Let's talk brakes

I had heard a lot of complaints about the brakes on the Surron LiteBee X before buying it. People on NewPipe were saying how they needed to be upgraded, but nobody said why.

front brakes

I decided to take my chances. Unlike other countries, there is exactly one company bringing these things into the country (and paying the 80% tax on them). So, beggars cannot be choosers. They must accept what they can get.

I have no complaints about the functionality of the brakes. They are slightly heavier than bicycle brakes and they do the job. I have never been unable to stop fast. There is also heavy regenerative braking which is on by default. I also took a chance on that being programmable before buying. The regen. slows the bike to a near stop while charging the battery at the same time. It works really well.

rear brakes

It was not until I turned off the regenerative braking that I noticed a problem.

I had wanted to be able to coast to the upcoming traffic light instead of applying power the whole way up to the line were you stop. The way it was set up from the factory, you were either gaining speed or braking (regeneratively). It gets to be a bit jerky.

Yes, this is totally legal to ride on the streets of Buenos Aires!

The brakes are programmable in all respects, and so are the safety features like power cut off when the hand brake is pulled. There are many tutorials on how to hack up the bike and remove sensors, but that is completely unnecessary. To be covered in an upcoming post.

As I was saying, I had programmed the throttle not to regenerate power back into the battery and the bike was able to coast to a stop. What I then noticed is that I sometimes needed to stop on short notice, like when I car pulls out in front of you, and it those cases there were heavy loads on the disk brakes. Therein lies the problem.

I am approaching a thousand kilometers on the odometer and the brakes are wearing thin. I have asked about brake pads for it as of yet. My son works for the importer now so I would know if they were getting brake pad for the Surron in or not. When the weather gets cooler, I will pull the brakes apart, and take the brake pads to a couple of shops to see if anyone has anything close (or exact) that would work.

In the mean time, I did learn something else. I had never played much with riding in 'sport mode' because it likes to do wheelies when activated. But one day I had parked it and gone into a store. When I came out and rode away, I though I had a flat tire. It was sluggish - I mean - not coasting.

Someone had played with the switches and buttons while it was parked.

As it turns out, you can have two different settings for regenerative braking. I had never changed the regen. settings for sport mode and therefore, it was still set on heavy regen. when letting off the throttle. As soon as I switched off sport mode, the bike went back to coasting.

I am using that button for when I have time to stop and charging the battery, but regen is off normally so I can coast. Still lots to learn and many undocumented features.