Gadgetory

electric motors are in pretty much everything these days from cars to bikes to scooters but one of the most fun things to ride with an electric motor in it is an electric skateboard and believe it or not the markets actually grown enough over the last two years that some of them are pretty useful now especially in cities you can even use some of these to replace other transportation options a good electric skateboard should have more than just a few miles of range it should also be fast not just because that's fun but because you need the speed to be able to get around obstacles and avoid danger it should also be able to stop really well too and it'd be nice if it was cheap but most of the best ones are still pretty expensive so you want to make sure you're getting the most for your money unfortunately it's not that easy to find one that takes all those boxes but if you choose carefully you can find something that gets you really close and still lets you have a lot of fun big surprise the best electric skateboard comes from a company called boosted and the best one that boosted makes is its new boosted Plus which takes almost every box on the list the plus has an advertised 14 mile range which is really more about 10 to 12 depending on how you ride but that's enough to cover most trips without charging I can make it all the way to work and back to my apartment in Brooklyn without charging in between and that's about a 12 mile round-trip and more casual rides you basically never have to worry about charging boosted's boards are also super durable the Plus like its predecessors is really flexible you can basically jump on it and never worry about it breaking and you can even ride the board through water it's also fast with a top speed of about 20 miles an hour which is frankly as fast as I ever want to go on an electric skateboard but more importantly it has really good braking which is something you really need what you're going 20 miles an hour I also find boosted's longboard the easiest to ride out of all the other options it has really big wheels which grip the road really well it has four different ride modes you can start off slow and maybe most importantly booster just makes the best remote it uses a spring-loaded wheel to accelerate and brake and there's just the right mix of tension and play in that wheel so that the movements aren't too sudden so you go flying off the board loose it also makes the best app of any other electric skateboard company out there which shows you stats like range it has an domitor for how many miles you've traveled it's just the most robust look at all the stats that you've generated while riding its boards the pluses size makes it easy and fun to ride but it's also one of the board's biggest drawbacks at 16 pounds this thing is just not that easy to carry around when you're out riding it and the charger it comes with is also pretty unwieldy though the longer range means you hopefully won't have to carry that around as much another place where the boosted plus loses points is its price even though it's cheaper than the last model it still cost $1400 but so much of the competition is at or over that thousand dollar price point that I'd argue this is where your money goes to the farthest for a completely different kind of ride boosted's new short board the mini is a smaller counterpart to the plus it's a stiffer board so the ride comfort isn't quite the same and it weighs about the same at about 15 pounds but I'm fine with those trade-offs for the price the base-level mini starts at eight hundred dollars and has about seven miles of range and boost it sells an extended range option that goes up to fourteen miles for a thousand dollars they're the smallest and cheapest boards boostin has ever made but they offer so much what I love about the big boards the durability the app the ease and speed of the ride in a smaller package that's hundreds of dollars cheaper one of the only drawbacks about the boost of mini is the ride comfort everything feels like it rattles around a bit more because of the smaller wheels stiffer deck and the shorter wheelbase this just ultimately means you have to be a lot more careful on the mini with bumps and cracks in the road while it might be able to match the boosted Plus on range when you have the extended range option I didn't necessarily want to ride it on the same kinds of commutes that I was doing with the longboard because you just have to be way more careful so if you want the quality of the boosted longboard experience but in something that is cheaper and definitely easier to carry around the mini is basically better than any other electric short board out there or let's put it another way boosted isn't the only company around making electric skateboards but based on our experience they're definitely the farthest ahead one of the only other startups to generate as much buzz about their electric skateboards as boosted is a company called inboard and their m1 skateboard is really the next best option out there at $1,000 it's cheaper than the boosted plus but it only has a seven mile range what's cool about the m1 though is that easily swap oval batteries and inboard cells spares for $200 a pop so you can effectively double or triple your range depending on how much you want to spend the m1 has a stiff neck like the boosted mini though it's almost as long as the boosted plus I actually like the flexible boosted deck better but the m1 is pretty smooth and some people prefer the stiffer deck especially at higher speeds it also has motors integrated into the wheels which means you probably won't have to worry about maintenance on things like belts as much and it means the m1 actually coasts pretty smoothly two inboard does a lot of little things right - they have a really good app that shows you stats and helps you update the board's firmware it has a pretty good remote not as good as boosted's but still one of the better ones out there and there's also tail lights and headlights on the board which is good because it just helps you stay noticed on the street overall it's a really impressive first try from what's still relatively new company and it's not a bad option in place of what boosted things one of the few boards that actually matches the boosted and the inboard on performance right now is the actin blink Quattro it uses motors in all four wheels for a top speed of 23 miles an hour and it has a range of 22 miles but the Quattro is a nightmarish product first off the braking is just really bad there's basically no way not to stop suddenly which is basically a safety hazard it weighs 25 pounds which means it's the worst to carry around the remote is really bad and it cost $1,700 Acton's made a name for itself making some weird electric right Able's and even a smaller electric skateboard before but the Quattro is just nowhere near the quality of these other boards that we've been talking about there are a lot of other options for Electric skateboards and long boards on the market now there's modular versions there's off-road versions there's some with really crazy range but the problem is a lot of them are still really expensive and also a lot of them are just kind of junk the truth is there's still no great and cheap option here so if you want to make sure your money goes the furthest with great range impressive reliability and awesome performance there's nothing that beats what boosted has to offer hey thanks for watching I knew there are a lot of other Electric skateboards out there so let us know in the comments which one you like the best and make sure that you subscribe to the new verge science youtube channel by phil