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A set of pages on EVs in general wouldn't be complete without mentioning
the "backup EV" I purchased in 2021, almost on impulse and with relatively
little knowledge of the field.
I knew that various vehicle changes were on the way for me, including
having to
replace the Kona
on short notice
and eventually unload the Prius, so I wanted alternative transportation that
I could easily load into a car and take somewhere if I needed to leave said
car there, or retrieve it later, without pestering friends for rides.
I used to use a bicycle for that occasionally, but biking around the
north-Boston burbs had become more risky over the years, because the car
drivers had become less attentive and more flat-out rude.
So I wanted something that could hold its own better in traffic, something
with a little more authoritative oomph than I could produce on my own.
I had become a bit intrigued by the whole "micromobility" market in general, but decided that toys like e-skateboards or a OneWheel were just too hazardous to really count on for practical travel on real roads. I didn't really want to go the full e-bike route, so a reasonably capable foldable scooter seemed like a nice balance. The e-scooters sub-Reddit was actually a really useful resource in learning more about them and getting an idea of other peoples' experiences, and more recently, this thread especially gives a broad view of how people compare the merits of e-bikes versus e-scooters versus their personal lifestyles. While the forums also held quite a few gripes about Voro Motors' poor customer service, they seemed to have one of the longest-range offerings on the market -- a claimed 62 miles top to bottom, or probably closer to 50 real-world with gentle riding. It was actually shooting a bit high as a "first scooter" for me, but most of the lower-end stuff seemed just too cheap-ass and prone to fail. I also wanted something with full suspension front and rear because that makes a huge difference in safety and handling, and with reasonable speed capability in addition to range. I couldn't really figure out if Voro was backlogged with orders or not and to this day don't know what really happened despite all their warnings about lead time, but I went ahead and ordered a scooter and it showed up a scant week later. Watching the UPS guy try to manhandle the thing out of his truck and to my doorstep was amusing; it was a longish heavy box, but he managed. And amazingly enough, it showed up not only unexpectedly fast but also intact and unharmed-- there are lots of horror stories about shipped scooters arriving with their boxes basically destroyed and actual damage to the contents, and shippers taking no responsibility or claiming that was the condition they received items in. So I had gotten reasonably lucky on the delivery front, and still had plenty more learning curve ahead. |
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| Scooter by serene water |
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This was really unlike any other vehicle I'd owned before, seeming to
blend a mix of technologies from bicycles, golf carts, and 3-phase variable
frequency motor control.
The first thing numerous posts advised was to go completely over it and
tighten all the fasteners; the manufacturer even throws in a cheap multi-tool
with various size hex wrenches and some other bits.
But more immediate was the fact that the front tire was flat and wouldn't
hold air.
I was surprised that this thing has tubeless tires, which are said to be
generally better and more puncture-resistant than tubed tires in this
application, but in this case the tubeless aspect was actually the
problem.
Some kind of granular, powdery goop had fallen onto the front wheel and
somehow into the bead area where the tire seals against the rim, and made
enough of an air passage that the tire would leak down in less than a
minute.
How the F did Voro's assembly workers miss something this obvious?!
So I broke out my old bicycle "tire spoons" and a couple of other tools
and actually managed to pry the tire off the rim.
If you've ever tried to wrangle a tubeless car tire, you know that a lot
of force is required for certain critical operations.
This much smaller one needed a bit of persuasion but actually wasn't that
bad.
The key secret is to pinch the sides of the tire opposite where you're
prying and let the beads sink down into the centerline of the rim, which
will release more play on the other side.
I cleaned up the rim and tire bead and put it back on, with some misgivings
that I would actually succeed in fixing it.
I had also complained to Voro about this and they seemed all set to send me a whole 'nother front wheel, but I told them to hold off until I could either succeed or fail to fix this one. And whaddayaknow, my fix actually worked! I was able to hold the tire in the right position that enough air could "catch" inside from an ordinary hand bike pump, and once the bead spread out and seated into place, I could pump it right up and it held. My first tubeless tire repair, in rather cute miniature! It wasn't 100% perfect, acutally; the bead still leaks very slowly but takes a couple of weeks before needing a top-up, so I can live with that. Voro was off the hook. In hindsight maybe I should have had them ship the wheel anyways; eventually I'll need a replacement front tire and they seem to be perpetually out of stock on the appropriate tires themselves. The scooter also features a basic LED "lighting package", if you can call it that, with running and brake lights, a headlight that's mounted too low and isn't worth much, and a rear pair of turn signals that are all but invisible and basically useless. I tried a couple of add-on rear view mirrors and eventually settled on this one that sticks out far enough to let me see past my own butt. Almost all scooters need some changes to what's called the "cockpit" setup, e.g. the handlebars and controls mounted on them. I found that the handlebar stem close to the maximum height adjustment was most comfortable when standing on the deck, with the brake levers angled comfortably downward and the little trigger throttle and display almost flat parallel to the ground -- very different from the as-shipped position sticking way up in the air and incredibly awkward to use that way. Later on I opened up the top of the deck and tried to apply some token bit of waterproofing with sheet plastic. Voro claims some inflated IPX-whatever rating of water resistance, which is total bullshit as trying to ride one of these in the rain would let water get into just about every part. Scooters whose electronics get wet can start seriously misbehaving. I ordered a full-face mountain bike helmet, because my old road-bike lid wasn't really adequate for this. Falling off any conveyance even at low speeds like 10 MPH can cause bodily damage, so a scooter capable of 30+ MPH needs to be treated like a serious 2-wheeled road vehicle. Many scooter eff-ups involve a forcible face-plant, thus we really want a robust chin bar. I tried various kinds of gloves, but they all felt clumsy on the controls so I ride without those. Trying to ride one-handed at any but the very lowest speeds is ill-advised, because scooter steering geometry is just generally squirrely. And like with my other activities, I'm safest riding barefoot, because any type of footwear would just introduce clumsiness and inhibit the useful feedback from the deck's motion under me. The grip-tape strips on the deck work really well with my own soles. That probably freaks out people who see me, but really, in a "scoot oops" I would worry far less about my feet than I would other parts of me higher off the ground. Design problem or launch problem? Because the throttle/controller setups on most scooters are a simple 3-phase VFD motor control, they are *speed* oriented rather than *torque* oriented. They read three Hall-effect position sensors in the motor and fire coils at the right points, up to some settable rate. This is very unlike how most directly-actuated throttles work especially on traditional fuel engines, where opening the throttle generally increases the torque that the engine delivers, and the speed is mostly subject to the resistance of what it's pushing against. So what happens is, a given throttle setting tells the scooter motor to come up to *that* speed as fast as it can and hold there, behaving much more like a speed-governed engine control system. That's fine for some applications, but not for interactive "driveability". Thus, the typical scooter throttle control is super-jumpy, trying to leap forward and rip the bars out of your hands on a slight control increase. On some really high-power scooters, wheel spins and inadvertent wheelies are a thing. This single and highly undesireable characteristic made my "new toy" fairly terrifying to ride at first. Once I learned that the throttle signal is a simple analog voltage, I dug into the little display and trigger-throttle unit to see what I could do about the super-annoying jerkiness. First try was to adjust the proximity of the Hall sensor (yes, another one) relative to the magnet in the trigger piece; that didn't do much and I realized that its output needed some kind of electrical "slowdown" or ramp, not to mention a serious dose of noise-suppression. Supposedly there were "throttle mappers" available that would perform that sort of function, but I had no further info on those so I tried to roll my own in a super-simple way. The Reddit e-scooter community had helped me learn quite a bit, so I wanted to begin giving back to that, so I started posting my various hacks there instead of my usual web-place. The first attempts at mitigating the throttle lurch landed here, and while it did help somewhat, the response was still very nonlinear. At the same time, though, I was getting more proficient at simply controlling the throttle pull more carefully, often by sort of bracing my index fingertip down against the brake lever and pulling slowly with the knuckle. That allowed somewhat finer control, and I practiced tooling along at low but well-controlled speeds. Any pull of the lever needs to be accompanied by a lean forward to accomodate the acceleration and not yank on the handlebars too much, as the handlebar stem is always a weak point on a scooter, and it's far better to stay relaxed on it and use the correct predictive body lean and weight shift for going and braking.
About two years later, Voro started offering an upgraded "sinewave" type controller. The difference between a typical controller that simply turns on motor windings at the right time and a "sine" or Field Oriented Control [FOC] type, is that the output of the latter is much smoother and can be torque-controlled to some extent by pulsewidth modulation. These are basically mandatory for electric skateboards with no handlebar to help a rider compensate for speed changes, and are an essential component in e-bikes that do torque-based "pedal assist" control. But scooter manufacturers usually want to just cheap out and install the dumbest controllers instead. The science of sinewave was already well-known, and there were even some independent open-source efforts going on to develop better controllers in general. The new one that Voro began offering was designed pretty much as a drop-in replacement, with the right voltage rating for the 52V battery and compatible wiring connectors. In fact, the newer versions of the same scooter were now coming with those installed by default, to deliver a much better riding experiece. I learned that at a random unrelated event, where I spotted a guy with another Cruiser and we got to talking. Voro was temporarily out of stock [as they often are, their supply chain management is awful], but as soon as they reappeared in inventory I waded into battle with their sad travesty of a website long enough to buy one. I was so done with that damn throttle lurch. So aside from some interim scattered posts and comments in Reddit once in a while, my next big dump on scooter improvements was lots of detail about swapping the controller and cleaning up the internal wiring quite a bit. The wiring inside most scooters is an absolute mess, with little attention paid to service loops or protecting against abrasion and crushing. Nonetheless, there is a kind of de facto set of "standards" for how controllers and throttle units get wired up, and there's even some kind of digital protocol to send information back and forth to display which I *cannot* find any documentation on. Presumably there's some secret Chinese resource that describes it, so all the low-budget factories over there cranking this stuff out can produce mostly interoperable parts. But therein lies one of the other major problems with the scooter industry: very little attention is paid to quality control of products. Most of what we see is the bare minimum needed to work, hastily and sloppily assembled from sketchy materials, and one really has to wonder if scooter riders *in* China actually use this stuff themselves and "eat their own dog food". Horror stories exist around the globe about scooter parts simply breaking and failing in all kinds of ways, and yet the manufacturing of this stuff never seems to improve despite widespread outcry against "cheap-ass Chinesium". Nonetheless, I was able to clean up and re-route the wiring in a much more sensible way, and apply some abrasion protection where needed. And the new controller delivers a night-and-day improvement in ride experience! With the slow-start setting in effect, the acceleration is smooth and very manageable. Setting it to "fast pickup" brings back some of the jerkiness, and I suppose there are some adrenaline-junkie riders who prefer that, but *I* don't want any surprises in the course of riding thankyou. It is still fundamentally a speed-oriented VFD, but with much better input damping done in software for more controllable response, and less motor phase-switching "growliness" at lower speeds. Between the new controller and tightening up the front end a little bit, I feel quite a bit more confident at higher speed ranges now. I still think it could use a steering damper, but Voro doesn't have a kit specifically for this scooter [yet]. So, the list of fixes and modifications to date:
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