Difference between revisions of "Riding technique"

Pushback

The ‘pushback’ feature is designed to keep you riding at a safe speed. ‘Pushback’ gives riders tactile feedback by lifting the nose to signify that the board is traveling at it’s maximum speed. A key distinction here is that pushback is not an arbitrary speed limit which we have decided upon to hold you back, it’s actually the limit that the board can safely go. Pushback is function that is defined by a number of parameters including battery, grade of terrain, speed, etc.

It is really important to understand that you can defeat pushback if you continue to lean forward and accelerate. You are essentially asking the board to go faster than it can manage and, on one wheel, there is little power left to maintain balance and stability. In order to avoid a loss of control, make sure you ease up when you experience pushback and you’ll be good to go.

Once beyond pushback the board increasingly lacks the ability to help the rider balance front/back, and therefore that job becomes the rider's. Small shifts in weight (even from a slight bump) can easily send the nose into the ground. People keep saying that the motor is cutting out, but that is not what is happening, it is a sudden loss of balance beyond a tipping point that the motor cannot compensate for that feels as though the motor has cut out or shut off because the motor has mechanically lost the ability to apply any torque to help them balance.

It is also important to mention that even below the onset of pushback at low speeds it is still possible to lean forward too hard while accelerating too quickly and overwhelm the motor's ability to keep the board from nosediving. Again, this will feel as though the motor cuts out, but it doesn't. The motor has simply lost the ability to apply torque to simultaneously accelerate that fast and counteract the weight bearing down on the nose. Once you go beyond the tipping point, the nose drives straight into the ground.

Experienced riders alway keep their weight centered over the wheel or slightly back of the wheel and use the muscles in their forward leg to apply pressure to the nose. In doing this, they are often able to recover from a potential nose-dive by getting their weight back fast enough to recover and slow down. If the board truly cut-out as some suggest, they couldn't do this as the board would essentially be free-wheeling with no power to the wheel and they'd tail-slide uncontrollably once their weight went back.

By design, the only times the motor should simply shut off completely are when the battery has been drained to its limit (and severe pushback will try to warn you first), or if you are already at full charge while going down a hill and the regeneration is charging the battery beyond its limit.