Do Four E-Scooters Make a Car? Someone Found Out

This guy's buddy broke his wrist on a Lime scooter, so he came up with a questionable solution.

17:30

Janaki Jitchotvisut

By: Janaki Jitchotvisut

Jun 13, 2024 at 10:43am ET

Add RideApart as a preferred source in Google

Comment

Hurting yourself is one thing, but in some ways, it sucks even more watching your friend get hurt, doesn't it? Or anyone you care about, really. For most people, we can take a little pain ourselves and deal with it, but we hate seeing people we care about suffer.

So, what do you do if your buddy breaks their wrist riding a Lime e-scooter?

If you're YouTuber Michael Reeves, you do the only sensible thing you can think of, of course. You take a Lime scooter, then add three more Lime scooters, and you make what's possibly the world's sketchiest wooden platform and chair combination to bring the four scooters together like the jankiest car you've ever seen.

And then you add an Arduino, some code, and some controllers you make by hand to simultaneously activate the thumb throttles on all four Limes at once. Eventually, you also think to add a little bit of braking capability, since even the sketchiest of sketchtastic electric vehicles will probably need to stop at some point (ideally, before you crash it into your truck again).

When initial testing doesn't yield quite the results you'd hoped, you don't quit. Instead, you learn from your mistakes, and you utilize some welding skills to re-make the frame out of steel instead of wood. It's less likely to break that way (at least, provided your welding skills are up to the task).

You also go on Facebook Marketplace and buy a lathe so you can make some custom bearings, because that's just how committed to the bit you are. What a friend!

How does your buddy like the 'cool' new scooter car you've made them? There's only one way to find out, and it's obviously not simply loading the thing into the bed of your pickup truck and hauling it over to their house across Los Angeles to see.

What do you think?

View

Comments

No, no, of course not. It's driving the thing there on public roads, including a stop to switch out one of the Limes for a fresh Lime when the first one runs out of juice! As you do.

If there's any major city for this kind of shenanigans, it's probably LA. How does the whole experiment end up, and does Reeves' friend like it? The only way to find out is to watch.