The JackRabbit takes a somewhat different approach to the idea of comfort. Their contention is that sweating is the least comfortable part of the bike experience, so they dispensed with the sweating. With no pedals, the rider will never, ever sweat—they take no responsibility for the dog days of August, though.
Many of our traditional concerns about rider comfort, such as a good fit that allows someone to pedal comfortably, go out the window. Again, we return to the idea that we think the JackRabbit rider won’t intend to be on this e-bike all day.
A highlight of the JackRabbit vs traditional standing scooters is thanks to the wheels. The 20″ tires (1.95″ in the front, 2.5 in the back where the rider’s weight really is) make a massive difference in going over bumps in the road vs the standard 8″ scooter wheels. And hitting those bumps from a seated position is far prefereable than standing in this rider’s opinion.
The JackRabbit has the single shortest wheelbase of any bike marketed to adults that we’ve ever tested. Its turn radius is just 33 in.—tight enough to do donuts around a trash can. People on roller skates can’t turn that tightly. Even so, the JackRabbit was surprisingly stable at speed.
That short wheelbase is a fundamental part of the JackRabbit’s appeal. It puts the Z in zippy. The JackRabbit’s videos showcase just how agile this thing is. Someone could ride a JackRabbit through a mall and not collide with the shoppers.
The throttle has a fairly short throw, but in testing our experience was that it seemed to offer essentially three speeds—slow, medium and fast—depending on how far down the throttle was depressed.
What might be helpful would be to take this idea a bit further. We would appreciate a series of settings comparable to PAS level that could serve as speed governors so that fully depressing the throttle would limit the JackRabbit to speeds of, say, 4 mph, 8 mph and 12 mph, before unleashing all of its wattage and freeing a rider to go 20 mph – food for thought for the future. But today just know that thumb modulation is what’s offered here and getting one of those three speeds is easy enough.
Last, while I’ve said a lot about how it handles, I haven’t mentioned enough about how it feels in the emotional sense: the JackRabbit is borderline silly, and that makes it a whole bunch of fun. I love the bikes that cause heads to turn, and you’ll turn a lot of them on this bike – doubly so if you’re passing people on the path riding on slower machines. The JackRabbit’s a novel idea and that has it’s own sense and charm which adds to the joy you get out of riding around on it.
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