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Electric Scooters 2022

BMW CE 04

Well, it's 2022. Are electric scooters any closer to being available and affordable then they were a few years ago? I think the answer is probably no. They are available if you look hard enough, and some of then are affordable, is by that you mean in the $1000-$2000 price range, but the good ones are expensive and the cheap ones aren't very good. Her's a table with some of the electric scooters you might be able to find and the price you might expect to pay for them.

These specs don't tell all the story of course. The cheaper (generally Chines made) scooters probably come with a heavy lead-acid battery (like in your car). They are heavy, usually slow to charge, but relatively cheap. The high end scooters use lighter and more powerful lithium based batteries (like in your electric car). They are much lighter, can be rapidly charged, but are more expensive. The cheapest Chinese scooters are slow, have very limited range, lead-acid batteries and cost more then 50cc gas scooters while under-performing them in most ways.

If you can afford a #13000+ BMW C, I'm sure it's very good (assuming you don't want to ride more than 60 miles...). After that, with a 220v charger it will take about 4 hours to fully recharge. There's also a newer model with better specs, the BMW CE 04. It's base price is around $12,000 but can easily go over $14000 with a few options. Top speed is around 75 mph and the range is about 80m miles. With the (optional) high speed 220v charger you can recharge to about 80% capacity (65miles) in just over one hour. So if you have a lot of money and don't want to ride far, it's a very nice scooter with zero emissions. But if you have ridden more then 40 miles from home and there isn't a convenient 220v outlet available, you may have to wait quite a while to get enough charge from a regular 120v outlet (assuming you can find one) into the battery to get you back home.

Not all of these scooters can be found for sale in the US. There are far more option in Europe and Asia. If you are in the US and want an electric scooter your choices will be somewhat limited, but it's work looking around to see what's available. Many of the electric scooter manufacturers are looking for US distribition outlets.

The TaoTao 500W scooter (shown above) can probably be found for as little as $800. It has a claimed top speed ~30mph (depending on which spec sheet you believe), a claimed range of 25-35miles and a claimed recharge time of 5-7 hours. So it would probably be OK for a slow ride to school or work if it isn't too far away. You could go a little further if you could plug it in to recharge it while you were there. It uses a 12AH, 48v lead acid battery. Cost to recharge the battery is probably about $0.25, so maybe around $1 for 100miles. A typical lead acid battery designed for deep discharge service, if treated properly, will probably be good for 500-1000 recharge cycles.

For round the same price you can get a 50cc gas powered scooter which probably has a range of around 100 miles, can be refueled in a few minutes for about $3-4 and probably has a slightly faster top speed (maybe 40 mph?). In general it costs around 2x to 3x more to drive a gas powered vehicle than an electric powered vehicle over the same distance, which is excellent unless you are 100 miles from home with no electric outlet available!

There is a "fail safe: option, the Tao Tao ATE 501. This is a 500W electric scooter, top sped 20mph, range 40 miles, recharge time around 8 hours. However if you run out of electricity it has a backup - pedals! Now it weighs around 220lbs and I'm not sure It has any gears, so just how much work it would be to pedal it is undnown, but probably less work that pushing it most of the time. Legally, it's an electrically assisted bicycle (hence the restricted top speed), but it looks pretty much like a regular 50cc gas scooter! Since it's actually a bicycle, it does not need to be registered. However since it looks like a gas powered scooter that does need to be registered, it's possible you could be stopped because there's no license plate!