Hoverboards are having a hard time of late. No sooner had these fun-looking, futuristic gizmos arrived on the scene than they’ve seemingly become public enemy #1 amidst a string of safety controversies.

Numerous incidents reported across the US and the UK (and presumably elsewhere) detail how hoverboards have caught alight when being charged and even when being ridden by their owners.

In one heart-breaking incident, a family in Louisiana lost their entire home after one of the boards, purchased as a gift on Amazon for their 12-year-old son, started shooting flames from both ends while the battery was being charged.

“It was like fireworks, the middle part of the board – just ‘poof’,” the mother of the boy told Susan Roesgen at WGNO ABC.

And even more freaky, another of the devices – also sold through Amazon, and only in use for three days – reportedly exploded under the feet of an Alabama man as he rode it outside his house.

“I came outside turned it on, came down the sidewalk not even a 100 feet [30 metres], and it exploded,” Timothy Cade told Jacqueline Quynh at WKRG. “Batteries started shooting out of it; you would not expect a fire like that to come out of a little thing like that.”

These repeated demonstrations that hoverboards can constitute such serious fire hazards haven’t gone unnoticed. Numerous airlines have announced they will not let passengers bring hoverboards onto their planes, and Amazon has begun clamping down on the sale of the devices through its site, requiring evidence of safety compliance from hoverboard manufacturers and sellers.

But why are all these hoverboards exploding in the first place? According to Jay Whitacre, a researcher in materials science and engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, the problem doesn’t lie with the hoverboards themselves, but rather the quality of the lithium-ion batteries used in the devices.