Electric Skateboard UX: Backfire Ranger X2 Review
Summary: The Backfire Ranger X2 is a strong contender in the casual all-terrain skateboard space, with enough power and a simple rock-solid design. It does however feel early-stage, and points toward much more advanced, useful, safe, and unified electric personal transport devices in the future.
THE BOARD
The board itself is reasonably heavy (23 lbs), and is a bit longer than some AT boards at 43". The 6.5" wheels seem a little oversized at first, but after going over a few massive sidewalk cracks they seem about right. The board comes with a front light (assembly required) and you can purchase a rear light (assembly required.) The remote is an R2 wireless remote which you use to accelerate, brake, change speed modes and check battery life.
CUSTOMIZATIONS
After confirming the board could actually go up the hills around my house I rapidly discovered a bunch of things missing. This resulted in a lot of brainstorming, trying random objects lying around in my garage, and ordering specialized products off of Amazon. In addition to the two lights I purchased from Backfire, I found that a simple tarp tie-down works quite well as a lightweight pull handle for the board (see video at bottom). It also became clear that if you picked up the board while heading to work, you would sandpaper the side of your dress shirt, or get yourself dirty, depending on the side you chose. Consequently I purchased a strap-on handle originally designed for a different kind of hover-board. One problem remained, which was locking the wheels during transport so that it doesn’t ricochet around the inside of a car or train carraige. My current solution is a heavy duty wire tie.
Product links:
Pull Handle: Dreamtop 25 x Ball Bungee Canopy Tarp Tie Down Cord Heavy Duty for Marquees Gazebos Tent https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01F8KWX8S/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_tai_QgkjEbCKQW434
Carry Handle: Shangyuan Self-Balancing Scooter Carrying Handle with Adjustable Strap — Adjustable Carrier Strap Handle Carrier for Hoverboard Drifting Board — Skateboard Hoverboard Accessories (Currently not available) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07H5SKG5F/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_tai_eekjEbT26K1HE
Wheel Lock: Nite Ize Original Gear Tie, Reusable Rubber Twist Tie, 32-Inch, Bright Orange, 2 Pack, Made in the USA https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0051BH0EM/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_tai_xlkjEbKDF81T7
PROBLEMS AND USE CASES
Transporting Your Board
As noted above, this board does not make it easy for you to transport it. There is no built-in handle in the board itself. Furthermore, there is no easy way to grab onto the board at all, unless you want to embrace dirt and sandpaper as your close personal friend. Towing it behind you has the same problem as the truck is dirty. Additionally, once you set it somewhere, it will roll away at the first opportunity. There are many different potential design solutions to these issues — handles built into the deck, a mounted handle on the front, a wheel-lock button built into the truck, lock the wheels when not powered on — but no attempt seems to have been made to solve these use cases.
Lighting Your Way
It is nice that Backfire offers some compatible lights which are built like a tank and seem like solid value. However, you have to disassemble the trucks from the board to mount either of them, which seems completely unnecessary. How hard would it be to pre-install universal mounts on the front and back and then simple slide the lights in? Additionally, the light feels like it was designed without storage or carrying use-cases in mind. In particular, the light slides out when pushed hard forwards, which incidentially is the same motion you make when trying to tow the board behind you by grabbing on to the light. It should lock in securely and eject the opposite direction. Additionally the light turns on if the board is placed upside down — ironically, the only way to keep the board from rolling around inside a car is to place it upside down. The power button for the light should have been recessed to avoid this scenario. Early e-scooters and e-bikes made you mount external lights with separate charging systems. Later, more integrated and polished designs built the lights into the transport-device and used the central battery already available. It’s surprising skateboard companies are taking so long to see this trend.
Turning Around
Perhaps skateboards simply aren’t really designed to turn sharply, but that is old-fashioned thinking. Normal skateboards are light, and you can grab them and reposition your angles easily. Not so with an electric board with a heavy battery pack, so a different solution is needed. Also, we need to start thinking about smart-skateboards. Boards should be able to transform, adapt, and intelligently respond. In any case, the turning radius on the X2 is so bad that you need an entire street or parking lot to turn around in (it improves slightly at faster speeds). These skateboards are competing with electric scooters as last-mile transportation options, so they need to offer similar levels of mobility. Modern cars have adaptive steering, meaning that when you are in a parking lot the turning-ratio increases and you can do a tight u-turn. When the car gets to a high speed on a freeway, it decreases the turning-ratio so that your car doesn’t wander in its lane. In principle, there is no reason a skateboard couldn’t have adaptive steering.
Staying On Your Board
The Ranger X2 is actually pretty stable. It has a drop-deck that gives a little bit of incline on both the back and the front if you position yourself carefully. However, the parallels between an AT board and a snowboard are very strong. Higher-end offroad boards have already made the transition to using foot inserts or straps as a way to lock you into the board more securely. No one is going to be doing a 360 flip on a board this heavy, so there’s a lot of advantages to simply mounting the user’s feet to the board. This might be my next homemade modification to the board. Also, the board can get a bit wobbly at high speeds, which could be solved by the adaptive steering solution mentioned above.
Accelerating, Braking, and Re-Positioning
The R2 remote is not bad, and seems to have a solid WIFI-based connection to the board. This is important because if you lose the remote, you can’t brake, which could get you killed rapidly. However, getting into reverse takes an extra hand and an extra button press, and this could have been used as a rapid turn-around option if it was designed differently. Also, switching between eco and sport mode requires slowing the board, which is not ideal, and is not the way switching modes works in a car (for good reason.) There is also the issue that if you happen to drop the remote, you can’t stop the board. Other e-transport solutions don’t have this issue because they don’t require a remote — it’s something to think about, and it does have positive safety implications. Another issue is that the remote is very easy to lose. I’m not sure why, but I’ve misplaced or simply forgotten it several times in the first month of owning the board, and the board can’t be operated without it. Some boards are already playing with foot-mounted acceleration and braking controls, but this needs to be done carefully due to constant natural movement of the rider to stay balanced. One-Wheel should be proud of their single-object, unified design simplicity in this regard, but they have range and weight problems.
Charging Your Board
The board and the remote use different charging systems. The board plug is a weird three-prong proprietary plug, the other, thankfully, is USB-C. Both of these systems should be 100 W USB-C. Also the remote has a weird trait where it can’t handle full PD power, so if you plug in a normal USB-C to USB-C cable, it won’t charge. Instead you need a USB-A to USB-C cable. Thankfully you can use 3rd party cables that meet these requirements, but it means you need to carry an additional sub-standard cable. Since there is a large central battery in the board, the idea of having a charging slot for the remote in the board seems very feasible. This would enable simply plugging in the board and also having the remote fully-charged when you’re done. I currently have a “charging wall” set on a nightly timer, with an e-bike, e-skate, and helmets with lights. Collectively they consume 8 power cables of 4 different cable types— this needs to be more centralized and simple.
Hills, Range, Adverse Conditions
The Ranger X2 advertises being able to go up 30 degree hills, and from my experience this is pretty accurate. It is capable of going up quite steep urban sidewalks, although it is possible to reach its limit going up a steep dirt trail with bumps. 2400 W on each wheel, or all-wheel drive might be useful in future versions.
Range while in sport mode, on the flat, with a rider of about 150 lbs seems to be about 15 miles. This is not bad, but the board is capable of keeping up with bikes, and rides on the flat are often more towards 20 miles, so a little more range wouldn’t hurt. There is more space on the bottom of the deck for battery, and many of the pro offroad boards simply mount a large car battery on the top of the center of the deck. Going off curbs on the X2 can scrape the battery compartment, so moving the battery up between the legs on top actually makes some sense. You do not want to be on this board on a wet sidewalk, much less in the rain. There is no attempt at fenders on this machine and any water on the ground (or other things you might run over 💩) immediately get flung up on your pants and arms. For this reason, it’s hard to ride this board in the winter. A deck design that covered the wheels or simple lightweight plastic fenders would make a lot of sense for an AT board, and would make it more commuter friendly.
DISCUSSION
Building Your Own Hardware
Both Tesla and Apple have similar design philosphies on third-party hardware suppliers, and it is one of the reasons they are both leading their respective industries. Both companies try to bring everything in-house, from battery production, to seats, to touch-screens, to charging solutions. Smart tech companies have learned that cobbling together a bunch of third-party generic products doesn’t create a cohesive user experience. Hardware should be custom designed for the task at hand. When Tesla knew they wanted a large central-mounted touch screen, they literally couldn’t find one on the market because the suppliers had even though of that use case yet. Clearly the suppliers didn’t understand the use cases and weren’t innovating.
The Ranger X2 has a feeling of a board that is a bit cobbled together, and it doesn’t seem to be alone among skateboard manufacturers. E-skate manufacturers talk about having a “Customized Hobbywing remote” (third-party), “R2 remote” (presumably third-party), “Caliber trucks” (third-party), and “Sanyo batteries”. It seems that they may be designing their own decks, but everything else seems to be outside suppliers. This greatly reduces their ability to build a cohesive transportation design. Everything from the trucks, to the lights, to the remote, and the charging system should be custom-designed for the board. There may be some argument for standardization in remotes (so that you can switch between boards easily) but at least the charging system should be integrated.
Some Assembly Required
It may be that experienced skateboarders are used to pulling out the toolkit and unbolting trucks, replacing bearings, and the like. However, this is not true for a daily commuter who may have limited experience with a board, or someone that usually brings their bike to the bike store for maintenace. E-transport solutions should arrive in a finished state, with all major use cases accounted for (e.g. riding at night.) If install is required, it should be as simple as sliding something into a mount. More features should be directly integrated into the board and not even be perceivable as a separate product. In particular, there is really no excuse to not have lights fully integrated into every electric vehicle made.
Satisfying Necessary Use Cases For Daily Commuting and Urban Travel
As mentioned in detail above, there are a lot of use cases that simply appear to have not informed the design process at all. Carrying your board through a grocery store, or placing it on a cramped overhead rack in a subway, or walking down a long train platform, or placing your board under a bar stool, or charging your board and excessories with one plug, or commuting in the rain. It’s easy to come up with use cases that this board does not handle well, and the sad thing is that many of them have pretty easy solutions. E-skate companies would do well to look at a wider ranger of use cases and talk to their users about how they are trying to use the boards. AT boards in particular are rapidly going to see a lot of creativity in how they are typically used.
It’s pretty clear that a lot of e-skate companies (not just Backfire) are thinking like skateboard companies. They’re often owned by ex-skateboarders and probably have skateboarding engineers on staff. They need to start thinking like electronic personal-transport companies if they’re going to be part of the future. Skateboarding was just one method of having fun and getting around given the technology of the day. It used to be a toy for teenagers, but now 30 and 40 year-olds are riding them. The demographics have changed. E-skates are now being used for practical commutes, last-mile connections to the train, and far more scenarios than skateboards used to. A real e-skate should be less like a traditional skateboard and more like an electric unicycle. It should automate-away a bunch of the problems, integrate more technology directly, and be dead-simple to use. Currently there isn’t an e-skate on the market that meets these goals, but there’s no reason there couldn’t be.
The Future
Due to electrification, skateboards seem to be more popular now than ever. Mono-wheel solutions like the One-Wheel or the King Song are taking a much more creative approach to form factors, but they have their own usability problems. Having four wheels under you may make sense for a long to come (after all, you don’t see many mono-wheel cars) but the concept of a four-wheeled personal transport device really needs to evolve. The first cars were called ‘horseless-carriages’ because that was the frame of reference, and presumably they came without lights, a push-button start, enclosed cabins, or seatbelts. Skateboards of the future are likely to be rebranded as something along the lines of a ‘personal transporter’ and will come integrated with all the features necessary to get somewhere cleanly, safely, and easily.
