Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “URB-E’s silly-looking electric scooter just slayed my commute”.
As a native New Yorker, I’ve tried pretty much every method imaginable for navigating the streets of the Big Apple. So when my next door neighbor rolled up in an ER B electric scooter, I was intrigued. I had tried out an early prototype back at CES in 2014 that vehicle was fun but too slow and slide to be taken seriously. On rugged streets.
I decided to take the finished product for a spin trying to navigate through a day of errands and my commute to work. I started on Brooklyn where I live. The ER B is front-wheel drive, so the steering can be a bit jumpy, especially if you put your feet on the front pegs, but I never fell off while learning to ride.
My wife had forgot her lunch, so I went to pick her up something to eat. The ER B was ideal for switching back and forth from the sidewalk to the street and the optional basket made carrying her sandwich a breeze. It even held my eyes coffee. It was definitely my ultimate hipster Dada moment. The ER B has a top speed of 15 miles per hour, which feels great when you’re accelerating, not quite as speedy, when you’re getting passed by a bicycle on the straightaway. Still, I left my camera crew in the dust by slipping past traffic.
A lot of the time the ER be even handled well on cobblestone streets, although that was a pretty bumpy ride. We then made our way into Manhattan. I took the Brooklyn Bridge, which is always crowded with tourists snapping selfies in the bike lane.
It can be a nightmare of starts and stops, but with the ER B I could start and stop with minimal effort and even weave between pedestrians, its agility and flexibility really impressed me on this leg of the trip. As I made my way to midtown, I spent some time weaving in and out of traffic on the RV. You sit far too low to be seen from a large bus or truck even most SUVs wouldn’t spot you in their mirror, but I actually felt safe, if not safer than I do in working my way through similar traffic on a bicycle, because the erbia is much Nimbler and faster to accelerate the ER B relies on a 36 volt lithium ion battery for power. It takes about 4 hours to get to a full charge, but you can get a whopping 20 miles on that single charge, giving you more than enough juice for a 45-minute commute to work, and so this is our last shot of the day and it’s a fake One because I beat the video team back to the office by a mile. I was really impressed with the maneuverability on the Irby and especially the battery.
We wrote it for like five hours before it died. This is a new one, I’m riding now, if you have $ 1,700 to spare, and you have an urban commute that doesn’t work for a bike or a car. This is a really interesting option. .