I bought an ELECTRIC rickshaw (tuk-tuk). It rocks!

hey everyone Micah here with ebikeschool.com and this is my new electric Rickshaw I just bought it a couple days ago I've been driving around it is awesome I have a lot to tell you guys about now I know you've got a ton of questions how much did it cost how fast does it go how far does it go is it street legal do I have some awesome project planned to build in the back of it I'm going to answer all of those questions and more right after this montage foreign [Music] let me bring you guys in for the tour here all right so this is an electric reekshaw some people call these two are usually uh gas powered that's where they get the name from because it sounds like going down the road uh this bad boy is a trike it's got basically a motorcycle front end and then on the back it's got a electric motor built right into the axle there so it Powers both of those Wheels it's a 3.9 kilowatt motor that's about uh so math like five and a half horsepower or something like that so not terribly powerful it does get up to 28 miles per hour or 45 kilometers per hour though I haven't gotten it up that fast not because it can't do it just because I feel like if I hit a pothole that speed the whole thing would just shake itself apart because the suspension is not great it's got a sort of okay motorcycle suspension Fork up front in the rear though it's just leaf spring suspension so it's really bouncy and in the back is really where all of that weight is because there's that heavy axle the motor and of course there are the batteries down here as well so let me show you where those batteries are I gotta unhook the bed here the bed actually latches down because it's a dump tilt bed kind of system so let me unlatch that there I generally try to keep it latched while I'm driving around so it doesn't sort of like bounce around but once you have it unlatched the whole thing just lifts up it's a bit heavy does have that nice air piston under there and so this lifts up if you did want to do like dumping things you have that option you know you're like moving dirt leaves whatever but this also gives you access to the battery compartment here and to the controller now you can see how new this thing is because I still have the bubble wrap on the air piston here but uh here's that access I was telling you about for the batteries this is an SLA battery setup so that's a little bit annoying because they're really old technology batteries you know SLA is nothing compared to lithium it doesn't last as long it's heavier it's less energy dense everything so at some point I would like to replace these six 12 volt 60 amp hour batteries so I can put in a nice lithium-ion setup or probably lithium iron phosphate actually but for now it is you know working just fine it's 72 volts and 60 amp hours so it's about uh I think four thousand watt hours or so I got to check the math on that I'm not really sure how far that's going to take me I'm guessing something like 35 40 miles maybe about 65 kilometers though I haven't pushed it to the very limit because I really don't want to run out of battery in this thing and have to you know like push it or tow it or bring like a power station out to charge it so I haven't like pushed it to the max to figure out the range is and I don't really plan to do that so while we're here I can give you a better look at the motor here it's interesting is the motor it's kind of like the motor on my mini truck if you guys have seen that video it's very similar motor approximately the same size actually and it's also got this little transmission built into it so you can see there's this cable running into the uh the motor box actually it's the transmission before the motor and that's a low high gear selector what that does is it allows you to drop the Rickshaw into low gear if you're going up a big hill or you're carrying like a really heavy load basically cuts the speed in half but it doubles the torque so you're like really powerful off the line I generally keep it in high gear but you know if you were carrying something real heavy you might drop it into low all right let me put this bed back down here show you some other features so this bed itself has some really cool features of course it's got a tailgate in back right like any good mini truck or Rickshaw should have a tailgate so you drop that sucker down but let me show you another really cool feature so if you're carrying some sort of big flat load like maybe some four by eight sheets of plywood you can actually open up the side Gates and fold those suckers down too when you open those up you basically turn this thing into a flatbed truck you can carry all sorts of big flat objects so it's already quite a big bed here but when you open that up it gives you so much more possibility here for the kind of things you can load into it so one other cool feature that's kind of hidden up here is this little bench seat thing so when you unlock these clips what is ostensibly the back of the front seat folds down oh you got to turn these all right still learn how this thing works hold on there's an order of operations here first the side Gates have to be up I'll get this okay now the reason those side Gates have to be up is you got to flip down these little rubber stoppers and then when those are down now this bench can come down and now you've got yourself a bench in the back where you could fit a couple people or maybe three kids back here sitting side by side so you can turn this into actually a people mover as well and you still cut a bunch of space in here for cargo too let's see your F-150 do that all right coming around to the cab here let's take a look at the controls so like I was saying this is basically a motorcycle up front we've got our motorcycle handlebars here's the throttle you give that a turn and oh parking brakes give that a turn and you start rolling the brake up here is actually the front brake so it's a bit confusing if you're used to bicycles but it's more motorcycle setup with the front brake on the right side if you pull this all the way back you can put the parking brake here there's also a parking brake over here for the rear brakes the rear brakes are a pair of drum brakes and you step on this pedal here too and that'll activate the rear brakes though I pretty much mostly just use the front brake because the pedal is kind of annoying to use if you had a real heavy load it'd probably be a good idea to use the rear brake as well but generally I'm just not going that fast so you've got a basic display here it tells you your speed and kilometers per hour your battery gauge though because this is lead acid battery and they're not great batteries the battery level seems to go up and down a lot as you're really gunning it we've also got a windshield wiper up here which isn't amazing but would probably do the job and to be honest I really like that this thing has a canopy because you know they sell these without canopies but I like that if you're in the rain you can you know get some covering there if it's a sunny day you got some shade there generally it also just gives it more of a presence on the road so when you're driving around in cars see this thing coming they might think like what is that weird thing but at least they notice it and you know that way they're less likely to hit you if they notice you so again it just gives you more that presence it also gives you a chance to add some real mirrors here that these things kind of vibrate a good amount so they're not the best quality but it's nice that they're there gives you a bigger headlight big turn signals here basically just you know more of a presence there's another cool feature here is that there's storage under the seat so if you lift this sucker up you get this storage box here and right now I've got the charger and the manual the an extension cord in here but you could put a decent amount of stuff in here it's got a main shutoff switch here which acts like a breaker and you can just turn the thing off if you're leaving it for a while this little box here is a DC DC converter gets 12 volts out of the 72 volt batteries probably runs the lights and those sorts of things covers the main features of the Rickshaw at this point let me close the back back up and maybe let's go for a ride together we can uh you know talk about how much it cost is it street legal and you can get a sense of what this thing is like when it's actually driving around [Music] all right I've got everything buckled back down let's hit it now you might hear a slight pinging or two or a 30 it's just because everything is haphazardly bolted together that's all speed bumps are a bit of a doozy all right so now the ride quality I describe it as good not great actually maybe decent uh great it's it's mostly the suspension oh there's another speed though see that the suspension leaves something we desired kind of like in my mini truck but honestly there at least it had you know real coil springs and everything this is just leaf springs in the back so there's not much you could do about it in general I'd say the electronics are quite good though like it's got good pickup good responsiveness decently powerful it's just the uh you know the suspension all those people just the suspension that really sort of digs the ride quality here the other thing that's kind of awkward is that the back of the seat here is actually part of the bed so when you're driving around and the bed bounces a little bit you feel it move independently of the seat and there are a lot of speed bumps on this road all right I picked a bad Road for this bit so let's get going on a bit of a faster Road here on the open road so you can probably hear that motor really whining now it winds itself up so we're actually in low speed right now those three speed settings we're in low uh the vendor actually told me that most of the people who sells it to keep it in low just because the suspension makes it kind of hard to go really fast if you hit a speed bump you might I don't know spontaneously combust I'm not quite sure you probably hear the canopy bouncing around a little bit too basically it's it's a lot nicer to look at it than drive I would say but it's still a pretty awesome vehicle now a lot of people are probably wondering why would I even get something like this if you know me you know that I'm kind of a car free kind of guy and so generally speaking I get around on two wheels that's uh you know e-bikes electric motorcycles electric scooters all that stuff but sometimes you know you're driving down the road you see something thrown out on the side of the street maybe as Furniture a pile of wood a bed frame you can use I'm the only one that sees those things is like oh it's free wood well it's hard to pick that stuff up on a bike or maybe you want to move something pick up a washing machine who knows sometimes you need a little more cargo space than you can typically get out of a little more garbage space you can put on a bike so something like this is nice in that it's not a full vehicle it's easy enough to you know keep in your garage it's not too big it's only about 10 feet long I think maybe even worse actually but you can still haul a bunch of stuff back there in fact this morning when I was filming I noticed it looks set up but I drove by some shelves that's only thrown out and I actually needed some shelves for project I'm working on so I was able to just grab those and throw them in the back it's those kinds of things where like yeah you might be able to carry those on a bike but it certainly wouldn't be comfortable so around the town utility tasks I can absolutely see the use of something like this [Music] didn't cost me I paid about four and a half thousand dollars for this thing it was sixteen thousand shekels here in Tel Aviv and that probably sounds like crazy expensive to you but truly a pretty good price here I've seen these things go for like 25 000 shekels which is more like um seven and a half thousand or seven thousand bucks on the way down one of the things is this is not Chinese actually this is actually made in Turkey it's from a company called Volta this is the vt5 model and so it's kind of Quality Air band construction I guess though you know I don't really care where it's made you can have good stuff made in China crappy stuff made turkey you know good stuff made in the US crappy stuff made in the US it's not really where it's made it's how it's made it's important to me but the other thing is that everything is really expensive in Israel especially imported Foods because there's value-added text and so if you go on volta's website in Turkey I think they sell these things somewhere like 2 000 bucks there but uh here you got to pay a little over twice to have the value added tax [Music] another question that I'm sure you're wondering is is this thing street legal so here in Tel Aviv it kind of is and also kind of isn't it's in a bit of a legal gray area so these things are all over the streets here you see them everywhere and you'll never get a ticket for using one but they're not actually in the traffic code here basically they kind of fit under the definition of a kangnoise which is like a mobility scooter and a lime in the left lane probably move over so it's kind of a Mobility Scooter which those things can have three or four wheels here and they are street legal within certain parameters this is exactly in those parameters but the police basically um you know view them as mobility scooters and so that's why you'll see like 130 thousands on the street here in Tel Aviv because they're used by all of the delivery services they used by the companies that like stock up and supermarkets uh package delivery you often see them carrying around scooters like the lime and the bird and tear scooters people go around and pick those up to recharge and redistribute them so there are sort of de facto street legal here even if they aren't necessarily in the traffic though they're still used everywhere and you'll never have an issue with it you're not allowed to use them in the bike Lanes in the beginning people use them in the bike lanes and then they made a lot of saying you couldn't do that which I think is a good idea because these things shouldn't be mixing it up with bicycles it's a lot bigger and heavier man if a bike I don't want to see this thing barreling down at me foreign [Music] so what am I going to do with this thing well importantly I got it because it just looks like so much fun apparently I got it because I do think it'll be useful for somewhere around the town utility stuff but also I've got a couple projects in mind for this one of the first things I want to do is make a solar canopy for it so over the bed back there put a big panel something like I don't know four or 500 watts of solar power that way I can charge this thing from the sun right now I've got to plug into a outlet that's in the corner of my parking garage and it's super annoying because I'm not technically supposed to park there I found a spot it seems like no one uses but not a great solution so if I put a solar panel on the top of this thing then that'll be nice because I can just you know pull it out of the garage and let it charge during the day and I think with about a 500 watt panel I can do a full charge in about one day so you know just roll it out let it charge up roll it back in but my ultimate goal for this thing is that I want to build a little camper in the back like a mini RV which I think would be awesome have this turn into basically a tiny little three-wheeled electric RV green light I don't know how practical [Music] on obtainium to make sure it can handle all the jarring around but if I can pull that off but I think that would be awesome to have like a self-contained little electric RV charge of the sun it was like a little bed in there maybe I'll make it big enough or two I don't know if my wife is really going to want to like travel around in this thing might have to make this an RV for one but uh I still think just project to do and a really cool thing to have in the end a tiny wheeled electric RV so that's my ultimate goal so see if I get there it's on the to-do list of things that I really want to do with this project I just think it is really great rear visibility [Music] foreign thanks for watching everyone I hope you guys enjoyed that video showing off my new electric Rickshaw here I'm going to be back with more content in the future on it of course I can't wait to build that solar canopy and hopefully that RV in the back until then though we've got one more thing to do and that's to announce the winner of the giveaway for my last video in the randomly selected commenter is ride a bike gun so congratulations just let me know which one of my books you'd like you can choose from DIY lithium batteries DIY solar power the ultimate do-it-yourself e-bike guide or my newest book the electric bike Manifesto and if anybody else wants to win a free copy of one of my books all you have to do is put a comment down below this video you can say anything you'd like and hopefully you'll be the randomly selected commenter at the end of my next video if you don't want to wait that long you can always find my books on Amazon all right thanks for watching Everybody I'll see you next time [Music] thank you [Applause] [Music]

Channel: EbikeSchool.com

Views: 461,562

Keywords: electric bicycle, e-bike, ebikeschool.com, ebike school, rickshaw, electric rickshaw, electric tuktuk, electric tuk-tuk, mini-truck, micah toll

Id: WS7ne-NnkVI

Length: 17min 49sec (1069 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 04 2023