AtlasP

Why can’t we just get a street-focused 18-inch wheel with a reasonable weight/under 80 lbs that has both suspension and at least 100v speeds? That’s it. I.e. a 100v v11 (what the v11 pro should’ve been), or a v12 with suspension (and ideally a slightly larger-diameter tire), or a v13 that was just a marriage of v11+v12 specs and weight (what the original v13 should’ve been). This is entirely possible with current tech, and I guarantee it would be a best-seller virtually overnight, they just haven’t found this sweet spot yet.

I remember multiple mentions/rumors of there being two distinct variations of this wheel, but obviously no mention of what would be the differentiator. Clearly suspension would be an obvious one (one with, one without)--in which case, the currently shown images may be from the suspension-less version (keeping their cards close to their chest and only showing the version that corroborates what has already been revealed so far about tire/motor size and battery system), and the version with suspension could have different case geometry around the top/back of the shell to make more room for the suspension. (Otherwise could be designed to use the same motor/board/batteries.) (The other likely contender for version differentiation would be battery size, although with how definitively they stated that "this is the battery size" for the V13 in the last video, this seems less likely to me in this instance.)

It seems the auto-deploying pedals thing is just speculation so not worth too much attention, but FWIW I think it'd be a killer feature (which I've been talking about for years) and which would be easy to do extremely robustly. I think people overestimate the risk of failure while vastly underestimating the potential QOL improvement. (It's not like you'd need a motor moving the pedal up or down. Just have a magnet which holds the pedal up, and to release the pedals the magnet just gets moved a very little bit such that it can no longer hold the pedal causing them to release/fall. This could either be done with a robust electrical solenoid or could even be done with no electronics and just a simple sliding mechanism physically connected to a button/trigger at the top. Conversely you don't need anything for retraction as kicking the pedals up is still easy and satisfying.)

Yeah, I had been dragging my feet on this for.. reasons.. but it was time. Done.

@TantasStarke, @Unipsycho, @RagingGrandpa, @enjoimangos -- All added, thanks.

The Cardo Freecom (I think the 4+) I have uses speakers provided by/in partnership with JBL which are excellent for music, but also for comms (whether direct or just routing phone calls via Bluetooth) or turn-by-turn directions, etc. They made a big deal about the JBL partnership because apparently yours was a common problem with comms units in the past.

Second this. Once you get proper moto comms you don't go back. I consider them the most-important safety equipment after helmet & pads.

eWheels determined that Begode's assembly was so bad that they stopped selling new Begode wheels for an entire year while they worked out the LiTech arrangement. When you consider both the cost to do this (which eWheels claims was over $1m) and how much money they left on the table by not selling a string of new Begode releases during that year, I think it's a pretty damning indictment. The only wildcard in this instance is that we don't know enough about the Master to definitively say how it will compare to that existing track record.

Obligatory: "70% how you look, 20% how you sound, 10% what you say". This might as well be the YouTube slogan.

This response by Alien Rides really rubs me the wrong way. eWheels isn't the bad guy here, Begode is. eWheels identified a problem Begode was unwilling to address, and at *eWheels' own great expense* (over US$1m) they secured a resolution/improvement. Meanwhile all Alien Rides did during this time was continue selling the original, dangerous Begode wheels unmodified, hoping maybe it would eventually be fixed by somebody else. I can understand/sympathize that Alien Rides was misled by Begode, but then they should be throwing Begode under the bus, not calling out a market competitor by name who has done nothing wrong as if they're the source of the problem in this case. Very scummy.

I (respectfully) disagree. There are several methods by which one could make a wheel competitive with the Master at the same or an even slightly lower voltage--mostly by focusing on the quality of other electrical components, which in most EUCs are still utter garbage compared to what our existing motors & voltages would be capable of if it weren't for shortcomings of the paired electronics.

Aside from the longer-term fundamental issues that prompted ewheels to stop selling all new Begode wheels for an entire year until they secured the LiTech arrangement, I have to wonder if the broader range of fires more recently across a wide range of wheels (including historically reliable models that traditionally didn't see such issues) are perhaps partially the result of the pandemic's impact on the global supply chain, and how it seems like everyone is cutting corners these days due to either supply shortages of better materials and/or rushing production trying to catch up. I.e. to what degree (if at all) is your average lithium-ion cell today simply inferior or statistically likely to be inferior than a cell manufactured prior to the pandemic as a result of issues affecting the global supply chain? And/or is there some attribute of inferiority that would make these cells still 'fine' for traditional use (like a flashlight) but less resilient to the kinds of stresses produced by using large sets of such cells in series as in EUC packs? (This is just a hypothesis carried over from observations in other industries. I have no direct knowledge about the quality of individual lithium-ion cells.)

It is important to recognize that the current LiTech packs don't directly address or claim to address some of the most fundamental issues with large packs of lithium-ion cells in series--the elephant in the room that we currently choose to live with due to there not yet being an alternative without significant compromises in capacity/weight/etc--they mostly just optimize away some of the low-hanging fruit of potential failure points within the context of current usage/implementations (things like better-sourced cells, adding fuses, some BMS improvements, better cell holders and welds, better testing of both cells and then packs, etc). This optimization is more evolutionary/'best practices' than anything truly revolutionary. These things are good and should be applauded, and they should help reduce the number of fires due to these low-hanging fruit problems, but on a fundamental level such improvements will not fully eliminate such fires and do not 'fix'/'solve' the longer-term lithium-ion battery issue. There I think we're at the mercy of the broader electronics industry and as-yet-to-materialize advancements in battery tech which up until now have remained perpetually '5 years away'.

Here is a summary of the improvements in the LiTech packs:

Obligatory Devil's Advocate warning: The car dealership didn't tell me I needed to change the oil/filters/check tire pressure/etc when I bought my car (nor did driver's ed), the only documentation about servicing it was buried in the manual. Yet if you bought a car and never did any research or service, the engine would explode. If you buy a skateboard or roller blades or snowboard neither the shop nor any sales documentation will tell you anything about the many (including some obscure/non-intuitive) fail states involved. (I.e. Watch out for loose gravel/wet surfaces/metal grates/sometimes single pebbles/etc on your skateboard. Watch out for trees/signs of potential avalanche conditions/etc on your snowboard. etc.) The modern "my ignorance/everything is somebody else's fault" mentality is a societal cancer. ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯