Landwheel L3-X Reviews

Thanks brotha!

Yes, the blue sticker of certification is there, I got it from landwheel to test it and reviewed. The range I can do is around 2km full specs and after that just cuttings all the time. 85kg + gear 90Ā±2 Now Iā€™m riding in cold temperatures, but Iā€™m starting with warm the batteries from home. Anyway after the 2 initial km It goes warmer from under the batteries and the batteries where is the esc, but I believe thatā€™s normal. How about the urethane of the wheels? Riding in Amsterdam is amazing because everywhere is bike path, really smooth.

I got 2 km range in canada at -6 degrees celcius. I too started with warm batteries. I weigh 225 lbs. Your riding weight is 200 lbs. So our cold weather range is similar.

With the same batteries I got 5 miles (8 km) in Florida on a really rough sidewalk route with stop and go every intersection. Temperature was cool for Florida, not more than 22 degrees celcius.

Andrew Penman got 7 miles (13 km) on a single battery in Australia on a continuous route and even warmer temperatures (perhaps 27 degrees Iā€™d guess).

Iā€™d put 99% odds that your 2km range is entirely due to temperature.

Thanks, I will try some of your ideas and report back. Please how about the cracks on the urethane wheels?

When I first saw your picture of the Urethane wheels I was puzzled becasue I thought mine had no such cracking. I was ready to blame your cold weather in Amsterdam.

But I took a closer look at my wheels and If I tugged on the edges, I could see the cracks forming. The good news is that I have a fix that will correct the existing cracks and should prevent this type of damage in the future.

The same fix is something Landwheel should be able to implement on the production line so that the products donā€™t need to be modified after shipping. See my next post for details

Yeah mine looks pretty much like this, except a few more chunks out of it

Actually iā€™m holding in doing the review, because itā€™s a cool drive and I see itā€™s nice concept about make you skate to an e-board in 10 minutes, but this things should fixed before recommend to some nobies

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This is a permanent fix for cracking urethane at the edges of the motor wheels and a temporary fix for the problem of screw posts and battery latches breaking.

Thanks to other landwheel owners who have been looking at these issues with me in our private forum. Contributors include @Mikenopolis @Technotron @DevoCut @rhinoinflight @jaysleezzyy and others.

Also thanks to @Surfer and @ShutterShock for escalating the Urethane cracks on the edges in the Landwheel review group. I did not actually notice any cracks on my wheels until I went looking for them.

The following video shows how to fix any cracks that have formed and prevent them from propagating. The same fix will likely prevent all future cracking at the edges.

There is also a fool proof temporary fix to prevent any form of shell failure at the screws or battery latch.

I also discuss the root cause of the screw failure to point out that minor changes to the mold can correct the current deficiencies. I supect the fix will be drilling out the mold to create large well supported posts and to implement either metal inserts or some other form of metal re-inforcement to transfer load.

I expect landwheel will be responding to correspondence from the beta testers shortly after the 2 week Chinese national holidays end on the 26th.

It is very important to note that the urethane fix involves some sanding that creates a lot of dust. Any kind of dust can be very bad for your lungs immediately and can be lethal much later in life. Please wear an air tight dust mask with proper filters and preferably perform the sanding outside.

Please watch the video for details.

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Outstanding work & video; thank you, guys.

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Great work, thank you!!!

Humor:

Pomela board review index 9:20

ā€œdonā€™t hit the brake at high speed which may cause injuryā€

Not so funny:

ā€œGreat board for your kids, just make sure they wear a helment becasue the brakes may throw them offā€

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I really appreciate the depth of which you guys have tested this. Unlike many of the new esk8 companies out there, I respect Landhweel for diving head first into the opinions of the DIY scene. This is opposite of what Iā€™ve seen Evolve do. This makes this a very interesting product for me to review. Iā€™ve actually received many offers to do reviews on Chinese companies & new kickstarters. However, Iā€™ve recently decided to hold back on reviewing those type of vendors as the quality control of products, with the boom of esk8s in the scene, has been lack thereof. Iā€™m happy that I can review this product with the preface that Landwheel takes the customers opinions seriously.

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Just to clarify. I do not work for Landwheel. But it is true that myself and the other customers who interact closely with landwheel as a volunteer beta test team have been taken very seriously and every one of our recommendations over the past two years has been addressed and resolved. So yes. They are very customer driven. Myself and the other testers are very confident that these remaining issues will be fixed on the production line and that corrective parts will be sent to the existing customers. Landwheel has been very consistent about doing this in the past.

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For sure, I know youā€™re not employed by them. Just an enthusiast with the desire for a good product! That to me is admirable from both the perspective of the company and tester. The only electric drive vendors Iā€™m familiar with are Landhweel, Mellow, and Onan. I havenā€™t found much history on Landhweel. May I ask how long you all have been testing with them? Itā€™s good to know the face behind the company and Jason has been very responsive. Iā€™ve also noticed in recent weeks another company that has a clone/white label of Landwheelā€™s L3-X. I believe they go by Revel Boards.

Thereā€™s also the brand I hate which is Psykoboard. I kept telling everyone on their social media post that they are just rebranding Landwheels (the failing versions). they constantly state that they designed and engineered the things and that itā€™s 100% Italian made which is why itā€™s betterā€¦also their deck looks stupid and thick for no apparent reason.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1256291290/psykoboard-electric-double-skateboard-psykoboard/description

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HAHAHA, I always thought the psykoboard look stupid too! Well, the reason I ask is that I want to give credit where credit is due. I have nothing against Chinese companies. If anything, vendors there are at an advantage because most of the manufacturing in the world is done in China! However, I am against crap companies that have very little quality control. It looks like Landwheel has been taking a beating for the end result to be a good product. Itā€™s annoying that a company like Revel Boards would just take the credit and pretend theyā€™ve been doing all the work. :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

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Zero dollars raised by zero donors so it looks like Mike and Neilā€™s opinions are shared by everyone else who has looked at it.

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As for Revel Boards, I suspect this company may have recently brought in a large shipment into the US via shipping container to streamline the transportation cost. Rebranding may have been part of the deal.

So customers would get an L3-x. Price, branding and local stock would be the differentiatior. Thatā€™s what I suspect. I found the link. Iā€™m not promoting it. This is just what I found when I searched for revel boards.

Edit: I took a second look at their web site. They did put together a decent north-american grade web site that makes it easy to order accessories, pay by credit card etc. They do have a california address and phone number. So they may have been wise to re-brand so that they do not end up supporting customers who purchase landwheels else where.

They do keep local stock and ship in 2 business days. So given the choice of purchasing from an amazon store front and this re-branding, the Revel may have some advantages. I suppose it depends on thier customer support.

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Youā€™re possibly right!

Many of the original beta testers ordered their V1 and V2 units from Landwheel prior to July 2016. Individually we communicated through the Landwheel sales representatives the things that we observed were not working. Progress was initially hard to see.

We beta testers came together as a group about a year later in July 2017. Up until then, Landwheel had sent out many replacements but the improvements were not resulting in a safe or reliable product. Consequently the companyā€™s image was getting beat-up pretty badly in the forums ā€” despite what seemed to be a genuine intention to satisfy customers.

The original six beta testers agreed that we wanted Landwheel to succeed both because we wanted working products for ourselves and because the people that we had interacted with at Landwheel seemed so dedicated towards satisfaction.

We estimated that the Landwheel drives worked well on the factory floor with light Chinese riders at relatively slow speeds. On real roads at higher speeds with heavier riders, the drives did not function well.

We felt that a team of testers was needed to test on long challenging rides, and to provide feedback. We agreed this might be the only way the many product flaws were going to get resolved.

We also wanted to communicate with the top level of the Landwheel company because we suspected that culturally, Chinese workers were likely not going to be comfortable presenting the very harsh criticism of customers to their bosses. Also, we wanted to craft the communication with Landwheel to be very respectful and to remove the harsh negativity that typically erupts on public forums when customers donā€™t get what they expected.

We reached the owner of the company and proposed to be a small volunteer test group and suggested that new versions be sent only to our group until we as a team agreed that the products were safe and durable. We also proposed to reduce the number of replacements to help control costs. So when a new version was ready, it was sent out to a subset of the test team, not everyone. We also proposed that new units not be sold until the Beta test team felt the product was safe.

Finally, we moved our conversation from the public forums to the private forums so that the discussion of the product flaws and risks could help Landwheel ā€“ without simultaneously bringing about the public disassembly of their brand and reputation.

The original six members were very experienced electric longboarders and DIY builders. Several had expert level experience with Lithium batteries, and BMS design. We each brought some level of testing and diagnostics experience. Most of us were from the software industry and understood the value of scientific methods, experimentation and documenting results.

Some of the major items that Landwheel redesigned based on our feedback included increasing battery capacity, redesigning the ESC to throttle back acceleration to keep the battery above critical voltage and the incorporation of electric locomotive grade braking algorithms into the ESC logic.

Landwheel also redesigned the battery BMS, upgraded the urethane and increased the diameter of the wheels based on recommendations from the beta test team. This is just a short list.

The beta test team was comprised of riders of a variety of different weights. This was a critical success factor as it exposed how brakes could function safely for a rider of one weight and completely unsafely for riders of a different weight.

In this area, I believe Landwheel gained a huge advantage over their Chinese counter parts and even over some of the prestige brands.

Today, when I see video reviews of other Chinese boards, I hear comments from some reviewers saying the brakes on board ABC are ā€œgreatā€ while other reviewers are flying off the front of the same board.

Even some of the top priced North American brands are having difficulty with downhill braking that can throw a rider on to the pavement or leave them without brakes. When I hear a reviewer say ā€œwhoah those brakes are powerfulā€ itā€™s a sign to me that people are going to get hurt.

The braking outcomes in the L3-x are spectacular and Landwheel might actually lead on many dimensions of braking logic. Brakes are so important in my mind (as you may have gathered from my recent post on a Pomela YouTube review).

So few people who are reviewing electric skateboards understand that brakes that perform marginally poor for one rider can have catastrophic results for another riders of a different weight.

Similarly brakes that work well on a flat surface can perform in very unexpected ways on a downhill grade.

There is a huge difference between one youtuber test riding a board and giving it a thumbs up compared with a team of riders testing the same board.

Landwheel made many of their own improvements over and above the recommendations of the beta testers.

Between July 2017 and today, Landwheel sent the beta testers over 50 units to test.

The L3-x was the first version that we beta testers gave the thumbs up to. Our reactions were universally positive to the first low volume run of L3-x. Most beta testers owned multiple boards and the L3-x became the favorite ride for most of us.

Three months later the beta testers continue to stress test the L3-x. This testing has produced some failures of the L3-x shell. We have directed a great deal of study discussion and experimentation to this flaw and feel we have put together a menu of viable re-engineering ideas to Landwheel. It will be up to Landwheel to translate these into changes to the product and production line (as they have done many times in the past).

To date, the Beta testers have exchanged 1200 posts with each other. The initial 6 members have now grown to 14. The new members have been invited based on posts that show up in the public forums.

When a customer posts about a problem that seems new, the beta testers draw them in to the private forum to gather more details, pictures and testing input. In this way, the testing and analysis reaches beyond the numbers and miles logged within the beta testers.

So, thatā€™s the history of the beta testers. The journey for the testers and for Landwheel has been long and interesting with some pretty amazing results. The beta testers have done most of their work out of the public eye, for reasons that I described above.

However, you are correct. Companies that have a solid beta test program end up producing much better, safer and reliable products than those who do not. So the quiet background efforts of the beta testers are indeed a very valuable ingredient to consider before recommending a product.

Also, as you say, a company that embraces its customerā€™s feedback in this way is worthy of recognition and trust for having done so.

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