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Scooter Review: Mellow yellow

Harangue the Chinese? Make plausible excuses to a growing queue of angry customers? Or maybe give up altogether and find a less stressful way to earn a living. Ian Allison, may or may not, have tried one of those, but he added another tack. Rather than just get frustrated with the poor reliability of the scooters he was trying to sell, he found a source of better components and fitted those instead. The result is the Elecscoot 4.

According to Ian, this is imported as a box of bits, which are assembled as a complete scooter at Elecscoot’s base in Consett, Co Durham. The wiring loom is (I hope you’re sitting down) British made. Most of the rest is actually made in China, but some key bits have at least been designed in Europe – the controller is a UK design, the motor a German one and the rear shocks are Italian designed (apologies if you read a recent issue’s round-up of electric scooters, which stated that the Elecscoot’s electronics are made in the UK – they’re not).

Elecscoot have been building them like this for several months now and 45 have been sold. That doesn’t sound many, but given Britain’s still tiny market for electrics, it’s quite respectable. More to the point (according to Ian) is that not one of them has come back with a problem so far – the Chinese-assembled scoots he imported earlier had a returns rate of 100%!

Mind you, even though most of the scooter is still made in China, using UK labour to assemble it does push the price up and the Elecscoot 4 costs £3997. That’s nearly £1000 more than the Emotive E3, which uses the same bodywork and claims the same sort of range and performance. Is it worth the extra dosh?

HIGHS AND LOWS

Riding the Elecscoot couldn’t be simpler. There’s no compulsory squeezing of brake levers before you set off, as on the Vectrix, and you really can just twist and go. This also means the unwary could twist the grip while the bike’s on its sidestand with the ignition on (there’s no obvious bank of warning lights to let you know that everything’s switched in and ready to roll) and of course, there’s no engine idling away under the bodywork either. It’s all complete silence until you twist the grip.

When you do, there’s a faint multi-tonal whine (try to imagine a boardroom full of bankers...) which indicates that the electronics are doing their thing. Take-off is actually quite slow up to 15mph or so, but from there on the Elecscoot rapidly gathers pace as the speedo needle fairly scampers around the dial past an indicated, 30, 40, 45, 50... It really does feel like a decent 125 at these speeds and it somehow seems more dramatic because there’s no noise apart from the wind rushing past your lid. I suppose it seems so odd because we’ve all grown up with the sound of two- and four-stroke motors buzzing away, so we associate acceleration with a hard-working engine. With the Elecscoot (or any electric scooter) there isn’t one.

But if the Elecscoot has 125cc acceleration in the midrange, it’ll soon get outpaced. Flat out, it will indicate 55mph, maybe close to 60mph downhill, but by that time the average modern 125 will be disappearing into the distance. The test bike also had an odd ‘hunting’ feel at 45-50mph, as if something was cutting in and out, but over 50mph, it smoothed out again. So the Elecscoot is quick enough to hold its own on main roads, but I still wouldn’t want to take one out on a motorway, where you’d be cruising at just on, or just under, the 56mph cruise of most HGVs – not a good idea.

All of this, of course, is in ‘high’ power mode. The Elecscoot has a ‘low’ power setting too, selectable by a little rocker switch, the idea being that of an economy setting to save juice, maybe in town only. In fact, it’s the other way round. On 'low' power, the scooter will slowly wind up to 40mph or so, but acceleration is seriously cut back. So much so, that I wouldn’t use it in town, not liking the experience of pulling out of a busy junction or away from red lights at sub-moped speeds. It made more sense to use ‘high’ power to get up to speed, then switch to ‘low’ to save some power when cruising. That’s not as daft as it sounds, as the throttle is quite short action, so it’s easy to squander power in ‘high’ by quite small wrist movements.

In any case, ‘high’ gives the scooter plenty of urge through town and I had no problem doing all the usual scootery things in traffic, filtering to the front of each queue and getting away first when the lights went green. It’s like a conventional scooter in many other ways as well. The front and rear discs do their job and are well up to the performance and the scoot is equipped with Taiwanese-made Chen Shings on 13-inch wheels. So it handles pretty well, with no dramas.

Despite the big bank of batteries, the Elecscoot doesn’t weigh much – 120 kilos, according to the handbook, or about the same as a small-bodied 125. Like the Vectrix, the Elecscoot has regenerative braking, so that when you throttle off it feeds power back into the battery. But it’s only a tiny amount and hardly noticeable, so that there’s virtually no ‘engine braking’ for want of a better phrase (unlike the Vectrix, whose re-gen feels like putting the brakes on when it’s working hard).

I’m told the OE Chinese shocks were dismissed as too stiff and the pre-load adjustable replacements work fine, though I still think the seat’s a bit hard. With 30-inch legs, I could just about stretch into a feet-forward position, but anyone taller might find it a bit cramped. Weather protection is OK, though a higher screen would be nice. It’ll take a pillion, just like any other scooter and going two-up had very little effect on ‘high’ power performance. There’s the usual underseat space (half full of electronics on the test bike, but these are hidden away on customer bikes) and a topbox is optional.

HOW FAR?

But this is all window dressing. What we all want to know about any electric scooter is how far it’ll go on a single charge? Especially in the case of this one, which is one of the new breed of big-battery scooters that claims main road speeds and a bigger range.

Let’s get the claims out the way first. Elecscoot themselves say they’ve done a smidgen under 60 miles with mixed riding and an astonishing 108 when really trying to save power. I had more modest ambitions – if the scooter could carry me 20 miles to Dorchester on a mix of country A roads, zip around for some urban photography and take me home again, all without recharging, then that would do for starters. And it did. I cruised at 40-45mph on the way there (touching 50mph a few times) and left it on ‘high’ for that outward trip and most of the photoshoot. That all went without a problem, until I was heading home again and with a good 15 miles to go realised that the battery had sunk to 58A, which I’d been told was getting quite flat. Breaking out into a cold sweat, I switched onto ‘low’ and trickled onwards at a steady 30mph... and got home with no problems. In fact, back on ‘high’ for the last couple of miles (I was getting a bit cocky by then), the Elecscoot seemed to have just as much oomph as before.

There’s an interesting psychological side to all this. Because electric scooters don’t make any noise to speak off, it feels as you’re freewheeling and not using energy at all. But of course, you are – and how much? Well there’s little point in looking at the instrumentation – the battery gauge is a crude thing that dips alarmingly when you pin the throttle back then zips back to ‘full’ when cruising, even when the battery is low. The Elecscoot also has a complex readout of amps, volts, even the condition and temperature of each individual cell, but that’s all a bit much for the man or women in the street to take in, I think. What we need is a nice simple readout of how many miles charge the battery has left. Elecscoot, you’ll be pleased to hear, has just such a thing in development and we should see it later this year.

Charging the scooter involves finding the nearest domestic socket and plugging it in. That’s something that needs thinking about if the only way you can recharge is by running an extension lead outdoors on a wet day. Fortunately, my garage has power and after its 50 miles, the Elecscoot took charge for a whole nine hours – the handbook claims 4-5 hours – which amounted to 4.5Kwh. Assuming 12.5p/unit, that’s 56p, or a just over a penny a mile (and don’t forget that electric scoots pay zero road tax). A friendly electronics boffin (all right, my brother) worked out that the overall consumption, including charger losses, is 89.8Wh/mile. Factor in the energy content of a litre of unleaded and a gently ridden 125cc (let’s say 100mpg) is using 400Wh/mile, so however you look at it, electric power is far more efficient than petrol.