This page will have real-world milage from a full charge of a Segway Max G3 electric scooter. As I add new entries, I will add notes about what modes and speeds the scooter was used in. This data is pulled from my Google Spreadsheet which you can also view for more details.
If you only see a few lines, you can scroll down to see the rest of the data.
If the above spreadsheet does not appear, you can view it directly in Google by this link:
This blog post serves as my “first impression” of the Segway Max G3 electric scooter. However, thoughts like this are meaningless if you don’t know the background of the person doing the thinking. Some “professional scooter reviewer” that goes through fifty scooters a year, spending maybe a week with each one, has a very different opinion on scooters than someone who spends years with the same model.
Likewise, folks who are used to $3000 scooters probably have very different views on $500 scooters.
In order to let you know if my thoughts even matter to you, here is a rundown of my “scooter background.”
2020: The Kugoo G5 made me a “scooter guy.”
In December 2020, I got my first electric scooter – a $799 Kugoo G5. This was a review unit I was sent, and as I wrote about at the time, it was dead on arrival. After some weeks, I was able to receive a replacement unit, and that one worked great. After a few weeks of getting used to riding it (I had never even ridden a skateboard, so the whole experience was new to me), it became my new favorite means of transportation. If I lived close enough to work to ride it there each day (weather permitting), I would have started doing that and been quite happy. It was a joy to ride.
I became a “scooter guy,” even though I had previously had zero interest in them, and thought they were dumb.
As you may notice by the awful reviews, I was not the only one that had a problem with the unit. Amazon even pulled the listing, and shut down the reviews. I was never able to post my review there.
The Kugoo G5 was a wonderful riding experience. It had 10″ air filled tires, and they were wider that I expected on a scooter. This made rides very smooth and it handled small bumps easily. It was also a very powerful scooter, able to speed up hills in my neighborhood without any struggles at all.
The Kugoo G5 was lacking in a few areas. First, the Kugoo app was crap. Every time I ran it, I had to search and find the scooter and connect to it. Since you had to use the app to “lock” the scooter (which was dumb since anyone could download the app and unlock it), I was constantly having to “disconnect and reconnect” when I went back to the scooter and wanted to unlock it.
Second, my unit started squeaking as I rode it and there was zero maintenance guides I could find anywhere about what I might do about it.
Third, while it did fold down, it was cumbersome to do that, and when you folded it, the front wheel went up so the base would rest awkwardly on the floor.
And fourth, it was heavy. It was a real pain to get up and down the steps to m apartment. If it was easier to fold down, I would have just done that and carried it, but since that was a pain, I ended up trying to lift/roll it up the steps. I sure wished I had a lighter scooter every time I did that.
But beyond those items, it really was a wonderful scooter — far beyond what I would have expected from a brand I’d never heard of. I routinely got around 45 miles on a charge, and never had any issues with it … until it broke. But more on that in a moment.
2023: The GoTrax Apex Max made me a dual-scooter guy
In 2023, I got a GoTrax Apex Max. At $399, it was half the cost of the Kugoo G5. I referred to it as my “toy scooter”. It had much less power, with much shorter range and a slower top speed. BUT, it was lighter, and I could easily pick it up and carry it without needing to fold it down.
However, it was so underpowered it could barely drive up my street. A slight incline would cause it to slow down to 7 mph. Had the hill been any longer, I would have been walking it.
BUT, it was a great “easy” scooter to use for running a few blocks away to pick up a TO GO order or whatever. I wouldn’t dare try to ride it anywhere else since I expect I would get stuck on a hill or just run out of battery.
It also had no way to “lock” it so I had to carry it when I entered a business, and would only park it when I could be on the other side of a window keeping an eye on it.
2025: The Kugoo kraps out.
When it warmed up enough to start riding the scooters again this year, I noticed my Kugoo handlebar was loose. It had a bit of wiggle that it never had before. As I rode it, I felt unsafe from that.
I tried to fix it by tightening some bolts at the base of the stem, but that didn’t help. Eventually, I resorted to disassembling everything I could down there to see if I could find something else to tighten.
I found this:
Yep, the stem broke. That was the “wiggle” I was feeling, and my feeling of being “unsafe” was well justified. The only thing holding it together was a plastic housing! Riding with that broken part could have ended badly.
I tried to contact the Amazon seller, but their account was no longer active. Searching to find the Kugoo website led me to a half-dozen or so different websites with variations like Kugoo Mobility, Kugoo USA, Kugoo EU, etc. I reached out to a few of them looking for a maintenance manual (before I had disassembled the stem), and then again trying to see if any replacement parts were available so I could repair it.
Silence.
Well, almost. One of them which sent me to a blog post that talks about airing up tires, and a confirmation that they had no parts.
At that point, I knew I wanted a replacement scooter and that it would not be a Kugoo. I wanted something from a company that supported their product and had spare parts available.
And I needed it “now” since I did not want to spend the next few months going down the rabbit hole of reading reviews, watching “review” videos, and hanging out in scooter forums asking questions.
Us humans (this is not an A.I. post, bleep bloop) have a tendency to try to find patterns in randomness. For example, when asked to pick a number between 1 and 10, a magician/mentalist will know that statistically humans are more likely to choose certain numbers. There is alot of “human nature” that makes us somewhat predictable.
In a deck of 52 playing cards, if you were asked to predict what card is on the top of a shuffled deck, you probably wouldn’t say Ace of Diamonds, but that card is just as likely to be there as any other. No matter which card you guess, you have a 1 in 52 chance of being correct.
Call it in the air…
When it comes to a coin toss, do you always call heads? Always tails? Or do you alternate?
When a gambling casino game presents a grid of squares and asks you to pick four squares, do you “randomly” pick various squares, or do you just click the first four on the top row?
If it is random, either should have the same outcome.
And don’t get me started on picking lottery numbers. While we do not often see the picked numbers be “1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6”, that sequence should be just as likely as any other.
If it is random.
So let’s play a game in BASIC with a coin toss. Heads or tails will be represented using CoCo’s Color Basic RND() command. Doing RND(2) will produce either a 1 or 2 result.
NOTE: This is not random. This is psuedo random. I have discussed this previously, but for the sake of this blog post we will pretend it truly is random.
Would calling heads every time produce a better result than calling tails? Or would randomly choosing heads or tails each flip be better?
Let’s try…
0 'COINFLIP.BAS
5 'POKE 65495,0
10 W1=0:W2=0
20 FOR A=1 TO 1000
30 V=RND(2)
40 IF V=1 THEN W1=W1+1
50 IF V=RND(2) THEN W2=W2+1
60 NEXT
70 PRINT "ALWAYS GUESSING 1:";W1
80 PRINT "GUESSING RAND 1-2:";W2
This program will “randomly” flip a coin 1000 times and count how many times it landed on heads (1) versus how many times it matched a randomly (1-2) chosen value. At the end, it will print the results:
As you can see, in this “random” test, neither method really proved to be that different. We could also alter the output to print how many times guessing tails (2) would have worked (1000 clips minus how many times it was heads, 511 in this example, so 489 if my math is correct).
But it still feels better thinking we have some “control” over things and guessing rather than always choosing the same guess.
Alphabetically speaking…
Let’s modify the program to select a random letter, A-Z (represented by 1-26). We will now always guess A, versus randomly guess a letter (1-26):
0 'COINFLP2.BAS 5 'POKE 65495,0 10 W1=0:W2=0 20 FORA=1TO1000 30 V=RND(26) 40 IF V=1 THEN W1=W1+1 50 IF V=RND(26) THEN W2=W2+1 60 NEXT 70 PRINT"ALWAYS GUESSING 1:";W1 80 PRINT"GUESSING RND 1-26:";W2
And here is what I get…
Maybe this perspective will help you “always choose tails” or “always guess Aces of Spades” in the future.
And speaking of the future, there is another “random” test I want to experiment with, coming soon.
