Another Motorola phone reportedly explodes in user’s pocket

Motorola is once again in the spotlight for the wrong reasons after reports surfaced of one of its handsets allegedly exploding inside a user’s pocket.

The footage, shared by tipster Abhishek Yadav on X (sourced from Instagram user shubhxr_369), shows the aftermath of the Motorola handset’s battery catching on fire. It’s not just a few static photos of a melted plastic back; the video pans over the user’s jeans, revealing a massive, charred hole burned clean through the fabric where the pocket used to be.

You can see the device itself in the clip — or what’s left of it. The back panel is obliterated, exposing the charred internals.

What makes this clip particularly unsettling is the user’s claim that the phone was idle. It wasn’t plugged into a high-wattage turbo charger. It wasn’t running a benchmark. It was just sitting in a pocket, until it allegedly decided to combust.

If this feels like déjà vu, you aren’t crazy. We are seeing a worrying pattern here.

Just this past July, News18 reported on a terrifying incident in Himachal where a Motorola unit, bought only three months prior, exploded while charging. Before that, The Indian Express covered a separate case in February where a woman suffered severe burns after her Motorola phone went up in smoke in her back pocket.

Three high-profile incidents in a single year is a trend I’m not comfortable ignoring.

Usually, when we talk about “explosive” growth in the budget sector, this isn’t what we mean. While lithium-ion batteries are volatile by nature, modern manufacturing has mostly ironed out these kinks. Seeing a specific brand pop up repeatedly in these safety headlines brings back some uncomfortable memories of the Galaxy Note 7 era, though obviously on a much smaller, less global scale.

But the Note 7 isn’t the only phone that cemented itself in the annals of battery failures. We’ve seen similar, albeit quieter, alarming trends with Google recently. The Pixel 6a has had a particularly rough run, with units catching fire while users slept and fresh reports of combustion popping up as recently as July.

While the device’s model hasn’t been explicitly mentioned, it does appear to be the Motorola G54 in Pearl Blue. The G54 packs a relatively massive battery with a 6000mAh capacity. But if that much energy goes volatile in your pocket, the damage potential is significantly higher than what you’d expect with lower capacity batteries (not to say those aren’t dangerous either).

Motorola has yet to issue a public statement regarding the incident, but I suspect the brand’s support team will get in touch with the user and hope to settle things outside the internet’s watchful eyes.

That said, we still don’t have crucial details such as whether the user had been using third-party chargers or cables that might have led up to this moment. But if you’re rocking an older G-series, maybe don’t keep it too close to your skin until we know exactly what is going on here.

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