Sunra Robo-S: My Review

The Sunra Robo-S is an L3e electric scooter (so 125cc give or take) that has two 72v 20ah batteries and a 3kw engine and while this sounds good on paper, is it any good?

Table of Contents

1. Delivery
2. Building
3. Charging
4. Ride Test
5. The Range Test … oh, flip
6. The Range Test
7. One Month Usage
8. Final thoughts
9. One Year Later

The scooter itself looks lovely and is essential with the features it has and there are a few things I do dislike about it (which will be covered in my riding review) but first I am going to talk about the range. The creators of the scooter claim it will be able to do 80 miles so assuming that for both batteries it should be able to do 40 miles on a single battery so let’s check the maths.

Assuming the engine is used 100% of the time, the scooter will be using 42A (rounded up to the whole number) we will get 28 mins of full usage per battery and seeing it can do 50mph this means at full power you should be able to get 23.33(3) miles. It is worth saying that as with my electric bike, this is purely based on full power at max usage and real-life riding will vary.

With max power at 100% usage being able to get 23 miles is about half of what the battery claims to be able to do although I am going to assume (and will test this based on my weight) that if it is being used in low power mode it will be much closer to this range.

So with both batteries, I am expecting to get at the bare minimum to be able to get 46 miles and I will be doing the same route in my electric bike test to see how well this scooter works as a commuter before giving it to my brother.

Delivery

With £3443.50 now burning out of my pocket I have placed the order for the electric scooter and just waiting for delivery. The company I ordered it from was Green-moped.com and the person I spoke to over email during the process of deciding which scooter to buy was polite, friendly and seemed to know his stuff.

Building

When I read online about this bike people said I would have to put it together but it came together ready to ride and even had a fully charged battery. I can’t debate the service there!

Charging

There is one thing I do not like about this scooter and that is charging it. The first method of charging the scooter is to just plug the power cord into the base of the scooter and it will charge the batteries in roughly four to six hours this is fine if you can charge it outside.

If you are like me and prefer charging the batteries indoors this is where you will have a bad experience. Removing the batteries is pretty simple and involves just learning the combo or using the remote but the charger will only charge one battery at a time. For a scooter model that comes with two batteries by default, you would assume the charger would have a spitter but alas this isn’t the case and buying another charger is around £100.

Ride Test

With the above said I think it is time we spoke about riding it. The scooter rode quite well and was a pleasure much like any electric vehicle you will need to get used to the throttle as it will feel different to a petrol bike but having ridden electric ones for ages is something I was already used to.

The test route I took was the same one I used with the Shengmilo MX025.

I left my house with roughly 92% charge (I didn’t charge the battery before leaving) and after going the route which was approximately 20 miles I had 58% left on the batteries and was mostly in the second power mode.

I imagine it will do this trip twice and possibly even more in low-power mode. I figured I would try as well, and remember I am about 150kg, it had no issues pulling itself up the annoying hill I hate using my electric bike with.

Riding wise it was smooth and not much different to riding an average scooter. I could see myself riding one of these as a daily driver long after I find it hard to get onto a motorbike which is kind of the same reason I was to switch over to a step-through frame when my current bike needs major repairs.

The Range Test … oh, flip

On the day before I decided to do the range test, my brother and I went to McDonald’s and on the way back he suddenly wasn’t able to throttle anymore something odd happened to the scooter what he did he wasn’t able to go forward. We tried turning the bike off, power cycling and much more. It is worth saying that at this point the scooter has been ridden about 42 miles!

Do you notice that red icon? That appeared and the speed kept flashing and it seemed, somehow, it seems cruise control was enabled. Looking at the manual there is a cruise control option that happens by pressing a button which doesn’t exist on this model.

Contacting SunRa recommended checking to see if the throttle cable was disconnected and after taking the scooter apart, we found the cable was disconnected. It is weird how it suddenly just turned on.

Sadly this wasn’t the issue and SunRa looked into it further and was able to recreate the issue. The kind bloke emailed me a list of things to try and none of them worked. Ultimately SunRa UK looked into it and they discovered it was a controller issue. I was sent a replacement but due to some issues on my side they came out and replaced it (plus two power connectors as they had some reports) and it buzzed to life!

The Range Test

With the issue now fixed I took the scooter onto a test drive into Stamford and back (26.8 miles) and getting there I had about 70% using the first power mode but upon returning I had about 15% using the second power mode to keep up with traffic.

For the second ride, I decided to just use the first power mode there and back and it was roughly 30%. Make from it what you will but the range for myself is enough to get to Stamford and back and a short detour if needed; although this is a matter of my weight and the hills.

One Month Usage

With all that said, here is my feedback on using it for a month. For the route, I was taking the bike and with it starting to get cold, the scooter was able to get there and back with roughly 20-30% left and that is with using it in P1 with switching it to P2 for one dangerous part of the road.

I imagine a lot of this is due to my weight as there are a few hills where I have issues cycling up so I am assuming the scooter as well has to use the full power of the scooter to do so. It will be interesting to see the results with my brother or myself in the year to come when I have hopefully lost a lot of weight.

Final thoughts

There are a few features the scooter comes with such as a fingerprint scanner and a reverse gear but honestly, they are both useless. The fingerprint scanner does let you start the scooter up but you are unable to remove the steering lock with it which means you need the keys anyway.

Like most motorbikes, I hate the default mirrors. You can not see it in the pictures above as it was taken beforehand but I added mirror extenders as I like looking behind me and not just at my lovely arms.

The range is something that I will always dislike about electric modes of transport and this scooter isn’t any different. It is wonderful if you only need to go a short way or if you can charge it somewhere but the range isn’t that great if you need to go far.

One thing I will comment on that I find missing (although I imagine there is a reason for this), is there is no chain. As there is no chain it means for it to go faster the motor has to spin faster which uses more power. I can’t help but assume if it used a chain it would handle the power usage. With that said the hardware does work out to be cheaper as the scooter is just a motor, controller, batteries, display unit and a bit extra which makes it more likely to not mess up.

When it comes to charging the scooter I found it was far better to just install an outdoor plug and I did this by buying this from Amazon (Outdoor Socket) and using the hole where the TV aerial comes in and connecting it up to a socket inside. Speaking about charging the battery I do still wish it came with a spitter cable but I also wish it came with a type 2 EV connector so I could connect it right to an EV charge point.

Overall I found the scooter easy to ride but for my weight, I had to stick in power mode 1 which limited it to 30mph to get as much power as possible. I am currently debating about buying the Sunra Miku Super for myself as I do think my motorbike will need replacing soon and while I would buy another one for myself I just hate scooters.

Would I recommend one? Yes. If you ain’t as heavy as me and will only be using it to go around thirty miles it is a wonderful machine. Motorbikes do find it hard to have a longer range but who knows with solid-state batteries being something that could be released one day.

One Year Later

It has been a year now and I have another update for the scooter. My brother has been using it without any problems although it has been making a weird noise that doesn’t seem to affect anything but the Sunra Robo-S had a fatal issue that nearly got me killed. I was using the scooter on the A1 and suddenly the scooter slowed down and was barely giving any power like how it works when the battery is very low. Thankfully it was late in the evening and I was able to get onto the slip road visually having a look at the scooter I couldn’t find anything wrong with it. I rode it back home on the back roads going 5mph (apologies to the people pissed off behind me!) and locked it up for the night.

The next day I had a look at the scooter and I noticed the isolator switch was turned off. I thought nothing of it and I used the scooter again to do this yearly update and the same happened when I was going up a hill. I pulled over and found the switch has turned off and I have noticed the switch is very loose and it is likely vibrations are flicking the switch. I am going to replace the isolator switch (or bypass it) which should fix the issue but I wouldn’t recommend this bike anymore – more so when Sunra has pulled out of the UK which I assume is related to the United Kingdom pulling out of the EU.

As you can see from the image above the isolator switch is being held by strong tape and I am pleased to say the scooter is working. This confirms the issue and replacing the isolator switch fixes the issue which I did by ordering a replacement part on Amazon. It is possible there won’t be another update until it is time to get its MOT but I still wouldn’t trust this scooter.