A trivial amount of follow-up fixes that.

"Why do you want a faster horse?"
"So that I can get to my destination faster."
"What if I sold a machine that was faster than a horse that could be maintained like a tool rather than an animal?"
"That sounds good so far.."

People are bad at expressing themselves but it's easy to help them.

He made no claim that NYC costs should resemble Mumbai costs. Are all comparisons now disallowed because of a false colloquialism about fruit?

I did.

I am well aware that they have fires and explode. Did my comment imply otherwise? It did not.

To answer your question, I think that if one e-bike-sized battery explodes three feet from other batteries then the fire has a very low probability of spreading directly to the other batteries. This is because the outside of these batteries are much less flammable than combustible substances like wood. I doubt that there is a single instance of one e-bike directly igniting another e-bike without the fire first spreading to the surrounding structure.

EDIT: I see that you edited your comment and added the sentence: "This is why newer buildings are moving towards fireproof bike rooms". You see that that contradicts the rest of your comment and supports mine, right?

> A recharging station that brings them all together, especially on the same circuit, is a good way to cause an explosion.

Did you just make this up?

Putting e-bikes together in one non-flammable place is safer than spreading them out into various places, some of which are flammable. Putting them on one circuit isn't particularly risky. If the bikes are each three feet apart, the probability that a fire will spread between them is low.

Wages are very sticky. Three years isn't enough time for us to draw conclusions about the medium term future especially since most of those three years were during a very strange economic time.