The main flaw of the Xiaomi Electric Scooter 4 Pro, the new electric scooter from the Chinese multinational, is not its fault. He’s slow, but he can’t do anything about it. It’s slow like all the others, because the new Highway Code requires these vehicles to have a maximum speed of 20 km/h, against the previous 25.
Five kilometers per hour may seem a little, but in city traffic they make a difference, and if you’ve tried many in the last 4 years, you feel it all right: at 20 an hour, even bicycles pass youyou spend more time making your usual home-work journey and maybe even more time taking you out of a dangerous situation.
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Xiaomi Electric Scooter 4 Pro, the technical characteristics
However, none of this is the fault of the Electric Scooter 4 Pro, which is instead an excellent product. Little surprise, why Xiaomi has been making them (and making them well) since mid-2019 and in recent years it has been able to win over a good portion of enthusiasts and an even more important portion of the market.
From a technical point of view, it is equipped with 350W motor with maximum output of 700Wwhich according to the company would make it possible to overcome slopes of 20%, has a 12,400 mAh battery, which should return a range of 55 kilometers (which, however, is a value influenced by many factors, as we have often written on Italian Tech), front brake with electronic ABS and rear disc brake and 10” self-sealing tubeless tyres.
List price it costs 849 euros (although online it is often found around 770), which are not few. More precisely: they are more or less the price of the competition (the Segway Ninebot Max G2 E costs 899), but a good 300 euros more than last year’s Mi Electric Scooter Pro 2 and almost double compared to the first, legendary Mi Electric Scooter Prowhich in 2019 demonstrated that these means could also work in Italy.
Net of these economic considerations, the Xiaomi Electric Scooter 4 Pro has all the credentials to go well. And it’s actually really good.
Xiaomi Electric Scooter 4 Pro, how it goes on the road
The scooter arrives disassembled at the top (nothing complicated: 4 screws to fix the handlebar and it’s done) and you can pair it with your smartphone via Bluetooth to check the remaining charge, but it’s honestly a superfluous operation and in fact we didn’t do it.
We have it tried for 3 weeks in Genoa, a city full of ups and downs and not exactly welcoming to this type of vehicle: one thing we immediately appreciated is that the large reserve of power, useless for speed purposes, is really needed to easily overcome the most severe slopes. Even in the streets that with previous versions of the scooter we were traveling at 12-15 per hour, we still hit 20 km/h and only in the really, really steep ones did we get down to around 17.
Coming back down, i.e. on descents, i brakes they didn’t struggle that much (but in the end we perceived a bit of a burning smell) and we never had the sensation of precariousness that these vehicles can sometimes give: braking is decisive and effective, even if the we found a bit not adaptable and often abruptespecially in the initial stage.
In general, however, the Xiaomi Electric Scooter 4 Pro seemed to us solid, stable, safe even when cornering and well equipped from a technological and safety point of view: the display is adequately readable, the brake light is clearly visible as are the front and rear direction indicators and activated by a command that we have found better positioned than that of (for example) the Nilox M1.
Two notes: it is not light (almost 17 kg), which is something to take into account if on your daily commute you plan to load it often in a car or on a train, and although it has improved compared to its predecessors, it still struggles to absorb the vibrations caused by pavé and cobblestones.
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What we liked
What we didn’t like
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Very expensive
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Hardly modulable braking
@capoema