Couldn’t agree more! You need to know your city well and how people drive and learn the roads to take the roads to avoid. Avoid commuter roads… No one commuting drives friendly lol.
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Not as bad as it used to be. First motor mounts where like $120 each 3 years ago… The reality is that people need markups because things fail. If they have any decent warranty or stand behind their product, there’s a keystone markup or higher. This is the same in every industry.
You have to think about how much time goes into designing a part, having it made, and testing it… Takes months of time, and if your only going to make $3000 profit from 30 hours of work… A lot of guys smart enough to this stuff are making more than $30 an hour… And usually, it’s more like 100+ hours, it’s really like $5-$10 an hour. The market is small and it’s getting really crowded fast.
There’s sort of this race to the bottom, and I think it’s not good in some ways. Cheaping out on quality will bring prices down, but when you start building serious boards, failures could be lethal, especially on public roads in a city. If you want to ride around your own property or on trails, then the lower quality is more acceptable. But one wrong move and your head is hitting a parked car like a rag doll, or you could get ran over.
The markup seems crazy, but when you get into quality, you’ll see the difference. Weak magnets at $1 per motor or strong, high heat magnets at $15 per motor. Cheap shitty epoxy for the magnets that results in broken magnets for $1 or proper magnet glue for $14 a motor. Cheap epoxy for windings that results in wires coming lose resulting and shorting and keeps heat trapped in like a blanket for $1 or engineered motor winding epoxy for this exact application for $14 a motor…
I can go on and on, and for the most part, end users have no idea what goes into the parts they buy. Some are selling cheap hub motors that they call premium hub motors that cost less than $100 to make and selling them for over $500 a set. And that kind of markup I feel is wrong. But for a lot of stuff in eskate, prices do reflect actual costs. The differences posted above are why those cheep china hubs sell for $40 per motor while a good hub motor will cost over $100 per motor to make, none the less before any markup. One will feel like a Ford and last like a Ford and the other will feel like a Rolls Royce but last like a Toyota.
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There is a way to reduce or nearly eliminate wobbles completely.
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Moe also uses a steering dampener. Defiantly seems useful at very high speeds.
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For sure. When I had it on, at least when it was engaged any past the minimum damping setting, I never got a single wobble, even geared to/pushing 45+ mph… Ever.
If something like this can be slimmed down and made more appealing, and designed to be widely compatible to just bolt on to the most common setups, this kind of addition would make a huge difference.
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I modestly agree with basically all above about the main issues :
Huge progresses have been made in the last years on the E side, ie electric/electronic (I confess that I’ve been monitoring decreasing frequency of fried motor/esc, broken belt,… on forums).
Price/mark up is still an issue but it improves, same for reliability/accessibility/safety… but not much progress has been made on the ultimate bottleneck : contact patch, grip, traction, wheels, tires…
So, I would dare to say that the last bottleneck is the old skatetruck design itself : you can’t expect much performance from a XIXth century techno meant to dance waltz on a wodden floor.
Brakes. I always want more braking.
I don’t like that braking force is related to battery charge state, and braking hard in the right circumstances (usually in the time of most need) risks all the electronics blowing up and consequently, no brakes. I’ll also mention hot hot motors here.
I don’t like that if there’s some electrical glitch, no brakes.
Some mechanical brakes on the front wheels would really ease my mind. Would still worry about electrical failure taking out the remote receiver. Not sure if this can be dealt with nicely. Foot stompable emergency brakes maybe…
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Money
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Oh most definitely not
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Have somthing in the works. Not an AT but a dedicated loose dirt wheel. Will be testing it hopefully late summer or this fall when the off-road board gets built. Should grip and rip dirt/gravel/sand.
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I mean, your suggestions are good, but they just aren’t true for San Francisco. It isn’t even safe to ride a motorcycle here.
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Fair enough. I thought tons of dudes ride in San Fran?
Oh I don’t disagree with that. Im a bit suspicious about the quality of most of the branded motors out there that might just be re-labeled Chinese motors. Stick a new paint job on it and sell it for 50% more is not out of the realm of possibilities.
Some of this obviously stems from companies desire to get you to buy there finished product, so they mark up individual components. But come on, $100 for two PLASTIC drive gears and two $6 ea belts. That’s just obnoxious. I think some of the complete boards are pretty fairly priced for what you get. Having said that, evolve/boosted and everyone else should not be using plastic drive gears on a $1500-2000 board. Especially when a drive gear failure could cause a lockup at speed.
As far as motor mounts go, I think they remain significantly under-engineered for what they are. The block on the trucks by far needs the most work. From a cost perspective though, that’s a single 2D machining process for a CNC – most parts don’t have threads either. Sure there is R&D time, I understand that. But theyre producing these at high volume and using them with a commercial product. Its $3 of aluminum + large batch machining cost and then selling for $30+ ea. Maybe $45 for two brackets? okay. $30 for bracket and trucks block, okay. But $30 for a single bracket, an additional $30 for the block. That’s just getting silly.
Evolve sells the TWO GT motor covers for $12. I can guarantee you they took 3 times longer in CAD to design. But they only fit evolve equipment, so the markup is reduce because the product is only applicable if you paid big money for one of their setups (which looks very nice). That’s not unreasonable, but its a major disadvantage to the DIY community and should be a huge motivator to these start-ups.
Electronics are a tough thing to stay competitive in. As the market grows and competition grows, electronic devices have razor thin profit margins because overseas manufacturers can get very competitive in that space. I think its smart for companies to reduce these markups to get more people on their equipment. As the DIY community grows, competition for individual components gets even tougher. Boardnamics is making motor mounts for $16 now per side. That’s a big big difference from what the high end mounts that are going for $50-90 per side – especially if things like 7075 aluminum doesn’t make a difference to 90% of the riders who aren’t doing extreme performance setups.
This theoretical conversation could go round and round. To be honest, the DIY community will never exceed the standard customer volume for companies like boosted and evolve. DIY folks are not as big of a threat to their market share as we might think.
Im not sure im a big fan of the direction electronics is going as far as VESCs are concerned. Combining components is nice from a design perspective. But in reality, the new VESCs that have integrated anti-sparks and other components are just asking for individual component failures requiring replacement of the entire device - which are far from cheap. Boosted and evolve are moving to manufacturing everything in house. And while combining components makes assembly and manufacturing processes easier, its a nightmare when something breaks. To make matters worse, warranties are relatively short. I mean 6 months for a $1500 board can be a lot of riding or not a lot depending on the rider and time of year
Lastly, safety is taking a long time to catch up. The big manufacturers should be leading this with standard or easily upgradeable light kits. They know that the majority of their riders are commuting on public roads and sidewalks with their products. They can wait for regulation to severely screw them, or they can get ahead of the curve. Im surprised that the new VESC design has not integrated automatic brake lights and front running lights.
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I would say the biggest bottleneck of all is the lack of manufacturing available basically everywhere but China. It would be nice to have access to factories that don’t have crazy if at all any minimums and decent turn arounds (not including transit time). Most Places like here in the U.S require you to have a business license to buy from the factory as well. It’s all very disappointing to me, but on the bright side atleast there’s still China.
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Oh for sure, It’s possible, but every time you get ready to ride you’ve got to psych yourself and mentally prepare yourself for a lot of idiots to be on the road and to be glared at by spiteful people. Cars here actually try to push you off the road. Yeah, you can manage it but if I was living in a small college town, riding on the bike lanes to campus would be a completely different experience.
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The law. Restricted to 250w and 6 km/h.
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I am gonna throw ohms law into this , resistance is the bottle neck , overcome resistance and you will be an instant billionaire and go down in history , on a smaller scale you will reduce the size of the battery needed , smaller motors and lower weight for our purposes
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There isn’t any price gouging lol
Parts don’t code much to make sure but they don’t get as much sales as you might think
Esk8 is a tiny market
Longboard trucks range from $30 to $600. Are you going to cry about that too?
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Slight curveball here, What were the past bottlenecks? What was overcome that allowed Eskate to become so prominent 2014-2019 compared to 2009-2014?
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