The advantage of electric ATV’s such as the E-Force is that they have better low end torque – three times the amount of torque as their gas powered counterparts. The torque in RC cars results in the ability to do wheelies or standing backflips, but in the case of an ATV it allows you to easily plow heavy snow, climb steep grades and feel heavy acceleration from a standstill.

Because the use of heavy torque can also quickly drain batteries the torque can be governed by a switch to optimize your drive for longer runs or sport runs. The E-Force uses Lead acid batteries which are the cheaper option over newer lithium technologies, but the manufacturer claims that the batteries will last around 500 cycles.

Shifting isn’t necessary (or available) as electric motors can take you from 0 to full speed all with the same amount of torque. Reversing the drive is done simply by flipping a switch. The result is less moving parts and less maintenance. ATV’ers will also notice that the E-Force runs comparatively quiet which is a great plus for trail riding where you don’t want to disturb the wildlife.

While skeptics point out the flaws in the technology of Electric ATV’s there are many advantages. Companies like Polaris have noticed the advantages and will be coming out with more electric vehicles (Polaris currently has one electric RZR model).

The selling price seems high for a lot of people over $1k, but if you think about it it’s not very high. Say you buy a summit for just under $600. Of course you never stop just with the new car, so you get a couple good lipos for $120 then get a Mamba Monster or tekin brushless system to give you all the power you’ll ever need with a price tag around $300. All of the sudden you’ve easily broken the $1k mark.

When you take into account everything you get with this car… the upgraded motor & esc, lipos standard, performance & utility sensors. And the R&D that designed a car to go up over 100MPH along with the title of the fastest brushless car, the XO-1 supercar is a pretty sweet deal.

Setting up a twin vxl summit is pretty easy. You just use two VXL systems and reverse the white blue wires on one of the motors:

Here’s an idea of the speed you can get on dry land. My temps did get very high even though it was only 50 degrees out, luckily it will be 20 degrees cooler when I run it regularly. On dry land I was able to get the speed up to almost 48 MPH.

For those curious how it crawls here is the twin vxl summit at low speeds:

I was surprised to see the GPS reading was 47.8 MPH on 6 cells.

After hooking up the meter I got a much better idea of the differences between Turbo & Economy Mode.


Eco mode essentially “governs” the scooter to only use 650 watts. That’s enough for you to maintain 20 MPH in ideal conditions. In turbo mode the Super Turbo 800 Elite uses all most 1300 watts to quickly accelerate you to 21 or 22 MPH, that’s almost the 35 Amps: enough to blow the fuse. It’s very easy to see the scooter reach 33 Amps. Well in eco mode it governs so that all that extra wattage isn’t “wasted” in acceleration. So what does it mean in the real world?

My Eco/Turbo Test Results

I found that using the scooter in turbo mode to go 3 miles used 2.8 Amp Hours. The trip took about 11 minutes. Doing the same trip in Eco mode resulted in a 2 minute longer trip and only 2.6 Amp hours used. Not huge savings. In my case it would be .4 Amp hours or 16 watt hours a day in my commute back and forth to work. To convert that to something more meaning full it’s 16/1000 of a kilowatt hour or 1/5th of a penny.

Making Eco Mode Matter

For the cost I’ll take the inefficiency and stay in turbo mode. Heck, I’d like to get an ever faster motor! Eco mode is really just something you’d use if you want to accelerate slower or not have the pull of acceleration be so strong. Still, I haven’t given up on Eco Mode. It can still save me watts hours which matters when I have a limited capacity as I do with my lithium batteries. They are only 4.5 AMP hours. We’ll see if the lower weight and eco mode can allow me to make the the trip back and forth to work with just 4.5 Amp hours rather than the 5.2 required with a lead acid battery.

Here’s the video on turbo & Eco mode to come!

After our initial review and use of our electric scooter, here are a few things I wanted to point out:

Wiring

The wiring on the battery is very thick, but progressively shrinks as you go to the speed control (brain) and then to the motor. There is also a loose wire off of the speed control intended for the brake light. When you pull either brake the brain will apply the battery voltage to the “brake light” plug.

Water Issues

No steps have been taken to waterproof or make the scooter water resistant. In fact, there is plenty of ventilation that makes it so you need to be even more cautious. The main area of concern is the “brain” at the front of the scooter. I’ll be making adjustments so that it can at least get me through some light rain.

Power

One of the things that set’s this scooter apart from it’s competition is it’s power. Super Cycle Sales claims it to have a “more accurate rating” than other scooters. From my tests with a watt meter I’ve found that to be very true. In fact the scooter peaks out at 1200+ watts, so 800 watt rating is more the the RMS or continuous consumption or consumption you would have after the scooter reaches it’s top speed and continues at that top speed.

If you’d like to get a Super Turbo 800 Elite or it’s bigger brother, the Super Turbo 1000 – Lithium, They’re both available at Amazon.

The new batteries will be lithium ion to take up the same space although they will weigh about 300 lbs than the nimh’s.