Mar 29, 2015 01:53 PM
62470 Views
Electric scooter brands are picking up in the country. With my office less than 10 kms from home, I thought to take a look at some of the electric scooters in the market. Visited the Yo Byke dealer Trinity YoBykes at East Bangalore, near Hennur Bus Depot.
To find the showroom without calling the dealer contact number given on the company website is a difficult task, as they sell from a basement.(probably due to low cost in maintaining the shop). When I visited, the shop just had two staff with one doing repairs and another for sales and partially helping the mechanic.
Coming the the electric bikes in store, they had four 5 electric scooters to showcase. But I'm looking at the one which accelerates to reasonable speed: The Yo EXL and Yo Spark.
Yo EXL - The powerful of the lot can accelerate upto 55 km per hour and can travel 60 km on a full charge. It has a 1000 W motor to move the vehicle comfortably with a pillion rider too.
Yo Spark - This scooterette can accelerate upto 45 km per hour and with a range of 60 km on a full charge. IT has a 900 W motor which is slightly less powerful than the EXL model.
Pros:
Very cheap to maintain.
Needs a visit to the service station to check the batteries every four month which costs approx Rs. 250 to 300.
You get your investment back in 2 yrs considering it vs a petrol scooter/bike.
Both these have a telescopic front suspension which could give you better ride than some of the petrol scooters in the market today.
Keep charging the batteries with a regular plug point for 6-8 hrs and move on without polluting the environment
Cons: Both the models have their batteries attached underneath the chassis, which may not let you ride on a rainy day. Direct splashing of water on the batteries could spoil the batteries and get you stranded on road.
The batteries underneath could scrape your body on humps, due to the way it is positioned.
If you are among the unlucky lot / poor maintenance of battery, you could end up replacing the batteries sooner, which would turn out to be very expensive.
Overall a good package for people who don't look for speed and distance.
Just a word of caution that some people think all of electric bikes/ scooters don't need RTO registration, which is not the case. Both of these above models being powerful needs an insurance and RTO registration.
There are other models which don't need license but travels only at 25 kmph, IMO is very slow like a bicycle.
