Jon Stern

I get that you're concerned about knee-jerk reactions causing manufacturers to change EUCs in a way that negatively impacts the user experience. I'm not calling for that. I'm calling for a long-term effort to eliminate controller boards frying for generations of EUCs down the road. I'm an engineer, so I know what kind of long term approaches are required here. When I talk about failure points, I'm thinking at a much finer granularity than "the control board". The specific failure points (electrical components) need to be identified and some of them eliminated, until they get to the point where there's just one (ideally).

Fuses are not a great solution, because the components that can fail (MOSFETs/caps) will do so at different currents depending on their temperature. A fuse cannot emulate that behavior.

I meant to state that this is a difficult engineering challenge for an EUC (for the reasons you state), but hard engineering problems get solved when customers demand it. I do understand the difference between e-scooters and EUC. My point in talking about e-scooters was a comparison of user experience. It was not intended to imply the engineering challenges were the same. I'm not suggesting that a catastrophic can be avoided 100%, but it can definitely be reduced to an extreme corner case. Of course, a shut down will throw off the rider, but if you shut down just before the board was about to fry anyway, that outcome is the same. The issue EUCs have is they are insufficiently tested, and have multiple failure points.

It's not easy to do this for an EUC, but it's the behavior we need to demand as consumers. The key to it is extensive testing and engineering refinement. Instead of having multiple possible failure points, they should improve the design to the point where under all testing conditions there's just one component that fails (across all reasonable temperature conditions). Once you get to that point, you can look at ways of monitoring that component (current/temp) and trigger a shut down just before it would blow.

You're correct that the Sherman isn't optimized for this kind of high torque condition. The question should be, what happens to the wheel when ridden outside its design envelope? EUCs should shut down in some way (fuses, thermal cut off, or something) instead of blowing up. A Ferrari taken off road would bottom out and probably would take some damage, but the engine wouldn't explode. Alien Rides does an e-scooter test on a hill in SF. I've watched a few of these and each time the weak scooters just stop part way up. I've never seen one explode. That's the behavior we should demand for EUCs.

Here's a idea to prevent the roll bar from denting. Drill a small hole in the tube and inject in a low viscosity epoxy resin. Just enough to fill the bottom couple of inches. Let the epoxy cure with the wheel standing upright, then seal the hole.

That's pretty crazy! When I first got my 16x (after riding a Inmotion V8) it seemed so high.

That's hilarious! My dad used to shoot our family vacations on Super8. I'd forgotten how bad the quality was. We've come a long way.

Actually, this is even better.

I painted the rim too, and matched the suspension slider too. That's a full disassembly job.

I'd prefer this.

Agreed. It's a bit of a mess. The wheel rim, vertical suspension slider tubes (which are ever so slightly green), and pads don't match one another. Then there's the gratuitous orange. The ID people I work with would either puke or laugh if they saw this.

That's because they were too busy trying to get it to cut out and getting in to fights with car drivers to ride very far!

It got me excited for a moment too. But then I realized he was cheating by using skill. If I were to buy the S18, I'm pretty certain I'd still be barely able to jump over worms.

Maybe not, if this work that uses eddy current damping to reduce power consumption by 70% pans out: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00423111003602400