Scooters as practical and ecologically sustainable transport

I love my scooter as a practical and fun transport method for short trips. Not only that but its just bloody practical to store at home too (right at my back door).

Making it super handy for a quick trip to the shops, or up the hill to visit my elderly mate. Pictured is my 500W single motor

One of the aims of most transport planners is to encourage less trips (especially short trips) by car, to minimise the impacts of cars on both infrastructure and the environment.

Cars (generally speaking) last significantly longer and generate less pollution if used for long continuous times, not shorter trips with lots of stopping and starting. Around town their fuel use goes up (per km) and the emissions get worse both in quantity per km and break up of what is emitted. Engines do better warm than cold.

Wikipedia has an interesting article here that goes into it, and puts walking as the standard (which is pretty efficient) and bicycles make that twice as efficient:

A standard lightweight, moderate-speed bicycle is one of the most energy-efficient forms of transport. Compared with walking, a 64 kg (140 lb) cyclist riding at 16 km/h (10 mph) requires about half the food energy per unit distance

Interestingly they find that a scooter gets nearly 25km per MJ of energy, while walking gets only 4.5. This puts the scooter at the number one spot for efficiency by a big margin (discounting the Velomobile simply because they're really quite impractical and have some real visibility problems in traffic).

 So leaving the exercise benefits aside (which perhaps you shouldn't), considering also time taken to get somewhere as part of efficiency, of all the mechanised transports a scooter is about the most efficient in particular for short journeys (which becomes clear when you compare the data in their table)

Now its interesting that the data from the Wikipedia article above has for scooters comes from simply the claims of Xiaomi 365 based on their claimed maximum range.  Now, I know that you know that claimed ranges are not always reliable, so I have been making some measurements of energy usage on my own scooters (as you may have seen in other posts) and thought I'd do some additional tests. On this test all I did was one specific run, then recharge it. This is the run I do (discussed before here):

and so yesterday I did it twice in the following manner:

1. fully charge the scooter
2. do the run
3. rest the scooter for 20 min and then recharge

I got an average of 147Wh needed, which means 15.3Wh/km or 1.53kWh/100km to use the same language used in that above table. This is not significantly different to the most optimistic claims of the much lower powered Xiaomi (which is 1.15Wh/km).

That's simply amazing stuff, and for contrast Tesla Model S is cited as being 17.25kWh/100km (best case), so 10 times less energy.

Yet (considering time) I'm sure I can walk out my back door, step on the scooter and be at the local shop (just under 2km away) in less time than I could do it in either of the above EV's

Impressive stuff.

Further, readers of my blog will note that I've done quite an amount of experimenting with small scale solar and I know that even multiple recharges per day of my Mercane from a solar system with 200W worth of panel (and controller, inverter, battery).

So in the event of any infrastructure failure I'm also covered there too.

Conclusion

Now all this is just back of the envelope stuff, but I'm sure that well treated and well maintained one should be able to get similar usage life out of a scooter when you factor in how much smaller it is, how much less you had to invest to get it, and how much less you'll pay in operational taxes. A starter for that calculation is this:

• my Mercane dualie weighs 24kg, a Model S weighs 2,225kg 
• my Mercane dualie has 78 lithium 18650 cells a model S has 7,104 
• my Mercane cost AU$ 1400, a model S cost AU$140,000 

so about 1% of the Tesla in all cases. Interesting.

This leads me to be more confident that Electric Scooters are not just good for the environment and highly practical but they're bloody good fun on a low budget too.

Win Win

Mercane Wide Wheel Disc Pads

Someone asked me if I could measure the brake pads on the Mercane Widewheel ... seemed a slightly strange request because if you had one you'd just measure them yourself. But it seemed like something to occupy 10 minutes, so I thought I'd post that here, and thus also have a reference myself for when that's needed (which isn't going to be any time soon looking at them).

Now I don't have the new 2020 model, so if the caliper is different, best pull them and see for yourself as its literally 5 minutes work. Its taken me twice as long to photograph and write this as it did to pull them out and look (well, and really, best pull them anyway if you're going to change them right?)

So this is the diameter of the pad back (steel)

and they're just held in with a magnet, so I just took them out with grabbing that tab with needle nose pliers and took them out.

Of course I had to wind back the outside pad to do that (but you'll need to be doing that anyway when you fit new pads (as well as the back one) because they'll have worn, and you'll have had to make adjustments over time if you still wanted your brakes to work right?

This is the amount of wear mine have had in over 6 months:

which is barely visible ... and the backing plate thickness is 1.5mm. Plenty of meat left there, and importantly showing nice regular wear (a good indicator of proper adjustment).

The pad in general looks like this from the front:

so no issues and generally in good condition all round.

Looking on ebay I found in about 3 minutes searching (key words were mtb disc pads) that they seem to be these:

TP-11C: 18.5 x 22.8mm/0.73 x 0.90"

So basically they cost nothing ... its beyond me why people carry on about using regen to save their brake pads ...

HTH

leaning off it VS leaning it

On a scooter its always better to lean your body into the curve than just leaning the scooter, because the scooter is so low and (compared to your body) so light; leaning it does nothing.

Scooters are or course not motorcycles (as I've mentioned before) and so cornering technique is different, but leaning off the motorcycle is actually still a common technique (even a MTB) when cornering, for example:

In the above picture my mate has altered the center of mass of the bike (and him as a unit) to enable him to keep the bike around the corner and not run out of tyre.

This is because eventually when leaning the tyre contact patch is reduced (by the lean) and the angles that the forces are being experienced are off axis from the suspension enough to unsettle the bike more when bumps are hit.

The situation on a motorcycle is that you may weigh only one third of the system weight (you and the motorbike) but still its helpful to lean (more so in wet conditions), BUT with a scooter its usually the case you weigh much more in that ratio (of you : scooter) with you being more than four fifths of the weight. So you leaning in a bit makes heaps more sense than attempting to stay "on axis" with the scoot and its stem.

The why

On my Widewheel this is even more easy to demonstrate.

So as you can see you're not only moving the contact patch off center by doing this, but you're also exposing your rim to more risk of damage because there is much less rubber there (Eg a mate was using my scoot on the weekend and although I've not put a mark on my rims in a year of riding, he dinged them on his first hour). You can see this ding ...

and here in a close inspection you can see that its been caused by him leaning it while entering back onto the road on a rough section

Essentially this is only cosmetic and these rims will take a likkin and keep on keeping on. But still, its nice to keep your ride looking neat isn't it. So ...

The how

Hopefully this video makes it clear:

So, lean in a little instead and have better grip and better steering dynamics ... on pretty much every scooter actually, but its more significant on the widewheel if you ride in rough areas (as I do).

HTH

first significant rain test ride

Well it rained here a bit lastnight

I was over visiting a mate when it started, which I expected but didn't mind. I waited for it to clear, but when it was pretty clear it was set in for the night I rode home.

Scoot performed well, one corner (the usual fast one) stepped out the front a wee bit (but happily I anticipated and caught that slide) and testing the brakes down my hill showed no easily observable loss of braking.

I sit it on a couple of heavy duty "plastic woven canvas" bags in my front room where it drip dried over night.

This is a quick look over it this morning:

so, seems alls good for a little bath.