Electric Scooter Power – Explained Simply

Electric scooter power is often misunderstood, especially by electric scooter beginners.

In this brief guide, we will shed some light on this key topic and go over everything you need to know, explaining in simple terms.

Why is motor power important in electric scooters?

For any electric scooter, the motor power will be the determining factor for most of its traits and features.

The maximum speed the scooter can achieve will be determined primarily by the motor.

The ability of the scooter to climb hills as well.

Motor power will also play a big role in other important properties:

• the rate of acceleration
• the ride comfort
• the maximum range on a single charge

In fact, pretty much everything related to performance will be closely tied to motor power.

Motor power is far from the only factor in these features. But as you can see, it is a very important one.

Real vs peak power

This is one of the most useful distinctions to know about electric scooter motors.

There are two ways to describe the power levels of a motor. They are the real power and the peak power.

The amount of power that a motor will unleash will vary, depending on several factors.

If you ride your scooter with an average speed and in average conditions, the motor will typically output average power.

What is called “real power” will be somewhere close to this level. It is what you can expect from your motor most of the time.

If you push your throttle to the maximum, and your battery is full, the scooter will perform as best as it can. This is when the motor will reach “peak power”.

This is worth knowing and keeping in mind.

Most scooter manufacturers only report one power level. Very few of them will bother to specify whether that’s real or peak power. It’s simply better marketing for them to report as high a number as possible.

That’s why I always assume manufacturers list the scooter’s peak power instead of its real one.

Sometimes, manufacturers will specifically say it’s the scooter’s real power.

In a few instances, manufacturers report both the real and the peak power. Of course, that is my favorite type of data. Those brands deserve the most trust and respect.

Aside from these, there’s also the term “rated power”. It denotes the power level of the motor that would not exceed the capabilities of the rest of the electronics. This term is the most rarely used out of the three.

If you only know the real power of a scooter and you want to find out the peak power, or the other way around, check out the real and peak motor power converters.

How to calculate real power when only peak power is available?

As we can see, oftentimes, only the peak power of the motor is available. It could be the real power for all we know, since nothing is specified.

But more often than not, it’s the peak power.

What if we still want to know the real power?

We can do some simple calculations to figure this out.

If we look at the motors that have both values available, we can extrapolate a trend.

When dividing the real power with the peak power, we get a range of ratios. The smallest is 0.37 and the largest being 0.91. The average of all ratios is 0.57.

That means, on average, you can take the peak power and multiply it by 0.57, and you will get the real power.

Often, this will be close to the actual real power of the motor.

You can also figure out the possible range within which the real power can be.

Multiply the peak power by 0.37, and that’s likely the lowest possible value.

Then multiply the peak power by 0.91, and that will be the highest possible value.

This will produce very different numbers, so it’s not a very useful value. But it should give you an idea.

These will all be approximations. However, in the absence of the actual values, they will still be useful information.

Other factors that affect performance

Motor power is not the only metric that determines the performance of the scooter.

Among the other important factors will be:

• the torque of the motor
• the voltage of the motor and other electronic parts such as the controller and the battery
• the battery capacity.

With all this information, getting a clearer picture of the real power of the scooter is much easier.

The issue is, manufacturers rarely provide all this information for their scooters.

That may be somewhat understandable. They may be trying to protect their brand or technology.

Still, that is not so good for consumers.

Luckily, motor power is almost always available as public information. That’s true for pretty much every electric scooter out there.

Even that information is enough to give you a somewhat better picture of the scooter you are considering buying.

Can I make my electric scooter more powerful?

Technically, adding more power to your scooter is possible.

However, it is something that I believe even the greatest experts, mechanics, and scooter enthusiasts would not recommend, at least not if you care about your scooter.

Modifying the battery, either replacing it, adding a new one, or both, is doable. Sometimes it’s even easy.

But replacing or upgrading the motor is very complex, and prone to errors.

I often compare it to replacing the motherboard or the CPU in your computer. If you need to do that, you’re better off buying a new computer.

The same applies to scooters.

If you need a more powerful motor, you should probably go for a new scooter.

The product was built to work as it was for a reason. Tweaking something as essential as motor power may easily have unwanted consequences. Proceed at your own risk.

Ok, what if you are set on powering up your motor?

Well, most likely, you will want to increase the maximum voltage that your motor can handle. This may also include increasing the voltage of your controller too.

The power, expressed in Watts, is the product of the voltage (Volts) and the charge (Amperes) that the motor uses.

By increasing the voltage, you will increase the total power that your motor can output.

For this to have any meaningful effect, your battery also must have a strong voltage. However, it is key that the battery is not stronger in volts than what the motor and the controller are tuned to work with.

Otherwise, short circuits might happen.

I suggest checking out my guides on how to make your scooter faster and how to remove the speed limiter for related tips.

How powerful should my scooter be?

Some of the huge power values we see here can create a distorted image of how powerful a motor should really be.

The most popular and widely used electric scooters of today, like the Xiaomi M365 Pro and the Ninebot ES2, have real power levels in the 250 – 350 Watt range. Their peak powers rarely exceed 1000 Watts.

These are scooters that take millions of owners to their destinations every day. They serve their owners perfectly well.

Getting a more powerful scooter is both very useful and very fun.

The better acceleration, the greater speed, and the better ability to climb hills, are all very welcome improvements.

If you need more of those features, or you simply enjoy faster rides, then getting a more powerful scooter is the right choice.

Either way, make sure that the scooter you get has at least 300 Watts of real power.

Less than that, and your scooter will struggle when challenged by a steeper hill, or when you’re late somewhere and need to hurry up a little.

Most powerful electric scooters

These are the most powerful electric scooters today:

• EMove Roadster
• Weped FF
• Dualtron Storm Limited
• Dualtron Thunder 2
• Nami Burn E-2 Max
• Dualtron X2
• Kaabo Wolf King

See my guide on the most powerful scooters for more.

Electric scooter power – complete list

These are all the power levels of the best-known electric scooters.

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Matt Trajkovski

I am Matt Trajkovski, the owner and main editor of EScooterNerds. I love electric scooters, and electric vehicles in general, and I’ve been involved in the industry for more than 10 years. I enjoy testing, reviewing, and research on various electric scooter models and brands, following our proprietary rigorous editorial and testing process developed here at EScooterNerds, looking for great value and performance, both through data and experience. All of the content published on this blog goes through a rigorous review and editorial process, and our product reviews not only include the hands-on experience of our own team members, but the experience of our audience members as well. My goal is to provide you with the best information about electric scooters possible. You can see all of my posts in my articles archive.