How can I make my electric scooter go faster

bigdummy

I have a 400W electric scooter and it's just too slow. It uses a 400W, 20Ah motor. So I have a few questions:

What is the easiest way to make this thing go faster without changing the controller?

Will I burn the motor out with a 36V battery pack (the pack is 3 twelve volt, twelve amp cells hooled up on paralell--does that make is a 36amp cell?)

Will the increased voltage increase the RPMs of the motor?

I am trying to do this on the cheap, which means changing as little as possible. I have two of these 36V batteries and a charger, so ideally I would like to be able to solve my problem just by using them. Will it work? Or will I thrash the motor to pieces overnight?

Cliff_J

Bad idea, you're likely to burn out the controller if you apply too high a voltage.

And if your batteries are in parallel then you have increased the current capacity - in other words longevity - not voltage. In series you gain voltage but the capacity remains the same as the weakest cell in the series.

To find a cheap solution, the first thing to establish is if the motor controller allows for a full duty cycle (assuming its a PWM) and/or if it automatically speed limits based on back-EMF. If this were the case, then a simple high-current relay bypassing the controller would allow you to increase the speed for cheap with the existing battery system. The relay by itslef would last a decent while before the inductive kick-back would pit the contacts too much, and you could add a flyback diode to prevent that too.

Otherwise, to go faster you'd need more voltage AND current - in essence more power. And likely a larger controller to handle that, and better cooling for the motor that may need brushes replaced more often and so on.

Danger

You could also, of course, swap the whole drive system from a more powerful bike—motor, batteries, the works. The advantage to that is that everything will already be compatible.