There’s been a huge surge of interest of adult kick scooters here in Singapore and we think its really down to people wanting an alternative to the bicycle. A bicycle has been around for longer than anyone reading this has been alive and we have seen a huge surge of bike shops opening throughout the island of Singapore. This is in line with a government effort to push for more park connectors and bike paths throughout the island. For an island that stretches only 40km by 25km, the government is proposing to build 700km of bike paths around this tiny island! That’s an incredible more than 5x around the main island!

Before we start, lets separate the toys from the real commuting vehicles. Scooters from the Razor brand are what we call toys. Badly designed for long-distance use, heavy, bulky and cheap, Razors will not be considered as part of a range of scooters that will be taken mainstream. On the other end of the spectrum, there are the self-balancing one and two-wheelers such as the solowheel, Segway, and robstep. These are neither practical nor reliable enough to be mainstream products. They have a steep learning curve and even the China branded ones like the Robstep are way too expensive to be considered mainstream products.

Anyway, the adult kick scooter market has seen several players sprouting up…one of the early ones is the non-electric version called the Xootr, a lightweight quicksilver of a kick scooter, like Mr Brown puts it, kick scooter on steroids. Heres blogger Mr Brown’s review on it:

http://www.mrbrown.com/blog/2008/08/riding-the-xoot.html

Outside of the Xootr, which is made of aircraft lightweight aluminium, there are also many new electric scooter models that have spawned from the successful Xootr.

The Myway is one of similar design of the xootr, but not only is it smooth like the xootr, but it runs electrified too! The hub motor of the Myway is a specially designed hub motor which has plenty of torque and power to make the hill climbs a breeze. Falcon PEV is the sole distributor of the Myway brand here in Singapore.

www.falconpev.com.sg

Designs spawning from the original electric kick/skate scooter Roth Motorboard is the GoBoard (www.sgelectricscooters.com) and the Patgear. The GoBoard is almost identical to the original Motorboard in design, with the wooden deck, but it now comes with a souped up motor and battery capacity.

www.sgelectricscooters.com

The Patgear is an original Taiwanese brand built for the German market. It has the slimmest deck of all and folds compactly. It has a great design especially its collapsible handlebar and LCD display but it is on the heavy side.

http://www.patgears.com/

There will be more coming out in the market. As reported earlier, the JACK electric scooter has encountered manufacturing delays and its originally scheduled mid Oct production delivery has been delayed indefinitely. We are still waiting to trial one unit and see how it matches up to the rest. With its robust and ingenius folding design, it is most likely going to compete on the high end of the spectrum i.e. with the Myway (www.mywayi.com). Heres some info on the JACK electric kick/skate scooter.

http://www.jack-electric-scooter.com/

That’s all for now but not for long. It won’t be that long before the manual or electric kick scooter becomes a viable alternative to bicycles.