Setting out on a scooter and roaming around the neighborhood had been one of the coolest things we did as a child. And now, as we’ve grown up, that very fascination and fun feeling still hardly seem to have faded away. Besides, scooting your way to work, commuting in the afternoons, or pleasure rides in your leisures can help you keep in shape as well.

So no matter how some people would frown upon you, don’t get cold feet. When you’ve decided to get a kick scooter, get one and start riding right away.

Here, we have come up with our reviews on some of the best adult kick scooters in the market, along with a comprehensive buying guide to help you out in making the perfect selection. So stick around.

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The Best Adult Kick Scooters 2024

Find all the reviews on the top-rated adult kick scooters in the market down below.

Read: Kick scooter vs Electric scooter

How to Choose the Best Adult Kick Scooters: The Ultimate Buying Guide

There are several essential aspects you should keep a close eye on while making a purchase. In this complete buying guide, we’ll help you decide on settling for the perfect adult scooter with all the right components, so your investment keeps its worth.

Know Your Purpose

Adults mostly prefer riding kick scooters for two primary purposes.

• For daily commute or transportations.
• For making the leisures fun and sporty.

Whichever your purpose is, your considerations should revolve around the following three crucial points.

• Convenience: What effort it takes from you while bringing it out and roaming around regularly.
• Performance: How well, far, or fast the scooter would glide.
• Quality of the Rides: How comfortable the scooter is to ride, or how much it can transmit vibrations from the ground.

All these considerations are directly affected by various technical features of a kick scooter, which we’re now going to discuss in detail.

Wheel Size

The wheel size in kick scooters is undoubtedly the most distinctive feature amongst all.

Kick scooters mostly come with polyurethane (PU)-threaded wheels having an embedded plastic core inside. For wheels to be used on urban surfaces, Polyurethane is a highly effective material.

Be it a skateboard, quad-roller-skate, or inline-skate; you’re likely to find PU everywhere. This lightweight, water-resistant material provides a substantial amount of grip and rebound.

1. Large Wheels: Diameter 180mm, 200mm, or 230mm

Large wheels are the right choice for faster rides with fewer vibrations for added comfort, but they make your scooter a bit hard to lift and drag.

Benefits

• They provide longer-distanced glides with each push with higher rolling efficiency.
• They are better shock-absorptive.
• You’ll be likelier to safely roll over obstructions like pebbles, twigs, or cracks.
• When paired with larger decks, the large wheels provide maximum comfort.

Drawbacks

• They’re mostly aren’t lightweight (weighs around 9-14 lbs).
• Their significant physique becomes cumbersome at times, and cause troubles in congested public transports.
• With lower acceleration rates, they require more effort while speeding up or slowing down.
• Larger wheels are mostly of less agility.

2. Small Wheels: Diameter 100mm, 120mm, 125mm, or 145mm

Smaller wheels are excellent for portability, but they provide slower rides compared to the large ones. And with more vibrations, they’re less comfortable to ride too.

Benefits

• Smaller wheels are lightweight (weighs less than 8 lbs).
• They take less effort while speeding up or slowing down.
• With their turning radius being small, they’re more agile than the larger ones.

Drawbacks

• Smaller wheels have lower rolling efficiency, and they cover shorter distanced-glides with each push.
• They cause higher vibration transmissions from the ground.
• You’ll be likelier to catch on cracks or random objects while riding.

Wheel Resistance

The resistance in wheels during rolling on the surface has a significant impact on your riding quality and speed.

Although the majority of the scooter wheels are PU-made, the resistance may vary because of the quality of the build. Wheels with lesser resistance provide more swift rides and reduce the amount of labor required for each push.

The size of the wheels plays a big part in it as well. Larger, stiffer wheels tend to be less-resistive than the smaller ones regardless of the surface.

Bearing Quality and Grades

Kick scooters come with a similar type of bearing that skateboards or inline skate wheels use. And it’s the 608 bearings to be more specific. Every scooter comes with two bearings mounted in two-wheel hubs.

For ensuring better wheel performance, you need to pick the rightly-rated bearing.

ABEC standard is recognized as the universal bearing rating scale, which stands for Annular Bearing Engineering Committee. All the odd-numbered grades ranging from 1 to 9 mark the precision levels from lowest to highest. Kick scooters wheels mostly come incorporated with bearings that are rated either 5 or 7.

With higher precision grades, you get lower rolling friction. And the smaller the resistance, the longer gets the glides per push. This equation directly indicates how fast or slow your rides will be.

However, not every bearing that comes with the same rating has equal quality. A well crafted ABEC-5 can have a better rolling potential than a poor-quality ABEC-7.

Material matters as well. The material of scooter bearing can be steel, ceramic, or titanium. The quality of steel bearings depends on its make while titanium bearings are of the highest quality, performance, and durability. Ceramic is waterproof and provides faster rolls, but can be brittle during high-impact rides.

Deck Size

The deck size in kick scooters tends to proportionate its wheel size. In general, larger wheels are paired with a larger-size deck and vice versa.

Large-size decks are more comfortable to rest your feet on or off. They allow you to shift your body weight and reposition your feet with more convenience. Also, with a sizeable deck comes a longer wheelbase, which makes your long rides more efficient by helping you keep the balance while rolling. Additionally, it keeps your scooter from wiggles for a more consistent ride.

However, larger decks tend to be heavier, therefore, require more effort while speeding up or slowing down.

Smaller decks, on the other hand, are lightweight and take less effort in speed controls. But they limit your space to handicap your footwork and can get wiggly at times.

We recommend small-size decks only when portability is your prime concern. Otherwise, you’ll be wise to go for larger decks for better comfort in riding.

Deck Height

In scooters, the distance between the upper deck surface and the ground is referred to as the deck height. This one of the most influencing factors that determines your riding comfort, yet it goes neglected by many.

Usually, with a lower deck size, you’ll feel more comfortable while pushing your scooter. A low deck allows you to push your feet against the road without having to bend the knee of your other feet that much. And it increases your stability by lowering the center of gravity.

Many manufacturers nowadays are adopting the “deep-drop” design that is borrowed from skateboards and several longboards in their kick scooters to lower the deck height. This kind of deck is kind of challenging to produce and expensive as well. So you’ll find them in some high-end scooters only.

Lower decks have a drawback, by the way. It increases the chances of scraping the deck-bottom against hump-like raised surfaces.

Nevertheless, you should always pick a deck height as low as you can to ensure an overall comfort in riding.

Folding Mechanism

Unlike the dirt scooters or stunt scooters, most of the kick scooters come with a folding mechanism.

A hinge between the steering column and the scooter deck makes up for a folding mechanism in the majority of scooters.

Probably the most common type among all is the three-action mechanism. It involves a simplistic locking-pin loaded with a spring—the pin shifts between two alternate positions to allow folding or unfolding of the scooter.

The folding and unfolding process is something as followed:

• Use the quick-release clamp for uncompressing the joint.
• Shift the locking pin from one notch to another by lifting it first.
• Compress the clamp back again.

Kick scooters these days mostly use variations of this mechanism. Except for some brands, who have made it further easy by eliminating the steps no (1) and (3), which translates into the single-action mechanism. For instance, Hudora’s patented “One-step-easy” or “Heavy-duty” and GlideCo’s “Single-Key-Single-Action” mechanism.

Now let’s get things straight. What a folding mechanism primarily affects is convenience and practicality.

For a scooter used for daily commutes, the folding has to be quick and effortless. If that’s the case, we recommend the single-action mechanism, which typically allows folding or unfolding within a second.

But when you intend to use it in your leisures, like the weekend fun rides, you’ll more likely need to do the foldings or unfoldings while taking it out or putting it into your car boot. In that case, you can completely cut down the worries as it’ll hardly matter what system your scooter uses.

In general, folding mechanisms have little to do with scooter performance. But, if the quality is poor, you may suffer unusual looseness, which may result in low-precision rides. And in the worst-case scenario, the folding-joint may break loose entirely because of the excessive stress that it may not withstand.

Suspension or Shock Absorbers

The suspension or shock-absorbing mechanism in kick scooters are mostly spring-based. You may find it either in a scooter’s front or rear and in some models, both.

A few might get surprised to know that most of the models from major international companies do not offer suspensions in their scooters while it’s a common feature in cheaper OEMs and kick scooters that you’ll find in local sports outlets. It might be because of the purported value of money that intrigues the customer.

Many European models nowadays, though, feature suspensions, thanks to the ever-growing unpredictabilities of the sidewalk surfaces.

Suspensions are meant to provide more comfortable rides by absorbing the shocks and impacts on uneven, rough surfaces, and they seem to do that competently. But at the same time, they bring along a few inconveniences.

Firstly, they add lots of weight to your scooter and encumber its portability. Besides, they generate a lot of rattles and squeaks during the rides with their constant movements. For the same reason, they are more prone to wearing out and even breakages. And lastly, they tend to make your scooter less responsive by taking away some energy from the pushes for its oscillations.

So it’s all up to you whether you’ll prefer comfort in riding or deal with all those potential hassles.

Yet, we recommend going for a suspension-scooter only when you’re well-aware of the roughness of your daily route. Most people like to forgo this feature in their scooters. And when you consider the fact that skateboarders and inline-skaters have been bossing around all types of surfaces on tinier wheels for ages without complaining, it becomes more evident.

If the suspension feature still seems important to you, nevertheless, you can go for a few lighter alternatives mentioned below.

• Scooters with pneumatic wheels filled with air (E.g., US-made Fuzion, Swiss-made Micro, or German-made Hudora)
• Specialized, shock-absorptive wheels (E.g., Swiss-made Micro)
• Cambered wooden-decks like those in skateboards (E.g., Swiss-made Micro)
• Solid synthetic tires (E.g., US-made GoPed)

Brakes

More and more manufacturers are implementing rear fenders in their scooters instead of the old-style handbrakes.

Bicycle-style handbrakes, although requiring lesser reaction time than fender brakes, add weight to your scooter while increasing overall complexities. Besides, the number of scooters with a handbrake is decreasing day by day, limiting your purchase options.

Rear fenders act more effectively than handbrakes as they double up as friction brakes on the scooter’s rear wheel. It only requires a little push of your backheel or toe to do the stopping or slow-down. You’ll only need a brief period of practice to get used to it.

Handlebar

To ensure better control in steering and overall convenience, you need quality handlebars that are comfortable to grip as well. You also need a pair of handlebars that properly adjust your height.

Among T-bar and Y-bar that most adult kick scooters come with, you can choose whatever you prefer since it hardly impacts the scooter performance. However, for day-to-day commuting, T-bar gives you more natural control with less effort because of their simplicity.

Overall Build Quality

Apart from the technical specs, the overall build quality hugely impacts a kick scooter’s performance and quality of the ride.

Scooters from less-known brands or the ones produced by local stores tend to attract customers with low price tags where quality isn’t a priority. The well-renowned brands, on the other hand, have their reputation to keep, and therefore, they opt to provide more durable quality scooters.

So it’s essential for you not to compromise the quality. You must pick a scooter from a trusted brand to remain free of the below-mentioned worries.

• Rattles and squeaks during rides.
• Improper fitments of various parts.
• Unnecessary movements will be encountered in the handlebar grips, folding joint, or steering column.
• Inferior quality bearings will roll much shorter distances with each push.
• The screws will come to loose more often.
• The paint will chip quickly; the raw aluminum build will tarnish soon enough.
• Their steel build will be too overweight to offer satisfactory portability.

We recommend never to hesitate to spend a few more bucks on a quality scooter, instead of settling out with a cheap one.

Other Features

Kickstands and carry straps are most common among the additional features offered in several adult kick scooters.

A kickstand allows you to rest your scooter anywhere conveniently without having to lay it on the ground. Carry straps, on the other hand, makes the portability of your scooter even more compact and more manageable by letting you carry it across the shoulders while traveling through public transports.

However, these features have nothing to do with your riding comfort or performance. So you should keep them out of considerations while purchasing unless you really feel they’re necessary for day-to-day use.

A Few Tips for Maintaining Your Kick Scooter

If you want your kick scooter to serve you for a long time with an increased lifespan, a few general maintenance tips will come in handy. The basic maintenance requires a proper assemblage, tightened bolts, safe storage, and regular cleaning.

Down below, we’ve listed a few commonly encountered issues along with their primary solutions.

Rusty Bearings

Steel bearings are the likeliest to get rusted when they’re wet. So you must avoid riding on wet circumstances to prevent the bearings from rusting.

When you accidentally wet your bearings, make sure you dry them out as soon as possible. Then you need to rub 3-in-1 chain lube in small portions to clean it thoroughly. Remember to avoid WD40 oil as they will ruin the bearings by degreasing the inner oil.

Wheel Coming Out of Line

The wheel comes out of line usually because of a loosened clamp. Tightening the clamp should fix it right away. If it doesn’t, then you’ll need to take the wheel off and tighten the ICS bolt. Also, ensure the collar clamp is retightened.

Squeaks and Rattles

The prime reason behind scooters making rattling sound is an improper assemblage. If the variety of parts and components confuse you, check the manufacturer’s manual.

In most cases, the improper alignment of the steering column with the headset causes such issues, so you need to make sure they’re appropriately assembled. Also, if the height locking pin doesn’t fix stiffly enough to the steering column, it can create noises.

Troubles with the Headset

A kick scooter headset pretty much resembles the bike headsets. It comes with several delicate moving components that require proper care. Riding your scooter in the rain may rust the headset and cause the bearing case to entirely fall apart.

It’s essential to keep it free of mud, grimes, and water. For cleaning it thoroughly, you may have to disassemble it as well. And while doing so, remember to use lubricants (such as 3-in-1 chain lube) and never WD40.

However, the headset is one of the wearable parts in a kick scooter, and you may need to exchange it for a new one at some point.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Is a scooter good for commuting?

Absolutely. Scooters are getting popular day by day for adults commuting. They can quickly help you move shorter distances and even longer ones in the most convenient and fun way. As long as you’re well-aware of the safety concerns, you’re always good to go. We recommend wearing protective gear like helmets and knee-guards to make sure of safe rides.

What is the best scooter for commuting?

For day to day commuting, it has to be kick scooters. They take less effort in dragging and setting out. You can move from one place to another through peaceful maneuvers. Also, they allow you to fold them into compact sizes to offer the portability that dirt scooters or stunt scooters wouldn’t. You can pick any of the above-reviewed products for convenient diurnal commuting.

Is a kick scooter faster than walking?

Without a doubt. Usually, with a scooter, you can get to a place 2-3 times faster than getting there on foot. And if you are a walker with an average pace, it can be even 5 times faster.

Are kick scooters allowed on sidewalks?

Mostly, yes. However, it’s good for you to check the rulings set by local authorities.

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Can adults ride kick scooters?

Why not. Kick scooters are hardly just a kids’ game anymore. Whichever state you visit in the US, you’ll see adults commuting on their scooters. Many of them use it as the primary medium of daily transport as well.

How do you make a kick scooter go faster?

Well, there’s no exact camshafts, nitrous, or turbochargers to make kick scooters go faster. But you can take some practical measures to make your scooter run faster. For instance, you can exchange the bearings for smoother and faster ones, or you may opt for replacing the wheels with bigger ones. Also, keeping the bearings and the wheel joints always lubed can make your scooter go faster as well.

It’s Rolling Time!

We have reached the end of this lengthy write-up. Hopefully, our effort will be of help when you make your purchase.

Now you know about all that matters while choosing the perfect scooter. And with the reviews on the best adult kick scooters right before you, it’s time to make a decent purchase.

So wait no more, get the one that gets along with your style and preference and start rolling right away!

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