X-Treme Scooters | XG-499 Stand Up Gas Scooter Available in Silver Only

Comment: While my son (age 12) does very much enjoy this scooter, the low build quality means that every hour he spends on the street is offset by an hour that I spend working on it in the garage.

PROS

Our scooter has run for about twenty hours now (over the course of a month and a half), and the 50cc engine has not given us any problems, short of minor oil seepage at several gasket seals. The vendor we purchased our scooter from has been reasonably helpful with our two (so far) warranty issues, but we'll see how long that will last.

CONS

Out of the box, the spark plug wire wasn't put together correctly, and wouldn't attach to the spark plug. When I tried to adjust it, the end cap fell off. After a few minutes of fiddling with it, I was able to put it together, but it has fallen off a couple of times.

You'll notice lots and lots of chrome on this scooter. I suspect the gratuitous use of chrome is not just for looks, but is also a great way to cover some very poor welds and metal quality.

As another poster mentioned, you should go over the entire scooter to verify the tightness of each bolt, as many were loose. In general, the bolts are of very low quality metal (soft aluminum, I think), so they're either easy to strip or to cross-thread. I've replaced several key bolts when it makes sense.

The handlebar assembly leaves the front wheel several degrees off center, with no way to correct. Worse, the handlebars do not solidly join the head bearings, and are left with a bit of wobble. I've slightly improved this with a washer that I shaped to fit the clamp, but it's not a perfect fix.

The rear tire lasted about 10 miles before wearing down to the threads. The front tire went flat due to a manufacturing defect in the front inner tube (the valve skirt separated from the tube). We were sent warranty replacements for both. For what it's worth, the replacement rear tire seems to be wearing much better now.

The front and rear brakes are both disc, but the rotors are constructed of cheap metal that bends & warps easily. This is further aggravated by very poor quality calipers, which don't float very freely, and often hang up on the rotor, causing both loss of power due to brake drag, and rotor overheating and warpage. The calipers have an adjustment knob, but this frequently (very frequently) needs to be adjusted again so the wheels can rotate freely. In general, you have a choice between brakes that drag considerably, or brakes that are unable to lock either wheel. PLEASE don't tell your kids they can go 30-40mph on this thing. I feel like I can trust my son to keep the speeds down, but frankly I am not happy with the overall safety of this scooter.

There are several wires and hoses that can either drag on the road or get pinched between other parts. I think they could have designed this a bit better, but it's probably a good idea with any scooter to scrutinize these and zip-tie lines where possible. I don't consider this a defect, but it's one more thing to be aware of.

Others have complained about chains slipping off. I found out that our scooter was missing one of four motor-mount bolts. Since the motor is mounted to a formed piece of thick but soft sheet metal, it was easy to move the motor around a good centimeter or two. That was easily enough to move the front sprocket enough to cause the three or four different cases of throwing the chain we had. Before I found the motor mount problem, I naturally tried to adjust the chain tension. Of course, the eye bolts and associated hardware were made out of very cheap, very soft metal. I ended up constructing two folded washers to replace the useless ones that came with the scooter, but kept the existing eye bolts. I also had to add several washers since the bolt was already out of thread with the existing chain tension. The bolts are currently bent at about ten degrees trying to keep everything tensioned correctly (about 1cm of chain play).

The scooter is currently sitting in the garage, waiting for a warranty replacement of the muffler. The stock muffler broke at the weld joining the mounting flange to the main pipe. The service rep told me that they would send out a redesigned muffler for this scooter, as failure of this type were common, given the large/heavy nature of the stock muffler. I also just went and looked and discovered that there WAS a supporting piece of flat metal stock (about 1/16" thick, 1/2" wide), but that was broken in half at the bend (cheap metal again).

At this point, we've had the scooter for about two months. I started out giving it two stars because it's fun while it's running. On reflection, though, I'm nervous about the next failure, particularly if it happens while in motion, and can't really recommend this scooter to anyone.