How to Find the Perfect Electric Scooter

today we're here to help you purchase your first electric scooter if you are looking at buying an electric scooter for the first time this is this is for you [Music] today we are going to cover the pros and first we're going to cover the pros and cons of owning an electric scooter so we want to make sure that owning electric scooter is really for you then we're going to cover the best scooters on a particular budget and then finally we're going to talk about why certain features are important for you and the features we're gonna cover our range the weight of the scooter which has to do with portability the top speed the max rider weigh tire sizes and tire types we're going to talk about motor power we're gonna talk about brakes battery size suspension as well as lights so we're gonna go over all those features today it's gonna be I'm gonna try to get through it quickly and so finally we're gonna talk about why you need support and then also where to find the best electric scooter deals coupon codes all that good stuff if you're watching on YouTube give us a subscribe to our Channel please and give us a thumbs up so we can continue making videos like this for you let's talk about why you should or should not buy an electric scooter so let's go over the pros first so for pros you know it's mainly the biggest Pro I think is the portability factor when you're riding an electric scooter if you are riding somewhere and then you want to put it into a restaurant you go into the grocery store maybe it starts raining and you want to be able to put it into the uber or something like that or you commute using public transportation but you live a mile away you can actually fold up the scooter and put it in any of those things so it's kind of like a personal mobility device that you can put inside of other mobility devices which is pretty cool they're also extremely fast so if I was going to the co-working space that I work out of sometimes just for me to get to the car to start driving would take three to four minutes in about four minutes I would be on my scooter and I would actually be at my destination which is a little over a mile away so in terms of the speed of just getting to where you're going it's way faster than using a car for short trips also you know electric scooters can go anywhere from 15 40 even 50 miles an hour depending on which scooter you get so when I lived in San Francisco I bought an electric scooter and this was many of us almost three years ago now and I remember thinking to myself there's no way I'm gonna be able to get anywhere in San Francisco so I lived in the mission and I would go downtown all the time so I got an electric scooter and all of a sudden I'm whizzing by cars flying past ubers that are basically stuck in traffic and that is I mean it's kind of an amazing and freeing feeling so they're also cheaper so to to buy it well to buy an electric scooter you're looking at you know $400 three $400 minimum to get a decent scooter to get an equivalent car let's say a Toyota Camry you know you're looking at twenty four thousand dollars so this is an order of magnitude difference about well I wrote some notes here it's about sixty times more expensive to purchase a car then what about the gas for each of these vehicles right electric scooter takes electrical power for a car you take fuel but you also have insurance and a bunch of other stuff but just looking at how far $20 will get you and if you look on our Instagram about I don't know two weeks ago I made an infographic showing how far you could get on $20 worth of gas for a Toyota Camry I believe was a hundred and seventy miles right 30 miles per gallon the Toyota Camry goes about 170 miles you look at a Tesla you're looking at it's on there it's like 500 and something miles which is pretty dang good for twenty bucks an electric scooter goes eight thousand seven hundred miles on eight thousand seven hundred and seven miles on twenty dollars worth of electricity that is ridiculous it's 50 X more than a car so it is way cheaper also when looking at buying your own scooter versus renting a bird or lime or spin scooter there are advantages to both but the advantage of owning your own is that not only is it there for you and ready and it's not or without a charge or actually just not there someone gets it first but it's there for you also you'll save money after about fifty days so if you take two trips a day at 3 dollars and 80 cents per trip for a typical electric scooter ride and that's about how much it is after 50 days you'll actually be breaking even and then you will be saving money every day so that's after 50 days or maybe about 2 months worth of your commuting it is extremely environmentally friendly so the sharing market we have yet to see how environmentally friendly that really is although I think I think it is friendly as soon as you get to the scooters that they're making now which are gonna last a really long time you also gotta have fun in your city with an electric scooter because most the time when you're riding you don't actually see your city you also in on a hot day you don't get sweaty which is kind of a huge thing so if it's hot right we're in the summertime now and you're ready to ride a bike actually there was a day in Berkeley where it was like a hundred degrees out and I went to my co-working place and guess what there was no scooters there was no bikes there and I've just parked my scooter right in the middle of the whole bike parking cuz there was no um yeah there's none of that ok cons to owning an electric scooter there's not this is not all pros it's not a perfect industry right now right it's a new industry and as such the industry is figuring itself out so there are cons to owning an electric scooter and riding an electric scooter number one are the tires so the tires are smaller than a bike thanks for the hearts tire the tires are smaller than a bike and therefore when you get when you hit obstacles in the road they're gonna they're gonna cause more disruption in your ride than other scooters and that's a big reason why Falls are happening on electric scooters is because they're just prone to false because the scooters tires are small we recommend getting larger tire sizes eight inches or larger also solid tires versus pneumatic tires I'm gonna go into that later but solid tires you don't it's just less safe especially in slippery conditions front and rear lighting on electric scooters that can be an issue if you don't have them bicycles right you can easily get them or they have them for electric scooters sometimes a front light is mounted low which is not as good as being mounted high also for rear lighting due to the form factor of an electric scooter your light is down low on the fender and therefore it's just harder for a car to see or anybody to see so we always recommend getting a rear light for your helmet because and then finally you know electric scooters some of them can be hard to fix so if like you get a flat tire and things like that there are certain models that are harder than others to repair and fix and there's not a lot of people right now that fix them so last thing I want to say because of most of the cons for electric scooters are due to safety issues and there have been a lot of safety you know problems with riders most of those are with the sharing market and with that market they don't ride they don't they don't ride with a helmet on and this is a huge problem so most personal owners wear a helmet you absolutely have to wear a helmet I like I can't say this enough I'll make a whole video just on why you need to wear a helmet I never wore a helmet when I was a kid on a bicycle electric scooters are way more dangerous than a bicycle wear a helmet don't ride one without a helmet and on our website we have recommended safety gear for you all link it in the video description if you're watching this on YouTube so moving on so now we're going to talk about how to choose an electric scooter so what I want you to do is if you're watching this open the electric scooter guide website it's electric - scooter dot guide and you can follow along as I'm talking because there's pages on the guide that I'm going to reference so it's electric - scooter dot guide I've got four of those pages open behind me and all and I'm gonna like kind of show what I'm talking about as I say things here if you have a budget then it's under five hundred dollars your choice is actually really easy I had four hundred dollars I would just go with the Xiaomi m3 65 we have links to it on Amazon that's the best scooter for that price if you are $300 I would look at the go Trax gxl commuter version to again it's on our website we have a coupon code to buy it directly from go tracts or you can buy it on Amazon if you're under 300 or even at 300 you can also look at the swagger 5 buy swag Tron that is actually kind of a little razor scooter goes about 18 miles an hour quite a bit faster than the go tracks and it's the same it's essentially the same body as a show me where you can go so I don't know if you can see this yep you can see it so right now we have inside of this use go to best-of and if you look at best under 300 it'll show you a comparison of that gxl versus the shell me Vasari versus the swagger if you are 300 and 600 basically we talk about the Segway ES 2 the Glee on dolly and the Xiaomi Xiaomi wins hands down 4 for that price range for most uses but not not every use so that's the easy that's easy right if you have under 500 bucks and you cannot spend more just get one of those 3 scooters I'll save you the time now if you don't have a strict budget and you're looking for what are the best features now this is where things get a little bit more detailed you need to do your homework and this is where I'm gonna help you and so basically scooter owners fall into two categories one is the commuters the other category would be your kind of like off-road I want a rocket ship I want the fastest scooter ever I want the extreme dual motor whatnot okay if you're in that second category of you want the fastest thing this is you have money to spend all that stuff then look for anything over about a thousand watts because that will be dual motor configurations that's what you're looking for and if you are looking at the comparison chart here all you need to do is go to the motor rating which is right here and put in a thousand boom and now it's gonna automatically sort and filter everything by thousand okay and then you know you're looking at the high-end screws for comparison chart I'm just gonna show you how it works cuz this is the best kind of like way to figure things out is you have three switches here you have if you are outside of the United States you we did add a metric toggle so you can switch from metric to imperial show all data so if you don't show all data you're basically only you're gonna get a limited amount of features and specifications to compare based on if you show all we added motor wattage and battery watt-hours and suspension I believe and then excuse me if you want to look at all scooters just toggle the only available option because what that's going to do is it's gonna show you scooters that are kind of like not being carried anymore versus versus scooters that are currently being sold so basically I usually have it set to this configuration yeah you can kind of see okay um so the first question we always get asked is range right how far how far does a scooter go because range anxiety is a real thing if you have a long commute you don't want to get stuck doing the scooter walk of shame when rain when your range kind of just goes down the average electric scooter commuter goes six to seven miles we did a survey and that's what we found is six or seven miles total per day is kind of average now when you look at manufacturer claimed range you you have to take that with a grain of salt you got it you got to understand that they are overestimating the way they do it is they have really good terrain and they're going really slow like nine ten miles an hour slow what we've done is we have we test all these scooters on a test track here in Berkeley that is pretty tough actually it's uphill it's in the wind that starts and stops it's bad terrain it's everything that the manufacturers don't want us to see or write on and typically you're gonna get a reduction in manufacturer range by thirty to fifty percent all right and if you want to know the exact range look at our reviews but also we have the performance and metric so I'm going to move that over here so you can see you just go you can type in performance or if you go to comparisons you can get it through there at the bottom you can see the scooters that we've tested the range so far we're adding to this like two to three every week right now so you can kind of think you can kind of get that info so let's see here so think about your commute think about how far you're going and then and then add 50% to that and then what you do is you type that in the range box right here so if you if you want a scooter that goes 20 miles minimum you just type that in and it's gonna automatically filter which is what I did but you can also sort and you can look at though the longest and the shortest within your criteria okay yeah so if you want to make sure you can go ten miles per day I would put fifteen okay unless I've done a range test in which case just refer to that range test next up we have scooter weight okay and I'm actually talking about each element in regards to the comparison chart so you just kind of move over so scooter weight now what you need to do is you need to think about your commute and if you are going to need to fold and carry the scooter I live upstairs there's no elevator no I don't have an escalator right so I got to fold the darn thing and pick it up when I have scooters that are over 45 pounds for me 45 pounds is the max that I've liked to carry up and down the stairs so you have to think about that and and if you don't kind of know go to a big five and just pick up a bunch of dumbbells or kettlebells and kind of test to see how easily you can pick up those those those dumbbells or kettlebells and then that way you'll know what scooter you will you know be able to handle right if you're a smaller person you might want to look for scooters under 30 pounds for me forty five or less is okay other people have other needs now remember for scooter weight lighter is better for portability right but lighter also means you're gonna get less features such as motor power and Moton really range so range is due to the size of the back right in cars a lot of the long range cars are small cars small tires or whatever right it's not that way with electric scooters electric scooters to get a long range you need a large battery and the battery is is really really heavy in comparison with other things so smaller scooters lighter you're gonna have lower range but more portability heavier scooters more features probably more range but again you can check all that depending on what you need and so there's a trade-off so the way I you know what I recommend is getting the heaviest scooter that you can really kind of manage get the heaviest one that you can also afford and then you've managed because you'll get more features on that scooter all right top speeds the next the next kind of feature is top speed it's right here again you can type it in you can sort and filter and do all that good stuff for me top speed is actually not a huge concern because I fall into the commuter category of people person California law maybe even US law has them limited at 15 miles an hour which is why a lot of scooters have a limiter at fifteen fifteen when you're on a bike lane going through traffic you're passing 75% maybe 50 yeah maybe yeah maybe you're passing 75 percent of the bikes out there so it's it's fast and when you're and if it's like a commute time you you actually will be able to fly past all the cars really easily when you're going 20 miles an hour in traffic it's it's really fast so for me I don't really need a scooter that really goes past 25 I've ridden up to almost 40 on some scooters I like the emove cruiser a lot for long distance commuting that goes about thirty thirty one which I'll do take it up to thirty thirty one on a long straightaway but it's fast and if I were to fall okay and also again wear a helmet because probably you're gonna fall right we've all fallen on these things like the uber uber riders gonna cut you off at some point right you're gonna hit a little rock in the road is like two inches high and your eight inch tire just not gonna handle it you're gonna get the wobbles or you're gonna forget you're on a scooter you're gonna bring out your phone in one hand and you're gonna get the wobbles and you're gonna fall wear a helmet okay max wait let's talk about max wait most scooters so that's right here so this is a pretty important one because there are at least you know at least four since you know some some people are larger than other people right and so we all we all need to get around right so a lot of scooters have a max rating in kilograms of 100 kilograms which is 220 pounds okay that's kind of basically how we know that they're made in China is because if they're if they're made in America they would be rated higher than 220 pounds because there's a lot of people that weigh 200 plus pounds and when you put a backpack on you need a scooter that can handle more in most of these cases the scooters can actually handle more than 220 pounds they just put that on there because you're gonna get the best performance and you know you really you should keep it under the max weight limit but in my experience most of these scooters can handle more than what they say and so again just type in the max weight that's that's the total writer plus whatever you're carrying max weight okay okay and and then obviously you can sort and filter so you can see the ones that are gonna hold the most okay next up we've got tire type okay and that's actually this column right here so there's basically two choices two tire type tire type is going to be either filled with air or pneumatic or not filled with air which we call solid all right now there is kind of a third kind of hybrid category which is this honeycomb style solid or air filled solid right it's a solid tire it kind of has built in little air pockets but you don't fill it up okay and it doesn't necessarily form fit to the road and so so you have so with so let me just talk about new tire so pneumatic tires are better are like cars right you pump them up and they're gonna have the best performance the best comfort and the best safety and I'll tell you why so they pneumatic tires have the largest contact patch with the ground because they form fit to the ground and when that happens when you're turning and doing things like that you want the most amount of traction and that's going to give you the most amount of traction also there is a net a natural damping effect with the pneumatic tire due to the flexible nature of the tire so when if you don't have you know fully full suspension type scooter a pneumatic tire is going to cushion the ride quite a bit actually over a solid tire and then finally if you're in slippery conditions like it just rained or you're going over one of those metal grates in the road or even those plastic things in the middle of the sidewalk for like blind people or whatever so they can feel where the corner is a pneumatic tire is gonna hold on those things whereas a solid tire I I don't recommend even going out in the rain on a Saltire I own two solid tires plus all entire scooter for a couple years like you got to be careful if you're going out in the rain just like super slow down on turns and things like that now solid tires right solid tires are totally worse performance for sure right they have worse performance we're safety less comfort right but they have low maintenance right with pneumatic tires because they're airfield you can get flats all right there's ways to mitigate that which we'll talk about slime and different things like that but but with solid but with them sorry I lost my place I have notes here that I'm reading but with solid tires you you are gonna not have any of those things but you will be able to get a no maintenance type of scooter okay now there is that hybrid right the hybrid is the air the air pocket filled is a honeycomb or whatever and a lot of scooter makers use that instead of solid tires because they have the benefit of some cushioning right some damping effect they don't have the advantage more performance or more safety okay so don't think that you're gonna get a pneumatic type safety gear wheels Casey agrees with me here all right cool um all right so think about your commute think about your roads right if you live in Berkeley like me there's a lot of crappy roads I at least need I would want pneumatic tires right if you are commuting and it rains a lot in your area right I would definitely opt for pneumatic tires because the trade-off of the maintenance issues is gonna save you when you're slipping and sliding on a solid tire scooter yeah and like I said I wrote a solid tire my first scooter was a youth scooter booster which is two solid tires and they're even small and I slipped even not in the rain every time I went over those like yellow hard rubber things in the middle of the sidewalk or one of those metal coverings or whatever it just slips and I don't go I wouldn't go out in the rain really I would that's why that scooter is portable pop it in an uber if it rains I go home okay let's talk about motor power so now we're getting some some advanced features so for motor power the ranges from you know 250 Watts about to 6,000 watts and 250 is what you're gonna find in most of the original sharing scooters birdlime spin all those guys originally use the Segway ES 2 or the Xiaomi m3 65 those are the scooters they used for their shearing fleet originally and those are 250 watt motors and if you've written those there they're fine they actually get up to speed relatively quick on flat ground and you know no problem now when you're going up hills right if you're going up like a 4 percent grade Hill on a 250 watt motor it's gonna take a little longer to climb up to speed maybe eight eight nine seconds something like that and and maybe you won't get the total max top speed most of those 250 watt scooters are gonna max out at 1516 anyway so it'll just take a little longer or maybe you only get to like 12 13 miles an hour on a 4 percent grade that's like a small hill that you can kind of notice is a hill it's not super steep we do testing on 15 degrees slope Hill as well really steep and for those a 250 watt motor we've tested a bunch of them on the same Hill it maxes out around 4 to 5 miles an hour so it's a little faster than walking but this is a steep hill okay now when you get upwards in the watts that's when you're going to get more power so a 500 watt scooter is gonna climb those hills a lot easier and you know we do have some performance metrics on hill climb stuff again you know I'm not gonna I'm gonna hurt my back if I keep reaching around but just look at the performance page because we do a hill climb test and all that kind of stuff and it works out really well and you can kind of see what machspeed you're gonna get you if you live in a place like San Francisco you may want to get a 5 or 600 watt minimum scooter if you are climbing a lot of hills if you're mostly going on flat you can get away with 250 Watts unless you're probably over 200 220 250 pounds then you might want to go towards 350 to 500 Watts alright brakes let's talk about brakes this is important for safety obviously so there's three there's three classes of brakes okay from so there's kind of like your worst brakes those are gonna be your electric brake it's also called motor brake also called regenerative brake okay that's the kind where it kind of like uses I'm not an engineer but it uses the motor to kind of make you brake and they have the least amount of stopping power typically forty to fifty feet is a stopping power on those guys a middle kind of the kind of like okay type of brake is gonna be your foot brake it's you it's located on the rear fender and you actually have to push down on that fender with your own foot as you're writing which means you're kind of like also riding with your other foot on the platform and that's how you're gonna break it uses friction of the fender usually a metal plate on the fender to push down on the back wheel stops you somewhat quickly your best type of brakes are gonna be drum and then the best of all course is disc but just can drum really really similar breaking types that's your best type of break we've done a lot of breaking tests so we actually have a lot of the data on how fast certain scooters break and I think I have it here but a regen only break is like forty to fifty feet and a disk drum brake is like a range of about ten to twenty feet is it gonna be your stopping power which is which is better so here's a nice thing even at three hundred dollars you can get a disc brake we recommend buying a scooter with at least at least one disc or drum brake so there are a few scooters that actually have dual regen brakes plus a foot and actually that is that's pretty decent the munagi model one has that configuration so they don't have the disc or drum but with the dual electric brakes or regen brakes it actually does stop quite fast and then it has a foot brake in addition but the thing about foot brakes is that when you're actually writing you want to have both feet solidly on the platform you don't want to have to like have one foot on the platform in one foot kind of like on your toe hovering over the defender brake because it's just not a comfortable riding position so that's why we recommend the type of brake yeah so always off for disc or drum when you can help it for sure okay let's move on to the battery so the battery size again you can get two battery size on the comparison chart so that's right here alright if you're following along so the battery we measure those in watt hours you can't always find watt hours on the manufacturer websites so we just do the calculation based on I forget what it is it's volts times like amp hour someone's gonna correct me on this my my business partner in this he's engineering and does this this part of it but the battery is a little advanced for this this video because it's kind of like a basic guide it's measured in watt hours the more watt hours the more energy you have that that battery can output before it dies alright the battery is also dependent on your motor size so if you have a 250 watt motor and 250 watt hour battery it's gonna go a lot further right it's gonna sip less juice than a 500 watt motor that is also has it the same battery of watt hours next up is suspension so suspension and you can find that right here okay so suspension is all gonna be on the front wheel the rear wheel or both wheels or I guess no wheels right suspension absorbs the imperfections of the road that you're traveling on limiting the amount of kind of like of just energy that's transferred to you in the form of little river or like you know your brain massage right if you don't want to get the brain massage you know you want to have suspension again look at your road that you're riding on and if it's like really bad like the roads here in Berkeley are pretty bad suspensions really nice also if your commute is longer suspension is just gonna cushion your ID so much more than the tires can do by themselves and that would be really nice so if you're like a real hardcore commuter and you've got more than a mile I guess each way you you probably want to look at suspension the tires do act as a form of suspension as I mentioned pneumatic being the best that honeycomb hybrid model being middle and solid tires giving you no suspension whatsoever suspension is absolutely noticeable on a scooter if you have a if you have suspension versus no suspension it will make quite a bit of difference okay next up we only have two more to go is lights so lights are on the front and on the rear almost all the scooters that we recommend are gonna have both lights and again right here is where you can find the light and again you can sort and filter by lights as well right for front back rear none let's talk about them lights are important when you're riding at night okay you got to have light don't write at night without lights because actually cars aren't used to scooters yet and so when you come up fast on a car and you're in a scooter it's almost like they don't see you yet because car drivers just the front light can be mounted high or low we recommend high we also recommend getting additional super-bright lights for the front and the rear and we'll put those in the video description you can also find it on the electric scooter guide website for the rear the rear is an issue with an electric scooter okay if it does have a rear light it's gonna be mounted on the fender and that's not as good for cars to see you because you're it's like right against the ground which is easier when the light is up at eye level with with a driver so we always recommend putting a rear red light at least one on your helmet on the back of your helmet or your backpack if you're wearing a backpack and put on a blinking mode because that is what's gonna save you when a cars coming around the corner and they just don't see you again you can find a link to our favorite rechargeable red back rear le rear red LED light in the video description or on our website also there's some scooters out there the es the Segway ES 2 for example that have ground effects or ground lighting which is pretty awesome also a lot of the dual Tron models are gonna have stem lighting which is again it's it's not just a gimmick I mean it is a gimmick kind of it's I think it looks cool but also it really helps for cars to see you at night the last thing that I want to say is that support rightfull is important for electric scooters we're in the first few generations of all electric scooters and this is something that is not to be overlooked is the amount of support that you can get and that support can be in the form of a large community like the Xiaomi has or in the form of the company that you're purchasing from giving you good support by answering your questions or if you have an issue getting back to you in a short amount of time okay and so the scooters that we recommend in our best of list so if you just go to best-of on the electric scooter guide those are going to be the best they're gonna have good support because we've heard good things we've also have surveys that show you which scooters are going to have the best support and if you look at you know for the survey it's actually a little hard to find but I think it's under guides and yeah I look under data I'll link that in the video description okay that's it I hope that this video helps a lot of people with figuring out what is the right electric scooter for them to buy these are all the things that I think are important that we all think are important but what's important to you is gonna be different and if you have more questions just send me a direct message on Instagram you can go to the contact us form on the electric scooter website I personally answer almost all of those myself you can check out all of our YouTube videos you can comment on the YouTube videos but if you want to get us in particular I would go to the electric scooter guide website which is electric - scooter guide go to the contact us page and like email us or fill out the form there and I'll get back to you usually within a day yeah and then check out lots of reviews we have on our YouTube channel we just did one on the ninebot max which is awesome and I do I'm doing more and more full comprehensive reviews of these scooters including performance data and everything else and then and then just if you just look at the website go to the review section we these are every review that you see is a hands-on review where we've ridden the scooter ourselves tested it out thoroughly we maybe even went on a road trip with the scooter and that is how we know which ones are good and which ones are not good we are not a website that is just saying everything's good because that is not gonna help anybody some scooters are actually not good and we say that in you know reviews of the scooter and then finally check out our community at the subreddit electric scooters so it's just reddit.com /r Ford / electric scooters there's 5,000 subscribers 15,000 page views a day there's four or five thousand people on there every day and they're all there to like help the community answer questions you can find a lot of info there you can also ask questions as well for everybody on YouTube thanks for watching please subscribe to our channel give us a thumbs up and that way we can make more electric scooter videos for you

Channel: Electric Scooter Guide

Views: 256,702

Rating: 4.8034377 out of 5

Keywords: finding the perfect scooter, how to buy an electric scooter, how to buy electric scooter, Electric scooter buyers guide, Buying an electric scooter, scooter buyers guide, electric scooter guide, electric scooters dangerous, best electric scooter, dangerous scooters, electric scooter, electric scooter review, electric scooter 2021, top electric scooters, Best cheap electric scooter, best scooter, cheap electric scooter, how to ride electric scooter, adult electric scooter

Id: myf5ugC7LXU

Length: 35min 56sec (2156 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 24 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Master_Chevron]

Yes fix it please thank god somebody is going to do something.

[u/BabyEatingDemon]

Yes. The market moves so quickly that updating this regularly is a good idea.

And I did want to mention the squeaky chair but I know these things can be very sensitive issue and I wasn't sure how to broach the subject ;)

[u/FlipSide26]

Definitely! I'm just starting my scooter journey and this video with updated models would be awesome

[u/james_faction]

Yes, and 7-8 months down the track there are more new scooters to ride around like a maniac review now.