I built the Worlds FASTEST electric scooter

In this video, me and my brother are literally building the world's fastest electric scooter. This is the biggest, most expensive electric scooter video we've ever done, so sit back and hold on to that food you're eating because this video is about to be insane. About two years ago, Colby and I built our first electric scooter. Oh my god, and by the end of the video, we got it going pretty fast. Then a year after that, we built our second scooter that was faster and capable of going off-road. In between catching the first one on fire and blowing up a $500 controller in the second one, we feel like we've made our mistakes and now we have enough experience to try and cross the 100 mile per hour benchmark or threshold. To make a scooter go 100 miles per hour, you need some pretty powerful motors. Our green scooter, for example, had a QS205 motor. This motor is rated for 5,000 watts of power, which for simplicity's sake is about two ovens. This was enough to get us all the way up to 65 miles per hour, but the problem is it gets exponentially harder to go faster the faster you go. For this new scooter, we got three QS273 motors. Each one of these motors is so big and so powerful that we'll be able to pull 30,000 watts from each of them. That's 10 ovens each. The only problem with these motors is that they're not attached to rims like the smaller motors usually are, so we have to do that ourselves. All right, I have no idea how to do this. It's called lacing a rim. Because of the insane power and speeds we're going to be going with the scooter, we ordered three of these dirt bike rims that can handle that kind of force. But to connect them to the motor, you need spokes, and that's where things get tricky. The length of the spoke pretty much has to be perfect. Too long and they'll pop your tubes and won't get tight enough. Too short and the rim won't fit. So we took super precise measurements and plugged them into this awesome calculator to get an approximate length. And because our spokes were so short and thick, they had to be a custom order over the phone, and you won't believe the price. This bag costs $500. Yeah, that's why we couldn't mess this up. We started trying to lace the rim like this, and it wasn't really working. So after watching a video, we learned that you actually should do it like this. After putting the spokes through the holes, and watching another tutorial video, cross them and skip one hole, we got the rim where we could start trying to connect the spokes to it. Again, we've literally never done this before, so it was pretty difficult, but eventually it kind of started to look like a wheel. After we got this first side done, we then had to flip the wheel and do the same thing to the other side. At this point with all the spokes in, we were really excited because that means we got the size right. We just laced our first wheel. Look, there it is! It's a wheel! Six YouTube videos and three hours later, we're done. After that, we did the other two wheels the exact same way, which took forever. We almost didn't do this video because we were worried about this. We didn't think we could do it, but we can! With the three wheels done, we mounted the tires where we could officially start working on the scooter itself. Now we're going to build a frame. For our frame, we're doing something we've never done before, working with aluminum. It's kind of hard to believe, but the three wheels on this scooter are 180 pounds, so it's incredibly important that we keep this thing as light as possible. All right, now we're going to figure out how long to make this thing. That's big. In case any of you are wondering, the reason the scooter has three wheels and not two is simply because three motors is faster than two motors. But that does make this scooter extremely long, so our goal is to make it as short as possible while still being able to fit all the electronics inside of it. For the front of the scooter, we bought half of a dirt bike on Facebook for 400 bucks. We literally only need this for the steering. That's it. Everything else is going to go. Once the dirt bike was pretty much stripped down to nothing, we could set the length of our scooter, which was pretty easy. We just popped the aluminum bars off and cut them in our new saw. By the way, pay attention to that big blade. Putting the wheels back on wasn't as simple as just bolting them up. We had to cut notches out for the axles to sit in. That looks good. But the complicated part was making sure the axles don't spin inside those notches. The reason they'd spin in the first place is because they're motors, and the motor has to have something to rotate against. They come with these little brackets, but they're kind of ugly, and because we're going to be running so much power through these motors, I'm pretty sure these will break. Our solution to this was to cut steel rectangles that slid into the aluminum frame. Then we cut notches in those that fit really snug around the axle. For the wheel in the middle of the scooter, we slid it all the way down to that notch and bolted it in place. And then for the back wheel, we made these super tight so we had to bang them in with a hammer. Once we test fit the bars to make sure they worked, we had to take them back off where we could weld them together, pretty much making the first piece of our frame using lasers. Lasers. All right, now it's time for the most important part, welding. As you'll see later in this video, welding aluminum is very very hard, and I am not good at it at all. And aluminum just does weird things. Watch this side just bend in as it cools off. It's a frame guys! That bend actually came back to bite us when we tried to put this wheel on, and we could not figure out why it wouldn't fit. It's kind of tight. Eventually though, with a lot of effort, we got it on. Yes! Great job! Amazing work man! The next challenge was the front wheel. I was debating on cutting this part out because we all have the attention span of a five-year-old, but I'm going to show you guys anyway because I think it's cool, and we're the first ones on the entire internet to actually mount a hub motor to dirt bike forks. Like look at that, look at the size of that hole. How do you even connect that? Remember our biggest problem is keeping that axle from spinning inside this giant hole. This would be super easy if we had like fancy tools and 3d printers or whatever, but all we have is a welder and this lathe from Harbor Freight. With that in mind, we took a couple pieces of steel and clamped them around the axle to get this square that perfectly slid onto it. Then I welded it all together to get one solid piece of steel like this. That way we could put it on the lathe and slowly shave it down into a cylinder. This took us hours and hours to do because we're not good with the lathe, but look how awesome it's turning out. Our first one looked awesome, but our second one looked like garbage. With the pieces done, you can see how nicely they slide on the axle. These pieces were also super precise, down to the thousandth of an inch, so we had to press fit them in where they wouldn't spin. Look at that. Then we just slid the forks onto the motor and bolted everything down. This is about to be crazy. All right, it's time for the part I've been waiting for, the marriage of the front and back of the scooter. This laser is usually for building houses and walls and stuff, but we used it to make sure the scooter was perfectly centered. All right, if this doesn't work, at least you know we tried really hard. Lasers. With this neck obviously needing to be the strongest piece of the scooter, we added more reinforcement bars on the back. I'm going to show you some of my welds, but you got to promise not to roast me in the comments. I know they're not great, and I'm just hoping some of them are good enough to hold this scooter together. Whoa. With the scooter finally being one piece, it's starting to look insane, but this basic skinny frame could never handle 100 miles per hour of anything. I don't think I can go 100 miles per hour on this just yet. So we had to reinforce it, like a lot. What we're building here adds strength, but it's also the belly of the scooter where all the electronics are going to be housed. We also strengthened the neck up a little bit more. Now that's a frame that can go 100 miles per hour. And with it finally done, it was time to test it and see how it worked. To tow our giant scooter, we're using the two-wheel drive GX3 that GoTrax sent us for this video. All right. I hope this works. Ready? Okay, here we go. Oh man. Oh crap. Keep in mind that our scooter with me on it right now weighs 400 pounds, and I had to yell at Colby to slow down because the GoTrax is going too fast. It's towing good. It's towing really good. With a 54 volt, 25 amp hour battery and two 1000 watt motors, the GX3 has plenty of power to pull around our scooter. And it's also capable of going 60 miles on a single charge. And on speed three with two-wheel drive, it'll do 38 miles per hour. Our scooter was also doing insanely well. Because it has three super heavy wheels, the stability was so good, I could let go of the handlebars. But when we hooked it up to the GoTrax again and took it off-roading, that's when we noticed a problem. Dude, that thing is impressive. We put the GoTrax in two-wheel drive to tow our scooter up this hill. I want to see if you guys noticed the problem from watching this. Did you see it? As our scooter is being pulled up this hill with all these bumps on it, only two wheels are making contact at a time, not three. You can even see it quickly happening here on this flat road. The back wheels are just taking turns touching the ground anytime there's a bump. If the scooter stayed like this, that means when all three motors are working, one of them won't be doing anything. The GoTrax on the other hand was super impressive. Being able to switch from rear-wheel drive to all-wheel drive is a really cool feature that works amazing. Just look at the scooter in the snow. Okay, now I'm going to put it GoTrax also sent us the G4, an insanely budget-friendly 20 mile per hour scooter that goes 25 miles. We've had a ton of fun on these scooters and GoTrax has so many options available for all types of riders on their website. They even have e-bikes too. Definitely click the link in the description, go check them out, and type in Che20 at checkout for a discount of $20 on any e-bike or scooter. Back in the shop, we had to figure out how to fix the back wheel where it was always making contact no matter what kind of bumps we went over. All right, so we basically need this wheel to move like this. Yeah, you can see the stress on my face here because I had no idea how to do this. We ended up just kind of going for it, popping the back wheel off, and drilling some holes for these pillow block bushings we bought. Or bearings, I'm not sure what they are. Anyway, after we got those mounted, we were able to slide a rod through that now spun. Look at this. Isn't that sick? Then we very carefully made some aluminum pieces with steel inserts that we drilled holes through where we could slide them onto our axle like this. Then we did the scary part, cutting our frame. Then I welded the bars with holes in them to a spacer, then that to the piece I just cut off. And once we had two of these, we put them on the axle where they could move up and down like this. With the wheel back on, you can see how this is going to work. This is really awesome. The next and last thing to do for the suspension was add the shocks. We picked these things up on Amazon for like $130, and putting them on was actually really simple. We just welded brackets to this side of the scooter, and after putting in the shocks temporarily, we could see how long the brackets needed to be on the back of the scooter. Look at all the travel it has. Yeah, that's crazy. That's several inches of travel. Then after welding those brackets on and a top bar to make the swing arm one piece, we added a little bit of bracing, and now we're ready to test our suspension. Oh, it's in the air. It's in the air. When it worked, we were only a little excited. No, we didn't. We nailed it. No way. No. No way, dude. Nailed it. Another problem with our test we did was pretty obvious. The scooter doesn't have any power, and remember at the beginning of the video when I told you we're going to be using 30 ovens worth of power? I'm not kidding. We're going to be running 90,000 watts through this scooter, which means we need a battery that can power 30 ovens at once. Again, this is not an exaggeration. We tried to find batteries online that were capable of delivering this current, but we couldn't. It seemed like to us the only way to get a battery powerful enough is to make it yourself, and given our history with batteries, we really didn't want to do that. I don't know what to say. I mean, I'm nervous. Yeah. Let me break down what's on the table for you. Here we have 600 lithium-ion cells that are 3.6 volts a piece. This will give us three batteries with 72 volts and 45 amp hours for a grand total of 135 amp hours. All that means is this scooter should go further than 100 miles on a single charge. We have tons of wire, new tools that we don't know how to use, and other stuff that you'll see as we put together these batteries. I genuinely hope we don't burn down the shop. The first thing we have to do is take the cells and put these green sticky washers on the positive side. Then we could organize the cells in a rectangle to get the amp hours and voltage we want. Think of them like this. Voltage is how fast water can come out of a bottle, and amp hours is the size of the bottle, or how far you can go. For example, the GoTrax GX3 has a 54-volt battery with 25 amp hours. That voltage pushes the scooter to 38 miles per hour top speed, while the amp hours can keep it going for up to 60 miles on a single charge. And for our battery, we're going for 72 volts at 45 amp hours, and we're making three of them. Now that you perfectly understand everything, let me show you this battery build. All right, now we're going to take our spot loader and weld this nickel onto the battery. These nickel strips we're attaching basically make 20 3.6-volt batteries that are 45 amp hours. Next was the hard part, adding the copper. Now we need 20 of these to make all of our series connections on the battery. What that means is we can keep connecting these 3.6-volt batteries until they add up to 72 volts. To put the copper on, we have to solder it to the nickel we just welded on, which we are really, really bad at. Just look at these awful welds. It's so bad. After hours of struggling with this, we basically learned that our little soldering iron wasn't going to cut it. Yeah, so we bought the world's biggest soldering iron. With this giant iron, we were able to solder the copper in super clean. Just look how satisfying it is to see all these cells becoming one piece. And again, the reason we're doing this is because each bank of cells we connect adds 3.6 volts to it. So once the copper's on, these two leads add up to be 72 volts. Next, it was time to add our BMS. This right here is a normal BMS. This is our BMS for that battery. Yeah. To do this, we stuck heat-resistant foam to the top of the battery. That way we could sit the BMS right on top. There were also a ton of wires we had no idea what to do with, but we found out they plug into the back of the BMS and monitor every single one of the cells to make sure they're at the right voltage. Once all those wires were attached to the cells, we taped them to look neat where we could start on our main leads. These are the wires that all the current is going to flow through, so to make sure they don't burn up, catch on fire, or explode, we used four 8-gauge wires. And if you're wondering how in the world we learned how to do this, I gotta give a shout out to this guy because we watched his video like six times. So I'm going to thank him by asking you guys to go over there and just blow him up with subscriptions. Then we just added our giant plug, and the last thing we had to do was just put more protective foam around it, tape it up, and all three of our batteries were done. And they looked terrifying. All right this is everything we need to make the scooter work. We have a motor, we have a controller, and we have a battery. Done! This is always our least favorite part because the controller and wheel need to do a test, and throughout the years of building these things, this is where a lot of the controllers fail. System okay. Okay that's good. But thankfully this far driver controller seemed really good. Good control. Yes. But what mattered more than anything was the speed. If this scooter has any chance of going 100 miles per hour, the wheel has to spin far faster than that. This was a huge win because not only was the wheel spinning at over 120 miles per hour, but our batteries were working. Watch the scooter lift up. And don't forget this is just one motor. All three wheels will be doing this. Oh my god. Oh my god. Oh my god. Oh my god. Okay now time for brakes. Brakes are good. Brakes are really good. Since the front wheel is going to be doing most of the stopping, the brakes on it were very important. I really hope we're going to be able to fit a brake on this front wheel. I bought the biggest rotor I could find for it that mounted to an e-bike, but there was a problem. When we put the brake caliper on, it was way too close to the motor. In fact it was scraping it. Scraping it. You can see here how it just wouldn't fit behind the rotor. Remember how I told you to uh keep that saw blade in mind? This is gonna be the dumbest thing I do all year. Did you guys think this is possible? I didn't. Let me see. Oh that's hot. Take it. In case you haven't caught on to what we're doing, I cut the teeth off of this saw blade where we could turn it into a giant brake rotor. That way we have even more leverage to stop, and the brake caliper has plenty of space because the rotor is bigger than the motor. Oh my gosh. After that we slid the forks back on and mounted the wheel back to the scooter. From there it was pretty easy. We just cut our own bracket out of aluminum, bolted it on, spaced out the caliper perfectly. Dude. And now we have a working front brake. The back wheels were a lot easier because we had these pieces that could thread on to the other side of the motor. This gave us plenty of room to mount the brake calipers after the wheels are bolted on. That took two hours to mount this rotor to the wheel. Just like the front, we made custom aluminum brackets to hold the brakes in place, welded them on, and I think they turned out really cool. Then we just needed to make the handlebars tall enough where you can actually stand up. This might seem like an easy task, but it took well over a day of machining to figure this out and make the piece perfect. We had to make our own brackets and clamps to hold the new handlebars on, and it all had to be strong enough to hold on while you're going 100 miles per hour. These are super strong. With that being done, we temporarily taped up our electronics, threw a battery in there, where we could test one of the wheels out. Yes. Okay. It's moving. It's moving. I wanted to go slow at first just to make sure there was no surprises and the battery didn't blow up or something. I'm going to try and make a turn here. Oh my gosh. I actually did it. So far, it's working pretty good. Then I gave it just a little bit of throttle. It has some power. I just felt it a little bit. The scooter seemed to be working really well. And without even trying, I already cracked 35 miles per hour. And now that I know it's not going to fall apart, it's time to try full throttle. And before I show you this footage, I need you to keep this in mind. This is only one motor. Three, two, one. I want to walk you through what just happened. As soon as I twisted the throttle, the wheel started spinning, putting down rubber, leaving smoke everywhere. I was terrified because I didn't expect it to be this fast yet. So I let off the throttle to stop the spinning. Then I gave it more gas. You can hear the wheel chirping as it tries not to spin. And by this time, I'm off the throttle and on the brakes trying to slow down because I'm pretty sure I just hit 50 miles per hour. I can spin it on demand. Watch. I didn't really mean to do this on a prototype scooter without a helmet, but I'm doing 60 right here. Things actually going to go This scooter was intoxicatingly fast. And again, this is one out of three motors. Did you guys see that? Dude, it's flying. To show you how fast our scooter is, we race it against the GoTrax that has two wheel drive. You ready? Yeah. Three, two, one, go. And the GoTrax is very quick off the line, guys. It has a lot of acceleration. So for our scooter just to pull ahead like that with one wheel, what's it going to do when all three are working? And check out when we drove it through the grass. You can see our suspension working beautifully. Now, no matter where we go, all three wheels have traction. When we got home, first thing we did was strip everything out because this frame might be good for a test, but it has a lot of loose ends. The main thing we needed to focus on was this neck. We couldn't leave it all open and ugly like this, especially on the top. So this plate's mainly for looks, but it's a quarter inch thick, so it's going to add a lot of strength up here. Then on the side of that plate, we added some more aluminum to clean it up even further. This lower part of the neck will eventually be where all the wires run, so we need that covered up too. To do this, my dad and I just made a cardboard template where we could cut out a piece of aluminum just like it. Now I just got to try and weld it. Because the frame was really thick metal and this was like sheet metal, my welds didn't exactly turn out good. It looks so bad. You don't like it? No. My dad felt bad for me, so he had the idea of getting the grinder out and sanding it smooth. I think I can clean this up a little bit. He ended up taking the welds from looking like this to this, which I was pretty happy about considering how bad they looked before. I swear my dad can find a solution for anything. With that, we put on the remaining pieces and the neck went from looking like this to this. And we were going to paint this entire frame black, but my dad had other ideas. Well, this is probably the best frame we've ever made. Huge shout out to our dad because this was his idea and oh my gosh, this is way better than paint. Looks awesome. Yeah, my dad had stayed up all night polishing the entire frame to a mirror finish. In my opinion, this is way better than black paint. Thanks dad. With all the major welding stuff done, it was time to put this frame back together where we could finally start the electric. All right, that montage was a good way to speed up 10 hours, right? To start off all the electronics, Kobe and I for the first time stuffed all three batteries inside the scooter at once. And if you're wondering what the awful noise is, that's my dad on the table saw working on the fenders he's building. Here's what I have. Pretty cool, huh? There it is. There's the fender. Looks dank. Now I just got to transfer that to metal. He won't say it. He won't say that it looks dank. He won't do it. Tell him it looks dank. No, no, not crazy. It's for what? Tell him it looks dank. Say it looks dank. For what? It's dank. Monaco's next job was to drill these holes where we could install our solenoids. I didn't show you this, but earlier in the video we had this set up during our test and you can see that when you turn this key, this thing snaps down connecting the battery to the controller, giving the scooter power. And we had three of them, one for each wheel. The next thing we had three of was the controllers. These things take all the power from the batteries and make the motor spin based on how much throttle you give it. And again, each motor has its own controller. So we wired up the middle wheel first because the cord actually reached. And for the front wheel, we had to cut the cord up and make it about double the length. It's like eight feet long now. That way it could reach its controller right there. And finally, we did the same thing to the very back wheel, but it wasn't as bad as the front. Then if things were complicated enough, we went ahead and added our shunts. Going back to the demo, you can see this little screen we had set up. This tells us the amps, the watts, the voltage, everything we need to know about the batteries. That's what the shunts are for. To wire all this up, Colby and I made a ton of these leads where we could connect everything together properly. For two of the three monitors, we built this thing that mounted to the handlebars, while the third monitor was mounted to this plate after we cut a big hole in it. And at this point, we have something that if you would have showed me two years ago and said we built this, I wouldn't have believed you. Meanwhile, my dad's fenders were going really well. He drew out a template on this sheet of metal, cut it out, bent it perfectly, where he could then shape it with the grinder, sand them, and they turned out like this. Can you believe that that was a sheet of metal? To cover the sides of the scooter, he made templates out of this blue paper. Oh, and by the way, those holes are vents to cool off all the electronics while we're riding. Then my dad took all of his paper pieces and cut them out of this sheet of metal. And at this point, everything was ready for paint. While my dad was putting a coat of primer on those parts, Colby and I wrapped up the 72 volt system, which is what you see here, and started working on the 12 volt system to power the lights and stuff. Since we had a couple cells left over, we used those to make a new battery just dedicated to these lights. It's kind of funny because this is the type of battery you should start with, not three of the most powerful batteries I've ever seen in my life. Anyways, once our little battery was working, we installed all that in the scooter. Three massive batteries starting with the brake lights and rear turn signals, headlight, front turn signals, and the horn, which fit perfectly down in here. This left us with a stressful amount of wires. This isn't even all the wires in the neck. We still have all the chargers and over here, all the keys. It's a lot, but the important thing, it worked. Three, two, one. And it sounds like we built a rocket ship. This is the world's fastest scooter. At least I hope so. We're about to test it in a minute. To turn it on, you have to twist three keys, one for each motor. And then there's a fourth key for the lights. Across from the keys are chargers that charge the battery. So it's nice and neat, looks pretty cool. I showed you this in the video, but each battery also has its own screen so you can see what's going on with each wheel. As for the lights, remember that little battery we built? Well, to see the charge of that battery, that's what this screen's for. Up top, we have a right blinker that makes a sound, left blinker, we have hazards, a horn, running lights, a headlight, and a high beam. All kinds of stuff. Each wheel has to have its own throttle. So what we did was we put the front throttle over here and then the two back wheels are right here. We actually sanded these down and conjoined them with a piece of aluminum that we made. That way they operate all at once. Because the scooter has so much electricity in here, it's going to get really hot. So we put four vents on the front of the scooter and two vents on the back of the scooter so air can come in and go out. But now it's time to see how fast this thing is. Okay, I'm going to hit this gas for the first time in all three motors. I'm pretty scared. Here we go. Did you guys see that? I want you to watch this again in slow motion. Look how hard I'm holding on. The acceleration of this scooter was literally unlike anything I've ever felt before in my entire life. I also had to let off the throttle in about two seconds because I was already going 50 miles per hour. Just watch how quickly my hair flattens out because of the wind. You're just gone. You are gone. You have to make sure you're standing like this because otherwise you're going to fall off. And in the midst of me explaining this to Colby, he had to I especially love when Colby hits it because you can see his face go from I can't believe this to excited to I can't believe this again. You can see in this pull he holds the throttle for two seconds and look how fast he's That feels so fast. It's weird. It's weird. It's like I gotta do it one more time. Then we got a green scooter out to make some comparisons. In this clip, Colby and I hit full throttle at the exact same time. Two, one, go. It wasn't even kind of close. Not only did I leave him in the dust, but I left a tire mark on the road doing it. Just look at this angle and remember we're flooring it at the same time. In this clip, you can hear the tire trying to get grip until it eventually does. All right, well, I think you know what time it is. We got to see how fast this thing goes. And I got to be honest, I was terrified to do this speed run. All right, here goes nothing. We all were. We built this scooter from the ground up. The frame, the spokes, and the batteries. Okay, I'm about ready to hit it here. So as soon as traffic lets up, I'm going to go. It's easy to go 60 miles per hour, but to do 100 requires more than four times the amount of power and strain on everything. Here we go. Three, two, one. At this point, I was trying to call the speeds out to you, but I just couldn't. After 70 miles per hour, driving required all of my focus. At 80, the force of wind on my body felt like two people pushing on me as hard as they could. But still, the scooter was pulling hard. By 90, air resistance was a major force slowing me down. At 95, it was even worse. I felt like if my feet slipped at all, my whole body would be thrown back like a flag on a flagpole. I was holding on with a death grip and I was terrified, but I kept the throttle pinned until the scooter slowly climbed to its top speed of 99.4 miles per hour. That was terrifying. After three years of building scooters, we finally managed to build one that does 100 miles per hour. This scooter should also be able to do 100 miles of driving given that it has a 135 amp hour battery. Thank you guys so much for watching, and we'll see you in the next video. All done.