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Old 05-15-2021, 06:24 PM   #1
CZroe
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CZroe is on a distinguished road
 
Join Date: May 2021
Location: Newnan, GA, USA
Posts: 10
Default Segway Ninebot ES3 Plus = ES4?

Last week I bought a Segway Ninebot ES3 Plus from Costco for $579 ($602 after tax). There seems to be very little discussion about this model online so I thought I’d share my observations and experience after a week and a half. After all, the official website acts like it doesn’t exist and I couldn’t even find it on Costco’s site until I was in-store and now it’s gone from the site again. Weird. Can’t find it in the app either. They still had a pallet of them at Costco in Newnan, GA, USA last I checked (a few days ago).

Every ES3 Plus owner I can find got theirs from Costco and I can’t find it elsewhere so I have to assume it’s a Costco-exclusive variant of the ES3. Costco used to carry the standard ES3 for the same price so at some point these replaced those. It has seemingly everything the ES4 has including the fancy lights, dual suspension, faster speed, etc They are either repackaged ES4 scooters with their full 300w motor or they are essentially ES4 scooters with a downgraded 250w motor and a boosted peak wattage (an ES4 “Lite?”). The manual says 300w and even the packaging shows a boosted top speed matching the ES4, so it appears to be an all-out ES4.

So, why do I still say it might be a 250w ES4? Some say the standard ES3 is just the ES1 with the extra battery, which would make it 250w with a higher peak like the product page says... but the downloadable ES3 manual says 300w. The ES3 Plus manual (pic) also says 300w but, unlike the standard ES3 manual, it shows a boosted top speed. We may be seeing some of the same contradictions/confusion around the ES3 specs carry over to the ES3 Plus but the boosted top speed is reason to doubt that. The top speed is prominently-featured on the packaging so it doesn’t seem to be a contradiction hiding in the manual like before. This gives us even more reason to believe this is actually 300w like the manual claims. Is there an easy way to check?

There are a few more things that make the ES3 Plus more ES4 than ES3. Ignoring the motor that may or may not be upgraded (but probably is), the ES3 Plus is the same as the regular ES3 except they added:
Rear suspension/swingarm from the ES4
Side lights at the rear wheel just like the ES4
ES4’s animated RGB lights under the deck
Increased top speed matching the ES4
Folding pedal now flips up like the ES4

With these additions I don’t see any spec or function that distinguishes it from the ES4. From what I can tell, it is an ES4 if the 300w motor spec is accurate. Here are the relevant specs from each manual:
[forum won’t let me share Imgur image gallery links yet]

So, the ES4 motor has the same 300w nominal spec as the ES2 but delivers a higher peak wattage in order to achieve higher speeds and the ES3 Plus has the same top speed.

According to the product pages I can find online:
ES1 250w nominal, 500w peak, 12.4MPH (20KPH)
ES3 250w nominal, 600w peak, 15.5MPH (25KPH)
ES2 300w nominal, 700w peak, 15.5MPH (25KPH)
ES4 300w nominal, 800w peak, 18.6MPH (30KPH)

So where does the ES3 Plus fit in? Well, I can’t find the peak wattage spec in my manual but it says 300w, 18.6MPH right on the packaging and manual specs. With the max speed matching the ES4 and presumably the same 300w motor, I have to assume a peak wattage in line with that.

...but let’s talk about the last week and a half I spent as a user before I even knew how the spec compared and discuss how suitable it is for my intended usage.

First of all, I am not the primary user. I bought it for my twin brother since we were both displaced by a natural disaster (direct hit from an EF-4 tornado) and he can no longer charge his car at home. The temporary residence doesn’t even have a driveway but there are a few public chargers around within 2 miles. My own car was picked up by the tornado then crushed under a tree and I was our mother’s caretaker so we both rely on his car for now. His Gen 1 Volt requires Premium gas when it runs out of electric range so he has more pressure to keep it charged after last week’s pipeline ransomware attack that doubled gas prices.

So, yeah: he’s stretched pretty thin and needs to charge wherever he can. The scooter expands his charging options and can even let us go separate ways in a pinch, like if I need to take the car to work when he works closer to home. Honestly, I’m thinking about a second one so I can get a couple hours of free charge across the street from work and get around some places without his car but that’ll have to wait since the car insurance money is already gone (spent on medical bills from my tornado injury).

My brother isn’t terribly enthusiastic about the one we have but he does use it for the intended purpose multiple times a day and it is proving useful... especially when he leaves his car charging at City Hall overnight and scoots back in the morning to get it (parking lot is only open to the public outside business hours). Though I am not the primary user and am over the weight limit, I have also used it many times over the past week and a half, so I will share my experiences and relay my brother’s complaints. The first issue cropped up before either of us used it:
During the initial charge the scooter turned itself on multiple times, flooding the room with animated RGB lights. It seemed to stop doing it after the initial charge so it may not seem like a big deal, but it becomes one. My theory is that the two batteries were out of sync so one stopped charging which prompted it to behave like it was unplugged. It is supposed to come on automatically when you unplug the scooter, in case you are ready to ride, but it remained plugged in the entire time.

Since our typical commute is so short we used the app to limit charging to 80%, which is a feature I wish I had on my cell phone. That should reduce battery wear and it will still be able to make multiple trips to the different public car chargers available to us. Unfortunately, it now powers itself on when it reaches 80%, flooding the room with obnoxious animated RGB lights while you are trying to sleep. In case you were able to ignore it or sleep through it, it begins cycling on and off while beeping for the rest of the night, or at least until you get out of bed to manually stop the madness by unplugging it. If you have to manually unplug it at your target charge level then you never needed the feature anyway.

What seems to be happening is the charge reaches the target level and the BMS stops charging. The scooter control board sees this and powers on the scooter as if the user just unplugged the scooter to go ride. It doesn’t distinguish between “charge stopped because it reached the target” and “charge stopped because user unplugged it.” Turning itself on causes the lights to drain it below 80% which causes the charge to resume and the whole process starts over again. Ugh.

The whole idea behind auto-booting when you unplug it means they expect you to leave it plugged in until you are ready, which you functionally can’t do while using this feature. Sad. Perhaps they can make a FW update that lets you disable auto-boot. I’m guessing that it came on a few times during the initial charge because one of the two batteries was at 100% and was triggering the BMS to stop charging, which triggered the main control board to power up the scooter. It doesn’t seem to do it now that the batteries are in sync unless I limit the maximum charge and reach that limit.

The next issue is more an issue with the app. It doesn’t accommodate multiple users. If it did then I would’ve been able to wake up in the middle of the night and turn off the charge limit. Instead, I couldn’t try it for days. The app binds one user’s credentials with the scooter so a second user with their own credentials can’t do anything unless the first user unbinds and the second sets it up like a new scooter. Even with shared credentials it logs the other user out, generates a security notice, and forces you to go through Bluetooth pairing. Only maintaining pairing data for the last connected device could be a hardware limitation. I’d be willing to pair again each time we switch except that it doesn’t let you use Apple biometrics like Touch ID and Face ID to login, making it just too much to bother.

Speaking of setting it up as a new user: The training video to unlock the higher speeds failed two out of three times we tried, showing Chinese error messages. It shouldn’t have even been a video streamed from some potentially (and demonstrably) unreliable server since the video was just a few slides/images they could have (and should have) built-in to the app. Dumb. If it supported multiple users I wouldn’t care so much and I would’ve been able to tell that it was booting up at 80% before losing days of sleep. The numeric charge percentage is only displayed on the scooter while charging and isn’t displayed when it powers on/wakes me up... but it is displayed in the app.

I can’t complain about the suspension since I am over the weight limit but my brother is probably 100lbs less than me and even he complains that the suspension bottoms out constantly. It makes loud clanking noises that sound alarming when you ride on anything that isn’t perfectly smooth. Brick roads, for example, are a chattery mess of loud, metallic, clanks unless you slow down below walking speed... and it’s so unnerving that you will since each one sounds like you damaged something. If it’s coming from the rear suspension I’d almost rather not have it. I think I need to try an ES1 to find out... or maybe something with pneumatic tires like the Ninebot Max.

Speaking of tires, we’re probably only around 30 miles (under 50 kilometers) on the thing and the front tire is very visibly worn. The center ridge in the tread is almost gone. The typical commute is only 0.6 miles (one kilometer) and I can’t imagine that this is normal for the first week of use. I realized early on that when I tried to kick to assist up a hill it would spin in place so I quit doing that after the first couple times. My brother also noticed the tire wear so I assume he is being mindful of that and yet the wear is visibly worse every day. I’ve had to use the foot brake a lot since the regen eBrake has trouble with someone over the weight limit like me and yet that tire still looks mostly new. The point is that it’s just the front that is proving to be a problem.

I kinda wish it had the option to automatically turn on the headlight when powering up and require you to override it to turn it off. I feel that would be much safer and would stop me from forgetting it until I am already moving as has happened a few times. Perhaps a FW update could add this.

The manual says you should hear a click when unfolding the scooter, but we don’t. I only recall hearing it the very first time I unfolded it then never again. It just kinda mushes into place and stays there. Perhaps one of us damaged something when trying to fold it down the first time, but nothing looks damaged and it still seems to work. I’m just worried that it will fold up while riding. I’ve seen at least three unboxing videos and they all click just like mine did but no clue if it was just the first time for them.

Before I figured out what was going on I tried to call their customer support line about the phantom lights every night and got a message that the call center was closed due to the pandemic. Since the lockdown ended here more than a year ago, one must wonder how long it takes for their call center to transition to work from home, since many were already WFH and it is one of the easiest types of businesses to transition. Undeterred, I created a support ticket online and quickly got a personal answer requesting more time to research the issue (two days). He or she also suggested that I call the support line if I can’t wait two more days, which they should know is closed down. A few days later I let them know I was waiting on a response and it has now been more than a week. No response.

I did get automated emails asking me to rate the support I received as if it were closed out. I hope it’s not true, but I get the impression that BOTH avenues for getting support are essentially shut down and they used the pandemic as an excuse to same money.

Despite these complaints, I actually like the scooter. Considering that our average commute is 1km, it was definitely overkill. I spent twice as much as another major scooter because...
A) It was right there in front of me at Costco and able to solve a lot of my problems immediately
...and...
B) The other major scooter brand was notorious for nightmarishly poor support.

I paid nearly twice as much partly because I was expecting to get better support from Segway/Ninebot. So far, my support experience has me wondering if I should return it while I still can even though I like the scooter. I really just want them to acknowledge the auto-booting issue so I can know if it’s just me or something they can fix for everyone with a firmware update... and I guess I’d like to know whether or not I should be concerned with mostly-silent unfolding.
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