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This Terrifyingly Fast E-Scooter Can Hit Highway Speeds
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this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2024
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micromobility - Ebikes, scooters, longboards: Whatever floats your goat, this is micromobility
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micromobility is seen as a potential solution to moving people more efficiently around cities"
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Have you seen the wheels that were used on the electric skateboard land speed record?
82.25 mph
I'm not saying this scooter is definitely safe, but it is absolutely possible for tiny wheels to be stable at speed.
The problem is more to do with the fact that idiots will hit these speeds that they can't safely slow down from in places where the will suddenly need to.
And even a smart rider will never have reason to reach speed that high because you can't really ever be sure you won't hit a pothole or make a mistake that leaves you sliding across pavement in a way that sands your buttcheeks off.
In fairness, on a race track any size tire would be safe.
Ride that skateboard in my municipality and good luck!
The point is, e-scooters with small tires and high speeds = high risk. The way an e-scooter rider crashes when they hit a small pothole is face first. There was a demo I watched on YouTube comparing these smaller e-scooter tires to one with a much larger tire (I'm thinking 16"+) when they hit an obstacle, and the results were dramatic.
I love my e-scooter, but I would hate to see high-speed e-scooters become the norm. I very rarely see people with hyper e-scooters riding them safely, maybe because they think how they are marketed is how they're supposed to be used.
That's exactly what I meant by "in places where they will suddenly need to".
The real problem is the sheer idiocy of casual PEV users, completely overdosed on the marketing. I've personally spoken to EUC users that thought the tilt based control system provided some kind of magical "gyroscopic stability" that together with E-ABS (literally just marketing jargon for regen braking, which yes, cannot lock up the wheel, but ABSOLUTELY CAN cause it to skid) means they don't need to worry about ever losing traction, even on ice. When in reality the self-balancing system is 100% reliant on traction being maintained, and losing it on something like ice is a single failure point which WILL put your face in the pavement.
These guys actually thought there was some kind of spinning component inside the wheel, aside from the wheel itself, keeping it upright. The "proof" of this supposedly being the way the wheel would try to "level" itself when hitting max speed, when this is literally just the ESC spiking torque on the one and only motor in the wheel, in order to notify the rider they need to stop accelerating.
Good suspension can significantly improve the performance of a smaller tire, and these high performing scooters almost always have some beefy pivot mechanisms giving the tires a crapton of travel. I have no doubt that at least some of these perform admirably at their rated speeds, even on fairly rough surfaces or over disturbances like potholes and manhole covers. It has continued to surprise me the gashes in the road I can fly over on my skateboards even with no suspension whatsoever (my fastest board is on 5" pneumatics).
But that will also give uneducated riders a false confidence to maintain higher speeds in places they shouldn't. Right now the only speed limits applied to PEVs in most of the world is the riders own judgement, and many have a concerning blind faith for the engineering that goes into these things.
This is something I completely agree with. I've never owned an EUC, but see plenty around. Those guys are probably the most geared up of all PEV riders.
But I've owned several e-scooters, including one with full suspension and the potential to go dangerously fast, so I think I'm more aware of how other riders behave while on them. Some people are downright reckless, and I can only thank the gods that they don't have 4000W of power under their throttle.
I've been particularly critical of how e-scooters are marketed, with some major brands like Segway showing riders doing dangerous (and often illegal) manoeuvres on their e-scooters, and some brands showing riders doing the same but without helmets or anything. Perhaps if we shift liability onto manufacturers, they'll change how they design/make/market/sell these things.
Personally, I see no need whatsoever to have a 2000W+ e-scooter in an urban environment. They are simply unnecessarily overpowered and end up giving all other e-scooters a bad reputation for being dangerous. I don't advocate for super low powered e-scooters, either, so having enough power to move you without being more powerful than a motorcycle would be nice. LOL
As someone who has had their ass saved by 2400W of acceleration on my most powerful skateboard, when I in a panic hit full throttle to dodge out of the way of a car that was about to ram into my side as I was in a bike crossing moving at walking speed...
It has its moments.
Driver turned a corner and accelerated towards and past the red light that was supposed to keep me safe. Near-missed two pedestrians on either side, too, but I would have been smack dab in the middle of the bumper had I stayed where I was.
My problem is more with how these things are geared. Power isn't top speed. Top speed is a function of the design voltage of the battery, the KV of the motor, and the gearing between it and the wheel. It doesn't matter what the wattage you can push is. Gear the drive-train for a sane top speed, and any excess power is only a good thing. Simply enabling greater acceleration. There to be deployed for fun, or like in my case, safety. A higher energy drive-train also works better in the other direction, allowing for MUCH more powerful regen braking.
Still I agree, the casual rider has little use for too much more than 1000W. At that wattage you already get plenty of torque when geared for the 25-30 kph range that the casual user of an ebike or escooter is comfortable riding at.
There absolutely needs to be a cultural shift in how high-performance PEVs are considered. The ads and the early adopters treat it like an extreme sport which it is ok to engage in at way too close a proximity to onlookers.
For sure, I agree with this. However, that's not how current PEVs are designed, so wattage seems to always linked to raw power and speed (this is a selling feature, no doubt), which isn't what you want/need in an urban environment when most places have laws that restrict motors to under 500w and speeds to 25km/h or slower. LOL
Having witnessed e-scooters before the advent of hyper scooters, I was optimistic in their future. But it seems like "low-end" (i.e. legal) e-scooters are being pushed away for electric racing motorcycles without seats. And nobody wants those around pedestrians or on bike paths. E-bikes have already become a problem in too many cities, and we don't need more backlash because of other overpowered PEVs.
Wattage is amps times voltage.
Voltage determines motor RPMs, amperage determines torque. (Simplified)
50V at 60A is 3000 watts, but so is 25V at 120A.
But the system configured to run at 50V can achieve twice the speed of the one at 25V. The 25V system is also 3000W, but all it can do with that is achieve its top speed really fast.
It's a bit more complex than that. At lower speed the higher cmvotage system can function like the lower voltage one, as at low RPM and therefore low motor voltage the ESC can pump up the amps while remaining within the power limit of the battery (up to the amperage limit of the motor), but once the ESC is pushing the voltage coming out of the battery right into the motor, there is no going faster even with watts to spare. Maintaining speed doesn't take as much energy as accelerating, so as you hit top speed, power consumption actually goes down.
Unless you sacrifice the amps/torque/acceleration to gain voltage/top speed, more power doesn't mean a faster PEV.
I imagine one would have a motor controller that included something along the lines of a variable frequency drive (VFD) and a boost converter for something in the 4.5KW range, which would largely mitigate the issue and open up the door to using a small forklift battery as the foundation of a motorcycle.
I'm not aware of any BLDC ESCs that implement boost conversion.
Looking it up it seems such a circuit would be beefy indeed when built to handle the amperages of propulsion.
Controlling the voltage coming out of the battery is already done using pulse width modulation, but this can only reduce the voltage, not increase it.
There's little point in boosting the voltage to achieve higher top speed, as configuring a battery pack for voltage is very easy.
To the point that I'm here lamenting that PEV designs are upping the top speed even when utterly unnecessary.
I was joking, yout silly potato. The forklift battery thing was supposed to be a tipoff.
Why would there be anything wrong with a forklift battery?
A battery pack is a battery pack.
Drop an /s next time.
Forklift batteries are also ballast. They're lead-acid and weight 600lbs at the minimum. It's a comically bad idea to use one for a personal vehicle.
Thanks. I'll go ahead and file that under "obvious common knowledge" going forward. /S
I know how lithium packs work and how to program a VESC. That's all.
Just because a pro hit a new max speed with specialized equipment on a specialized track doesn’t meant it’s safe for everyday travel.
That's not even remotely what I said. Did you skip my last three paragraphs?
I simply wanted to say tiny tires are not a functional hindrance for a vehicle to be designed for stupid speeds, nor necessarily a feature which would increase the likelyhood of something going wrong at those speeds.
The speed itself is the problem, available on a vehicle which will be used in places such speeds will never be safe in, in a form factor that leaves the user exposed should the worst occur.
As a former skateboarder, I disagree: Smaller wheels can result in a pebble throwing you off. In the real world, tiny wheels are inviting disaster at high speeds.
On park boards, definitely. Those wheels are truly tiny.
I imagine the same is true for the smallest of longboard wheels.
And I do notice a difference between my various eskates (90mm - 5" air tires), but I don't dodge rocks on any of them.
Which size wheels I'm riding mostly determines how high the curbs are that I try to go up and down without stepping off. Going over anything that's even a little less than half the diameter of the wheel, works, and it's actually easier the faster I go. I'm talking speeds you wont ever hit on human power. At low speeds you have too little kinetic energy to overcome the stopping power of pebbles, but that actually stops happening at speed. I only need worry about tiny things stopping my boards at speeds where getting "thrown off" is little more than involuntarily stepping forward and off the board.
So yes, tiny wheels can be trouble, but the odd reality remains, that I in fact can go up and down curbs that look like it shouldn't be possible, on a skateboard.
These scooters have tires at sizes far and above the kind where you might be stopped by something you can't even see.
They absolutely can be disrupted by potholes that wouldn't bother a car, but not the kind you wont see coming. (though whether you can stop or dodge a pothole in time at these speeds is a different matter)