian riders woke up to this spring. The story is messier than a single recall notice, and the practical answer for an Ontario owner is different than the one a Vancouver owner gets. We get the call about this in the shop almost daily now. Here is what actually happened, what the new owners are offering, and what we’d tell a friend to do tomorrow.

The 30-second version

On November 24, 2025, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission issued a public warning telling owners to immediately stop using lithium-ion batteries with model numbers RP-1304, RAD-S1304Y, and HL-RP-S1304. The CPSC documented 31 fires linked to these batteries, including 12 that caused property damage totalling roughly US$734,500. Some fires started when the battery was in storage and not even charging.

Rad Power Bikes refused to fund a full recall, telling regulators it could not afford one. Three weeks later, on December 15, 2025, the company filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The brand was sold at auction on January 22, 2026 for US$13.2 million to a Florida-based holding company called Life Electric Vehicles. The acquisition closed March 5, 2026 under a new corporate entity, Rad Life Mobility. The Vancouver retail store, Rad’s only Canadian location, closed permanently in January.

That is the whole timeline. Now the messy part.

Which bikes and batteries are affected

The three flagged battery model numbers — RP-1304, RAD-S1304Y, and HL-RP-S1304 — shipped as the original packs on a long list of Rad models, and also as aftermarket replacement packs. If you’ve ever ordered a spare battery from Rad, it is almost certainly one of these.

The bikes the CPSC named directly: RadWagon 2, 3, and 4; RadCity 2, 3, and 4; RadRover 3, 4, and 5; RadRunner 1, 2, and Plus; RadMini 2, 3, and 4; RadExpand 5; and the MY25 RadRunner and RadRunner Plus.

The failure mode is the part that should make every condo dweller in Toronto pay attention. The CPSC notice specifies that the risk goes up when the battery or its harness has been exposed to water and debris. Translation: the bike that sat outside on a TTC rack in a March slush storm, or the cargo bike a Skip courier rode through six months of GTA winter, is the bike you should worry about most. And again, several of the reported fires started in storage, not while charging.

Why this is worse for Canadian owners

There is no Canadian recall. As of this writing in early June 2026, Health Canada has not matched the CPSC’s stop-use warning, even though Rad sold widely across the country and had an actual brick-and-mortar store in Vancouver until five months ago.

Health Canada is moving on the broader issue, but slowly. The agency ran a pre-consultation on proposed lithium-ion battery rules under the Canada Consumer Product Safety Act from December 2, 2025 to February 14, 2026. The proposed framework explicitly excludes ebikes. The bigger structural problem — Canada has no federal certification requirement for ebike batteries — has not changed.

So the Canadian Rad owner is on their own. There is no automatic refund path, no nationwide stop-sale order, and no centralized Canadian replacement program. What there is, finally, is a private one.

What Life EV is offering, and what it isn’t

Rob Provost, the new CEO of Rad Life Mobility, has said publicly the company will offer current owners an upgrade to its newer Safe Shield batteries at “around 50% discount.” That program is open to Canadian owners, but the details — pricing in CAD, shipping, who pays duty and brokerage at the border — are still being worked out as the company rebuilds its retail and service operation.

Plain reading: you can probably get a safer replacement battery for half-ish the U.S. retail price, eventually. You will not get a free swap. You will not get a refund. And if you bought your Rad on a credit card more than 120 days ago, the chargeback window has closed.

The new ownership is doing the right thing structurally — U.S. assembly, rehiring 95% of the laid-off staff, a 100,000-square-foot operations base — but they bought the assets, not the liabilities. Buyers who paid full price for a bike under the old company don’t have a legal claim against the new one.

What we’d tell you to do this week

There are basically three groups of Rad owners in Canada right now, and the right move is different for each.

If your battery is one of the flagged models and you ride daily. Stop charging it indoors. The CPSC’s call to remove the battery entirely is the correct one if you have any way to do that and still get to work. If you don’t, at minimum: charge outside, on a non-combustible surface, away from anything that can burn, in daylight when someone is around to notice. Do not charge it overnight. Do not charge it in a hallway, a stairwell, or under a balcony. If you live in a Toronto Community Housing building or a condo with a UL 2849 system-cert requirement, your board policy already prohibits charging this battery indoors and you should treat that as binding.

If your bike is in storage. Take the battery off the bike. Store it at roughly 40–60% charge — not full, not empty — in a cool, dry location away from your house, ideally a detached garage or shed. The Toronto Fire Services chief, Jim Jessop, has flagged 29 ebike and e-scooter battery fires in Toronto so far in 2026, up from 25 in all of 2024 and three in 2023. A meaningful share of those started in storage, not during use.

If you’re considering selling it. Don’t. The CPSC notice is explicit: do not sell or give away the affected batteries. Quite apart from the safety issue, you would be putting your name on a fire risk in someone else’s apartment. The right disposal path in Ontario is a municipal hazardous waste depot — Toronto has six drop-off sites and runs Community Environment Days through the summer. Use one.

What you should buy instead

We sell Rad alternatives every day, and we’d rather give you the honest version than a pitch. Here’s the short take.

The thing the old Rad got right, and what made it the largest direct-to-consumer ebike brand in North America for a stretch, was hitting a price point with a useful spec sheet. RadRunners under $2,000 with a throttle, a passenger pad, and enough power to be interesting. That niche has been filled, and the bikes filling it are now better certified than the ones they replaced.

For a RadRover or RadCity replacement at a similar size and price, the bikes worth looking at: the Velotric Discover 3 (UL 2849 certified, 750W rear hub, removable battery, 80 km real-world range), the Aventon Level 3 (the cleanest commuter spec under three grand in Canada right now), and the Gazelle Arroyo C8 if you’re willing to spend up for a Bosch drivetrain and a step-through that will last fifteen years.

For a RadWagon replacement — the family cargo case — look at the Tern GSD S10 Gen 3 (Bosch Cargo Line, 200 kg payload, the gold standard for hauling kids in Toronto), the Aventon Abound LR, or the Tern Quick Haul if you want the lighter, easier-to-park option. Cargo is the category where the safety stakes are highest, and it is the category where Tern is, in our opinion, currently the best in the world.

For a RadRunner replacement — the moped-style throttle bike — be careful. A lot of what’s marketed in that lane is sliding toward the e-moto regulatory cliff that Ontario’s MTO is about to push off (ERO 026-0422, comment window closed yesterday, June 7). Stick to bikes with functional pedals, a 500W continuous motor, and clear Class 1 or Class 2 documentation, or step up into a properly registered Sur-Ron or Talaria for off-road use and ride the right vehicle in the right place.

The non-negotiable across all of these: UL 2849 at the system level. Not UL 2271 on the battery alone — that only covers the cell pack, not the charger and BMS together. UL 2849 is the certification standard Toronto Community Housing wrote into its 2025 Electric Mobility Device Policy, and it is the standard the Ontario Fire Marshal’s office has been pushing the province to adopt formally. Buy the cert, not the brand.

The bigger lesson

The Rad story is not about one bad battery design. It’s about what happens when there is no federal certification requirement and a regulator (the CPSC) issues a warning a company can’t afford to act on. The U.S. system has a backstop. Canada’s, on ebikes specifically, does not.

That’s why we keep beating the same drum on UL 2849 in this shop, and why our subscription program — $65 a week or $225 a month, maintenance included — exists in the first place. If a battery on a bike we sold goes wrong, we replace it. The fix isn’t waiting for Ottawa to catch up. The fix is buying from a retailer who has the inventory, the certification paperwork, and the local service bay to make it right when it doesn’t.

If you’ve got a Rad in your garage and you don’t know what to do with it, come by the Toronto shop. We will pull the battery, identify the model number, walk you through the Safe Shield upgrade path, and give you an honest price on a trade-in if you’d rather just be done with it. No appointment needed.

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