Tag: meepo

Today we’re looking at the Meepo Hurricane Ultra all-terrain electric skateboard. There are several things I really like about it, and one thing I really dislike.

Like the original Hurricane, the Hurricane Ultra is really powerful – more powerful than most people would ever need. But exactly what are the differences between the Hurricane and Hurricane Ultra?

Honestly, I was quite confused about this because the Hurricane Ultra is not exactly an upgrade. Some might even consider the new battery a slight downgrade.

I think the difference is that with the Hurricane Ultra, you have more options to choose from, such as different decks, trucks, drivetrains, and wheels.

I’ll talk about the configuration that Meepo sent me, and also the options that are available.

Deck

The Hurricane Ultra that I have uses a flexible bamboo deck. The other deck option is the stiff carbon fiber deck, which is the same deck that’s on the original Hurricane.

Which one is better comes down to personal preference, but the carbon fiber deck seems to be 200 to 300 dollars more expensive, depending on what the sale is like.

The carbon fiber deck is very strong, and the battery is protected inside an aluminum shell. So if you think there’s a good chance that a car will drive over your board, you might want to consider the carbon fiber version.

On the other hand, if you prefer a flexible deck for a more comfortable ride, like if you’re riding over cobblestone, get the bamboo version.

I was pretty happy with this deck. Most, but not all, other all-terrain bamboo decks have hardly any concave. There are pros and cons to that. With a more shallow concave, your feet don’t get as tired on longer rides.

But I personally prefer being able to feel the edges of the deck with my feet at all times, so I prefer the more pronounced concave of this deck.

I would consider the flex to be a medium flex. It does flex noticeably, but it wasn’t too bouncy for me like certain other boards.

The grip tape is really grippy. It took me a while to get used to it.

Trucks

The trucks on my Hurricane Ultra are all-terrain traditional kingpin trucks. They’re pretty similar to most other e-skate all-terrain TKP trucks on other brands.

Double kingpin trucks, like the ones on the original Hurricane, are still available as an option.

I prefer their TKP trucks, which are more stable at high speeds compared to DKP but sacrifice a little bit of turn radius at low speeds.

Wheels

The wheels on my Hurricane Ultra are the 165 mm tubeless tires.

First of all, these hubs look really cool. I think they’re the best-looking parts of this board.

These tires are really wide compared to most other e-skate pneumatics. They are 72 mm wide and have a relatively flat contact patch. Most others are about 50 mm with a rounded contact patch.

With this flat and wide contact patch, the grip is incredible as you would expect. But compared to a more rounded and narrow contact patch, you get less ride comfort and also less range. So be aware of the tradeoffs when choosing wheels.

The other stock options are the 175 by 50 mm tires, and the 165 by 65 mm racing tires.

If comfort is your priority, go for the 175 mm tires. These are also more affordable than the other two options.

I imagine the racing tires would perform similarly to the tubeless tires. They are less wide, but still very wide.

Motors

On my Hurricane Ultra, I have Meepo’s new gear drive, which uses the same motors as the original Hurricane.

I’ll basically just read to you what Meepo wrote about their gear drive versus belt drive on their website.

According to Meepo, with their gear drive you get more torque.

There’s something about an exclusive buffer protection that protects the gears. I don’t know what that is.

It’s maintenance- and trouble-free, according to the webpage. Is it really maintenance-free? Or is it low maintenance?

Less sliding resistance, more smooth acceleration. I’m not totally sure what that’s referring to, but it’s probably about how a board with gear drive supposedly has less rolling resistance compared to belt drive.

I gotta say though, it did not feel that way to me. Every time I let go of the throttle, I feel like I’m thrown forward a little bit.

That might be because of the really wide tires creating more resistance. I’m really not sure. Even if that’s the case, I thought the ESC is supposed to smooth out the deceleration.

But anyway, for most of us, I think belt drive is already very low maintenance and very high torque. Belt drive is also a lot more customizable.

My opinion at the moment is that the only people who should get gear drive are people who ride in situations where stuff is always getting inside their belt drive system.

With gear drive, the gears are protected inside a sealed housing. To me, that’s the main selling point of gear drive. It’s also the one thing that Meepo doesn’t mention on their webpage.

Battery

The new battery is 691Wh made up of Samsung 40T cells in a 12S4P configuration. That’s about 5% less Watt-hours than the original Hurricane, which used a 726Wh pack made of Molicel P42A cells, also in 12S4P.

Aside from the 5% smaller capacity, the bigger downgrade is that the original P42A cells supposedly perform better in extreme temperatures. However, Samsung 40T is still a highly reputable battery cell.

Nowadays I don’t actually read too much into the battery cell model, and I’ll explain why in a future video. The only reason I mention it here is because I made a big deal about how great the P42A was in my original Meepo Hurricane video.

Range

For the range, I got 31 km. I was about 79 kg with everything I was wearing. The weather was 8 ºC. And the tires were at about 30 psi.

As always, remember that many, many, many things affect range. Meepo’s website says 50 km, which is probably possible under the right conditions and with the right parts.

ESC

The speed controller of the Hurricane Ultra, the LY-FOC, is where I have very mixed feelings about this board.

In my Hurricane review, I said that the LY-FOC is getting pretty close to Hobbywing in terms of how smooth and intuitive the controls feel.

On my Hurricane Ultra, the board felt quite a bit more jerky to me, even in ride mode 3 out of 4. You can accelerate smoothly, but you have to be very gentle on the throttle compared to most other boards.

To be clear, this is not because powerful boards are naturally jerky. You can have a very powerful board with smooth and intuitive controls. You can also have a very weak board with jerky controls.

In this case, just like the Meepo Voyager, I feel like the ESC needs much better tuning.

And it’s not just the acceleration. As I said earlier, letting go of the throttle felt a little bit like braking.

The brakes actually feel totally fine – that’s different. It’s just that the board doesn’t coast as well as you would expect when letting go of the throttle.

Another quirk of this board is that the torque seems to really kick in at around 30 km/h. It’s like the mid-range torque felt stronger than the low-end torque. For people who like to ride at top speeds, maybe that’s a good thing.

For myself, my comfortable cruising speed is around 30 km/h, so I personally don’t like having so much torque there. But I’m also not sure if it was just the jerkiness affecting how I felt.

The jerkiness aside, I actually really like a couple of this ESC’s features.

I think push-to-turn-on is great.

Most other boards nowadays have some sort of standby or one-button turn-on feature, which is also great, but I feel like pushing the board to turn it on is at least a couple of seconds faster.

There’s another benefit of push-to-turn-on that I never thought about until I rode this board. At one point I think the board turned off by itself. But because the wheels were spinning, it turned itself back on right away.

I only know it turned off and on because I heard it beep, and also because the trip meter on the remote went back to zero.

Another feature I like is that the board can hold itself in place on a slope. Most boards actually cannot do this. Not having this feature is not a deal breaker at all – you just have to put down your foot – but it’s also very nice to have.

Who it’s for

The Hurricane Ultra comes with different part options for lots of different configurations.

If you frequently go off-roading, I suggest you get the bamboo deck with gear drive and the 17 5mm tires. DKP and TKP trucks are equally fine here.

If you want a board for racing or just riding very aggressively on asphalt, I suggest you get the carbon fiber deck and TKP trucks for better control. And for the wheels, get either the tubeless tires or the racing tires for extra grip. Gear drive and belt drive are both fine. With belt drive you’ll be able to change pulleys and use smaller wheels. With gear drive, you don’t have to replace belts.

If you want a board for just casually cruising around and carving, I would get the bamboo deck for more comfort. Either type of trucks are fine, but I personally prefer the TKP over the DKP. For casual riding, I don’t think you should waste the board’s energy with the wide contact patch wheels, so go for the 175 mm wheels. And go for belt drive so that you have more aftermarket wheel options.

And of course you can mix and match however you want depending on your own use case.

This board is of course not for people who want portability. My configuration, for example, with the bamboo deck, gear drive, TKP trucks, and the tubeless tires, weighs just over 17 kg. For context, that’s close to the weight of two Meepo Shuffles.

After I finished my range test on the Hurricane Ultra, I was really happy that I could go back to riding a different board. Because the Hurricane Ultra is not for people who care a lot about having a smooth and intuitive feeling throttle control.

I don’t want to make it sound worse than it is. If this is your only board, don’t worry about it. You’re probably used to it already. And the jerkiness is not nearly as bad as Meepo boards from 2017.

But at the same time, I haven’t been on another board in this category that felt this jerky.

So overall, pretty much everything on the Hurricane Ultra was great except for the jerky controls.

In my last video, I told you why I feel the Meepo Hurricane is a landmark product for Meepo Board and how it out-specs many of its competitors, such as the Evolve Hadean.

Now let’s get into the detailed review.

Electronics

Like I said in the previous video, the Meepo Hurricane uses a 12S4P 726Wh battery pack made up of Molicel P42A cells – the best battery cells for electric skateboards today. There are other battery cells that are arguably “good enough,” but it certainly doesn’t hurt to use the best of the best – especially when it comes to the battery.

Because the battery capacity is so high, I decided to split the range test into two rides. With the stock all-terrain wheels, in total, I got 42.8 km according to the Ride app, and 37.3 km according to Meepo’s remote.

The Ride app’s measurements are usually pretty close to what I get on other devices, so I’m going to go with that number. I think the Meepo’s number was a bit off.

I’d also like to point out that my e-skate range estimator’s calculation was really close to what I actually got. According to my estimator, if I were to use the stock 90mm wheels, I should get about 70 km of range under the same conditions.

In any case, remember that range can be affected by many different things, such as your weight, how you’re riding, road conditions, etc.

The Hurricane comes with a 50.4V 6.5A charger. Since the battery is 16.8Ah, this board should charge from empty to full in roughly 3 hours, which is faster than most of the competition.

The only drawback is that this is also the heaviest e-skate charger I’ve used.

The Hurricane uses huge 6374 motors from Dongxingwei. You may have seen the wattage rating jump around in Meepo’s marketing for the Hurricane. The reason they settled on the arguably outrageous claim of 3500W per motor is because of Evolve’s claim of 3000W per motor for the Hadean’s smaller and less powerful 6368 motors.

When it comes to motor ratings, just ignore those numbers. Different brands can show completely different wattages for the same exact motors. If you want to compare which motors are likely more powerful, find out their stator sizes instead.

The new LY-FOC is the smoothest Lingyi ESC that I’ve used. But is the control as smooth and accurate as the Hobbywing ESC? And the answer is: it’s really close.

Accelerating and braking both feel really smooth and intuitive. The only time I feel a little bit of jerkiness on the LY-FOC is when I’m riding at a constant cruising speed in mode 3 or 4, and I try to increase that speed by just a tiny bit. It ends up increasing the speed by a little more than I want, and in that specific situation, I feel the Hobbywing is more precise.

But in any case, they’re close enough that I don’t really have a preference for Hobbywing over Lingyi anymore. In fact, I might even prefer the LY-FOC for three reasons.

First, the smart turn on. The board turns on if you just push it a little bit. This is in my opinion better than the standby mode because the board turns on more quickly. With Hobbywing’s standby mode, you actually still have to wait a few seconds for the board to turn on. But on the Meepo, there’s no waiting around.

The second reason is that when you brake at a full stop on a slope, the board will actually stay still instead of slowly roll down the hill. This is something that all cars can do but not all electric skateboards can do this.

And the final reason is simply that the Hurricane’s LY-FOC can handle more current than any Hobbywing ESC that I’m aware of today. So for situations like climbing hills, the Hurricane is likely going to perform better than any 2WD board using Hobbywing.

One more Lingyi feature that some people might like is that you can change the brake strength on the remote, just like how you can change the speed mode.

As for speed, this board is very fast. Meepo claims a top speed of 35 mph, or 56 km/h.

The acceleration is incredibly strong, stronger than all the 2WD production boards from my uphill battle video back in April.

If this video has been helpful so far, hit the like button!

Skate Parts

Let’s now talk about the skate parts.

The deck is 100 cm long, 26.5 cm wide, and made of carbon fiber. It’s not some gimmicky chassis with more than half the deck being plastic. It’s all carbon fiber.

This deck is incredibly strong and should be suitable for any rider’s weight. In one of their tests, Meepo drove a car over this deck and it stayed in one piece. And the most expensive component, the battery, remained safely enclosed in its aluminum shell.

Like most other 2-in-1 all-terrain boards, this deck is a double drop, meaning the standing area is lower than the truck baseplates for more stability. The drop depth is a significant 2 cm, but the board still retains 8.5 cm of ground clearance with the stock all-terrain wheels.

The grip tape design has changed a few times during the prototyping process. The version I have now doesn’t use foam grip tape, but it’s still very rough and grippy. I also like that the grip tape covers the edges and drop areas, because some other carbon fiber boards leave those areas uncovered and slippery.

The deck uses these large anti-sink plates, borrowing from Metroboard’s design. And the rear plate can be customized with your preferred number when you order the board.

The trucks are your standard double kingpin trucks for electric skateboards, just like Evolve, Ownboard, Onsra, et cetera. According to Meepo, the stock bushings durometer are 110A. I don’t personally like the stock bushing setup but I do have an aftermarket setup that I like. I’ll put a link in the description.

The wheels come in two options: 155mm pneumatics, or the pneumatics plus a set of 90 by 60, 78A urethane wheels.

Originally Meepo was going to include 190mm pneumatics instead of 155, but when Kieran asked experienced riders what size they prefer, just about everybody including myself prefer the smaller size.

Smaller wheels are lighter, take up less space, and perform better on streets. If you want bigger wheels for extreme off-roading, none of the all-terrain boards with double kingpin trucks are ideal for that anyway. They’re capable, but far from ideal. These boards are more for street use, and the smaller pneumatics are just more practical.

Portability

According to my scale, this board is 15.1 kg, making it the heaviest board that I’ve tried so far from the 2-in-1 all-terrain category. The additional weight comes from a number of things, such as the stronger deck, the aluminum shell protecting the battery, the 48 cells instead of 36, and the extra large motors.

While the portability is about the same as any other board from the same category, I do notice that it’s heavier. It’s not a board that I want to pick up very often.

Heavier boards are probably going to be come the norm. As these boards become more robust and more powerful, they’re going to become heavier. If portability is a priority for you, you may want to look into other categories of boards.

Appearance

This is the best looking board that Meepo has ever made and a huge departure from Meepo’s previous all-terrain boards.

I’m guessing the squiggly lines were inspired by weather models, but my first thought was Pewdiepie which makes the design even better.

The anti-sink plates look nice. I like the anodized orange arrow.

Hurricane logo looks nice.

I mean nothing particular about the design really stands out, but that’s kind of a good thing also. It’s a really powerful board that doesn’t scream for attention. You won’t be asked about it with strangers every single time you’re at a red light.

Aftersale

The Hurricane comes with a 1-year warranty. Meepo has localized support in the US that carries replacement parts, offers repair services, and can accept returns for US customers with a restocking fee. The same services are now being setup in Spain to cover the EU. For everywhere else, Meepo continues to offer support out of China.

Who is it for

This board is for people who find the Evolve Hadean Carbon’s $2900 price tag to be ridiculous.

Although the Hurricane is Meepo’s most expensive board at about $1600, it’s actually a great value for what it offers.

But just like how the overpriced GTR isn’t the Atlas’s real competition, the Hurricane’s real competitors are all the other Hadean killers that are also available today or coming soon.

Each of them have their own pros and cons, so there isn’t one board that is definitively better than another in terms of specs.

I think Meepo’s biggest advantage is going to be its localized aftersale service. Meepo has had localized support in the US for some time now but they’re expanding on it by working with a larger 3rd party provider. As I said earlier, they’re setting this up in the EU as well.

Another set of people who may be interested in this board are DIY builders.

The Hurricane is a great candidate for putting in a larger VESC-based ESC for those who want to fine-tune the board’s performance. With the screws and ports taken into consideration, you should have room for a speed controller up to 143mm long, 85mm wide, and 25mm tall.

As for the rest of the electronics, the motors, battery, BMS, and charge port are all ready to give you a lot more power.

If you were to source your own parts and build this board from scratch, you would likely spend over $2000.

Final thoughts

I quite enjoy using the Hurricane and I’m glad to see a good mass production alternative to Hobbywing’s ESC.

While this isn’t the type of board that I personally would use on a regular basis, this board will probably come with me on many downhill longboarding trips to pull people up the hill. Its powerful motors, battery, and ESC happen to be very suitable for that type of stressful task.

The CESL event last month also gave me new appreciation for this type of board. I now have access to riding boards on a gokart track. It’s quite far, but I’ll probably get some people together to ride there at some point.

Anyway, if you want to get this board, save some money by using my discount code, DKHURRICANE. Or you can use the link in the description. Using my discount also helps support this channel.

And if you’d like your name to appear in the credits for future videos, find out how here.