Electric Scooter Now Legal(?) in Germany

As major U.S. cities are inundated with shared electric scooters, Germany lags behind in this “innovation.” There, any small electric vehicle capable of operating at over 6 kilometers (3.7 miles) per hour is illegal for road use, and while one could debate this type of restriction’s merit, YouTuber bitluni decided to take matters into his own hands and built a scooter with a 250W hub motor and LiPo batteries.

While this did work — as seen being tested in the first video around 8:00 — bitluni did want to make his device street legal. While a purely electrical vehicle of this type is verboten, assistive electrical motors of up to 250W for bicycles are OK. So to emulate this assistive action, his scooter was modified to sense kicks on the ground and engages the assistive motor to “help out” instead of using a direct throttle.

Kick sensing is taken care of via an accelerometer, along with an Arduino Micro sends PWM signals to the controller for speed regulation. A brake assembly is added, which can be tapped three times to start and cuts off the scooter when pressed. It also stops when tilted, and is wired in such a way that if there is a problem with the brake wiring, the motor disengages.

It’s a clever design, that will hopefully keep bitluni on the right side of the law — or at least close enough not to invite scrutiny!