It'll Be A Cold Day In Hell Before You Catch Me Riding This 100 MPH Electric Scooter
No. No way. Absolutely not. There's absolutely no way I would ever consider stepping foot on this giant stand-up three-wheel-drive electric scooter that does over 100 miles per hour. This is easily one of the sketchiest monster projects I've ever watched happen, and the guys behind the President Chay YouTube channel apparently have more guts than I do, or less desire to live, I'm not sure which. They might have more engineering expertise than most of us do, but watching them put this thing together, that's definitely up for debate.
Okay, let's get down to brass tacks. A lot of the stuff going on in this video is extremely cool to see happen. They're building, breaking, re-engineering, and trying everything in the pursuit of speed. Is this the e-scooter version of what British motorcycle enthusiasts were doing with motorcycles in the 1950s? Perhaps. People have been putting weird stuff together in the pursuit of 100 mph for decades, so why not a mega scooter?
Well, calling it a scooter is really a stretch. There's not a whole lot that connects this scooter with the average stand up app rental scooter around your city. First of all, it weighs several hundred pounds, and it has articulating suspension, a boxed aluminum frame, three 40-horsepower electric motors, and gobs of home-built battery. If you're aiming for 100 miles per hour on a stand-up scooter, there's no kill like overkill, right?
They spent way more money on this project than I would have thought reasonable, with each of the three powerful batteries running over $1,000. Just the custom wheel spokes were an impossibly expensive $500. They don't give a running total, but I would be surprised if this whole project cost less than 10,000 all-American greenbacks. Big oof.
Don't do this at home. Or do, your call.
One thing that I really appreciate about this absurd scooter is that, in spite of how it looks, it appears to be street legal. The frame includes a segment of a Honda motorcycle frame with a VIN tag retained, and they had enough foresight to add the minimum requirement of road safety gear, like a headlight, taillight, turn signals, and a horn. I definitely don't want to ride it, but I'm glad they made it legal. It's certainly not legal to do over 100 mph on a rural road, but I'm not going to be a scold. Grip it and rip it, kids.
Does the scooter actually do the ton? You'll have to watch and find out (yes, it does). Even wearing the right gear, as they do in the official run, I'm not sure I would trust a home-built scooter with about the same horsepower as a current Hyundai Venue at these kinds of speeds. Maybe I'm not the devil-may-care youngster with a penchant for speed that I once was. Age and wisdom come for us all.
I have to mention, the rider in this video takes the scooter with just one of the wheels powered up to 60 mph without so much as a helmet, and that's only the second most deadly thing that happens. Please, I beg of you, do not try to zip wheel the teeth off of a chop saw blade while its spinning.