Ease of manually kicking

NaesNayr

Curious which e-scooters can be easily manually kicked (perhaps after battery dies.. or just because) without damaging scooter

Barry578

I am curious as well. As a big fan of manual kick scooters, this quality/ability is important to me. Do they all pretty much require the walk of shame for anything beyond a few hundred feet? Or can some actually be propelled manually for a mile or more without exerting great effort or suffering considerable discomfort? Many electric bicycles have the benefit of offering some level of exercise, do some scooters as well?

Many of the budget oriented, lower end breed of electric scooters would probably be best suited to this task. I would think that most intermediate level and higher electric scooters do not accommodate themselves well to this, if for no other reason than that the typical platform height of 7 to 12 inches or so forces unduly flexing of the onboard knee. Also, internal resistance from the motors could be a factor. And then there is the actual weight of the scooter. Imagine trying to do this on one of the Wolfs. Scooters such as the Ox, with one motor, reasonable weight, and an adjustable suspension able to lower the platform, might be candidates here.

DrScootLittle

This is a great question! I agree with Barry578. Scooter height will be a big factor. Launching a Wolf scooter is more of an excercise in hopping up than pushing forward, so a dead battery on one of those is definitely a full walk-of shame situation. One thing I haven’t really looked at is the inherent drag of motors. Low powered scooters are going to have less motor drag than high power scooters, but I’ll bet there are some other elements of motor design that come into play.

justin

Bottom line is that even the ones that are easy to kick (low deck height, motor doesn’t lock up when dead) aren’t so easy kick. If you need to go a short distance then workable, but in most cases you’ll just want to do the walk.

Scoots DrScootLittle Motor lockup on a scooter probably relates a lot to how the controller is configured and if the motor sees a load when connected to the unpowered controller.

Scoots

I had a cheap genesis hornet s1 that would actively prevent you from pushing it when off, or even with the battery removed. Pretty sure it was a design flaw, and not a “feature”.

Scoots

justin Yep. I suspect the power electronics were set up as “closed by default”, so when idle, the windings would act like generators, and heat the power bridges up with the induced currents passing through. If they had instead used an “open by default” setup, I suspect it would have rolled along unpowered just fine.