How to Operate & Ride the sixthreezero E Bike Rickshaw: Using a 3 Wheel Electric Bike for Passenger

Hey everyone. Dustin, CEO at Sixthreezero. I'm going to walk you through how to use and operate your e-rickshaw from Sixthreezero. So, in front of me, I have our electric rickshaw. It's got our passenger seat on the back, and I'm just going to take you through some simple steps on how to use not only the electric part of it but also how to use it in manual mode. So, once you have it all together and the battery is in the on position, that's very important if you're going to use the electric at all. I can show you down here. The key must be turned into the on position right here. If it is off or unlocked, nothing on the electrical element will work. Now, put that into On. Right up here on your left hand, you have the power button, which is located right here.

So, I'm going to go ahead and push that and hold it in. Now you can see your screen come on. Right up here in the upper left, you have your battery right here. You have the level of assistance you're in. Now, the level of assistance can be changed right here by pushing these up and down arrows, and you can put it into level zero. The motor is on, but it's providing no level of assistance. If this is at level zero, the throttle will not work either. From there, you have your distance. You have the outside temperature, you have the watt output of the motor right here, so you'll see that increase as you ride. And then, you have your miles per hour, and then you have your actual riding time right there at the top. From here, I'll show you basically how to go ahead and start a ride with the electric.

I don't have my helmet on, so I'm not going to be riding very fast. Now, let me show you something else if you want to come in quick here. Now you can see, when I pull the brake, this little symbol pops up right here, basically indicating that the brakes are engaged. And at this point, the motor will not work. So if the brake is pulled, nothing is going to work. So you can see right here, I push the throttle. With my hand engaged, nothing will work. So, a lot of times when people have a test road for the first time, they're holding the brake and they go to push the throttle and nothing happens. That's because when the brake is pulled, the motor is cut. Now you can see, right here, if I take my hand off the brake, the throttle will in fact work. Okay, so from here, I always recommend starting in level one until you are very used to the power output of the motor and how to ride with it.

If you have over 300 pounds of passengers on the back, then you probably started in a level two, three, or four. Also, the heavier the load you have on here, if you're planning on using the throttle, you can put the pedal assist into a higher level. So, if it's a single rider on here, you can start it in the lower level. Just make sure that you're fully prepared for the kind of thrust you're going to get. Okay. Now, if you want to come in here for a closeup just on the throttle, the output of the throttle is just dictated by how much you pull or don't pull the throttle. It's just like a gas pedal. So the more you push the gas, the faster the car goes. The more you engage the throttle, the faster or more output you will get from the motor as well. So, this is something you'll have to get used to and find your comfort zone with how much you engage or don't engage the motor.

So, I'm in a position now to take a little ride, and this is if we're just going to use electrical, right? So I'm just going to show you the right ear. Here's my thumb, and I'm just going to push this down, and then we start to move.

Now, here, I can show you something. With pedal assist, again, put this down a little bit. I always recommend starting in lower gear. Now, these gears right here are for the bicycle element. Now, these are not linked to the electric in any way. These are essentially just like gears on a normal bicycle, and this is a trigger shifter. So, you're going to push here. Now, you normally do not want to shift while you're standing still. That's very important. These gears typically only get shifted while the bike is moving, because when you shift, the chain starts to slide to a different cog in the rear and that's what creates the different gears.

So, these actually cannot move gears while I'm sitting here. So when I start to pedal now, it's going to start to move the gears that I already shift. But the plus symbol right here indicates that that'll take your gears up, and this gets pushed like this to go down. So, here to go up, here to shift down. Okay? Now, I recommend that you're going to do pedal assist and you're starting from a dead stop. Start this in a lower gear, one or two, especially with three wheels on the ground with these [inaudible 00:05:12] tires, there's a lot of drag, and so you're going to want an easier gear until you have the momentum going. And if you're going to do pedal assist, I would say keep it below three. Again, unless you have a very heavy load. If you have a load in excess of 350 pounds that you could be in three, four, or five, that's going to make it much easier.

So, you're going to have to get the pedals a half rotation turned for the pedal assist, and then once there, you're going to wheel it. Turn. Yep. When you're riding, it's going to say assist above the assistance level, and then you're going to see the watt output increase right here. So now, let me just show you. If you want to ride it as a regular bike. So I'm going to turn everything off here and I have it in second gear, and now I'm just going to show you, you can just ride it like a regular bike. Shift it into first, now in second.

Now I'm in third. You just push this plus symbol with your thumb. Now I'm in second, now I'm in third.

And another recommendation is I always recommend stopping in first gear because then getting moving again will be so much easier. Now, let's show you a couple of other things. On the fork here. This is a fork, and it has a position where it's open or locked. When it's locked, what that means is that the fork will be rigid, meaning these will not move up and down. The benefit of that is if you're on pavement and flat ground, it's going to roll, and have less resistance. Being locked out like that because there won't be any give to the fork, so you're not going to lose efficiency and this will move up and down. If you're going to be going over a lot of bumps or a lot of curbs and you want to have some absorption in the front here, you unlock it, and that allows the fork to move freely.

So when you go over a bump, this can go down, come up, and absorb some of that shock as you're riding. And if you're doing a lot of curbs, up or down, or you're riding on a hard pack trail, maybe unlock that. If you're going very flat ground, you want to roll smooth and go faster, keep it in the lock position. Okay. Now, I'm going to have Peter come in here and explain in more detail some of the settings you can put on the display, and how to change certain elements of the display on your e-rickshaw.

Peter: Hey, everyone. Peter here at Sixthreezero. Let's just go through the three basic screen displays that you can have and what they mean and how to make a couple of basic changes. So, here on the screen, I have what I might call kind of the default screen, and there are three that you can switch through by using the power button up here. On this screen here, we have the time that we rode on our last ride. So you can see this is just showing like we did a three-minute ride. And then, it showed how far we went, which in this case is just 0.4 miles. I just did a short ride to get a little bit of data on here. Over here, you have your assist level, zero through five. I can change these with the up and down arrows. So there's zero, which means no assist whatsoever. It would be just like riding a regular bike or trike. And then 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, with the up and down arrows.

In the center, you have miles per hour, that'll tell you how fast you're going while you're riding. And then down here is the ambient temperature. Today, it's warm. 86. It doesn't feel like 86. It feels cooler than that. But anyway, this says 86. And then, you can also have motor temperature if you like. Okay, so we can [inaudible 00:09:16] by hitting the power button one time, and then that will switch us over to here. I'm going to switch through again just to show you how that did. So, it switches to... Go back. So this was the one we were on, and then we're going to switch to the next screen. This one shows a little bit of different information. At the top here, we have total time ridden, so we've ridden this e-trike for 58 minutes total on all of our rides.

So, it's a new one. We've only put 58 minutes on it. The average speed that we've ridden has been about 8.6 miles per hour. And then, our odometer, which will not change, we've put a total of 6.4 miles on this rickshaw on all of our rides. And then again, the temperature here, 86. So I'm going to go over here and hit the power button again, and then it will change the screen to the third display. Still shows our total time. Now here, it has max speed, so 15.9 miles per hour is the fastest we got on our last ride. It's also showing voltage, not that important, but it's a 48-volt battery, so it's showing 49 volts right now. You just kind of want somewhere in the vicinity of 48 volts, usually more than 48. And then our ambient temperature, again. If I hit power again, I can go back to the regular setting.

Now, on this one, we can go ahead and reset it because this is the trip odometer. It says distance, this is the trip odometer, that's our last ride, as opposed to the odometer, which will show our cumulative timing. You cannot change that one. But this one you can change by hitting the up and down arrow at the same time. You'll hold them down for about three seconds, and then the screen will start to flash the time that we rode on our last ride and our mileage. And we hit the power button... Whoops, I waited too long.

So we're going to have it flash again, and then we're going to hit the power button in the center, and it'll set back to zero for our next ride if you want to go out and see how far you ride and how much time it took. Okay? So there we're, we're reset again for our trip odometer. Again, that was all I did was hit the up and down. Everything is flashing. Of course, here it's all zeros because I just reset it. To reset, hit the power, it'll go back to zeros, and it's reset for your next ride.

Okay, that's it. There are a lot more capabilities on this display, but they get fairly complicated and a lot of it is just stuff that you don't need, and most of it is set at the factory. But there are other things you can do, but it gets somewhat more complicated. We have other videos we have and we can also share, but those are the basic functions that you'll use on a daily basis.

Dusin: Okay. Now that Pete's explained some of the display settings, I'll just walk you through a couple of other things up here on the handlebars. One quick thing is, you have your horn right here. The other thing is to turn... Oh, okay. So, this is now walking mode. So if you have to go up a big hill and push the trike, you can hold the down button. Now we're on flat ground, so it's going to be quite powerful. But you hold that down and it's going to move with you. Now, that's one option for walking mode. The other option, quite honestly, is just to push this very lightly. Oh, sorry, we're zero here. So push that very lightly and you can walk with the trike.

Okay. Now, if you hold the up button down, this is going to turn your lights on. So you'll see this symbol right here, and if you take a look here at the front headlight, although it's very bright out here, you'll see that it is turned on. All right? And now we can just hold the down button right here to turn that off. And you can see it switches off right here. And you have your horn right here. I think that's important, especially with this size of an e-bike when you're coming up on people. You have a bell right here. Go ahead and use that.

Now, one other feature as well is the parking brake, which you may need when you're leaving this on a slight incline or even just parking it somewhere. Now, the parking brake is right here. It's this little lever here. And what you do to engage it is you just pull the lever and then push this down like so, and that keeps the grip or the brake down. So that's your parking brake, now the bike can't move. And to disengage, just pull down and this pops up.

So, to operate the seatbelt, it's pretty self-explanatory. You just plug it in and you just kind of pull this back like that, and then you would slide this. And to loosen, just pull out like so. And now, coming to the back here, you have your basket underneath here, and you just loosen this latch and this comes down. Put anything you need in there on your rides, and this easily comes back up. And you just lock that back into place, clamp that down, and you have your ride. Now, the rear taillight is engaged when you hit the brakes. So pull the brakes and the tail light will engage and light up.

And that's the full tour of what you need to know to be operational and up and riding. Let's take you through for a little test ride and I'll show you how I steer and navigate on the e-rickshaw. I'm going to go ahead and push the throttle. You can see I'm engaging the throttle, and you can see my wattage output of the motors displaying there, my miles per hour, and our assistance level.

And go ahead and speed up a little bit.

All right. Now, a few things about steering the rickshaw and driving the rickshaw, and driving a tricycle if you've never done it. The weight distribution and how you turn, and you can just shoot up here now. There we go. So, when you're on flat ground, it's pretty easy. It's a little bit different on a tricycle in that, on a two-wheel bike, you're going to be doing more leaning. But on a tricycle, you have to do the steering. So, I'm not leaning to get the bike to steer, I'm turning the handlebars. So I think that's important. If we make a U-turn right here, you need to turn the handlebars, okay? And trust that the bike will stay balanced.

On a two-wheel bike, you kind of lean into it and you do steer the wheels, but it's a little bit less of a turn. On a tricycle, you have those two wheels in the back and it's going to balance. So, the other thing too is a lot of people get on and they always feel like the bike is pulling them in a certain direction. Now again, with the two wheels in the back, sometimes the bike needs to be steered, right? On a two-wheel bike, it's more balancing. On a trike, you need to steer a little bit. Now, once you get the hang of it, you'll be doing it unconsciously, and just know that there is an adjustment period to getting used to a tricycle. If you've never been on an adult tricycle in your adult life and you've never steered something, it can feel different. But it's not the trike, it's just the fact that riding a two-wheel bike is so much different, and a lot of riders' brains become programmed to how to operate a two-wheel bike, but a three-wheel bike is much different.

So, just remember, it's less about your body weight shifting to steer and more about the actual act of turning the bars like this. And now you make your circle, and you just have to learn to trust the tricycle so that it will stay balanced. Now, a couple of other things. You never want to ride horizontally across a very steep incline. So if this was an incline straight ahead of us, you never want to come straight across it like this on a tricycle because you have a risk of tipping. On a two-wheel bike, it's going to find that balance point so you can do that. Going up and downhill should be no problem.

Now, if you're taking turns at a very high speed, which you should never do on a tricycle, but as you start to turn this way, right, the bike could, the wheels could come off the ground, right? So you want to lean into the turn, just like this. And honestly, this is a pretty well-balanced electric trike because of the four-inch wide tires. So, in most situations, you won't even need to do this. But, if you want to feel safe, just lean into it, keep all the wheels down and you'll be riding with no problem.

And as you get more and more comfortable, you're going to start to naturally just lean with the turns like you would on your two-wheel bike. So again, if you've never ridden an electric trike as an adult, it's a whole relearning period just like when you learn to ride a two-wheel bike, right? I think there's an expectation for people that when they get on an electric tricycle or a tricycle of any sort, they should be able to do it. And you will be able to stay balanced, but the nuances of steering and turning and going uphills feel different and take a little getting used to, and it will happen. Just do some test riding, get out for rides, and over time, I promise you, you'll start to feel more and more comfortable very quickly.

One thing I'll just say too with braking is, your left brake is your front brake, and your right brake is your rear brake, and you've got two rear brakes. So, if you're going to pull one singular brake, use your rear brake, okay? Because you've got two disc brakes back there, or you can engage all brakes at the same time, right? So, it's important if you're going at very fast speeds, don't just use the front brake. Either use the rear brakes or use all three brakes together. Again, if you pull the front brake too heavily, there's always that risk that maybe you could go over the handlebars, although you'd have to be going very fast on a trike, especially for that to be the case.

But it's just important, especially if you have a load on the back, to try to use all three brakes at the same time. That'll be the best option to give you the most braking power or the rear by itself. And there we have it. Now, we're just going to walk through how to use the pedal assist and the shifting of the gears a little bit. So, I'm in level three right now, so I'm going to go ahead and start pedaling, and then once we turn the gears around, the pedal assist will kick in. All right, there we go. All right, so now, we are doing pedal assist

All right, and we're going to come over here. All right. Now we get some flats. I'm going to shift this down a little bit. Okay. So you can see, right now, I'm going to put this down into first gear. It gets easier for me to pedal in the lower gears. Now, in the lower gears, if you start to get in the speeds up higher, if you start to go fast, you're going to need to start shifting up, right? And I can push my trigger shift. Now, my pedaling will match the assistance level much better so I'm not over-pedaling or under-pedaling. And then, slow down and you start to go slower, you'll want to shift down here if you're using pedal assist. Okay?

And now, so if I have this in five, I'm getting maximum assistance, I'm going to want to start to shift up, match my pedaling to the assistance. And then as I shift down, I want to shift down here. Okay? Also, a little recommendation. Don't pedal into the turn, just pedal when you come out of the turn on the trike to help maintain your balance. All right. Now, I'm going to go ahead and turn the motor off completely. So now, it's in zero, and I have it in third gear. I can shift this down to first, which is going to make it even easier to pedal, or I can now move up a little bit. Second, right now, with one passenger on the back, this feels okay.

Now, keep in mind, with the 24-inch four-inch wheels, it is challenging to pedal, especially if you have a passenger on the back. So we've got a little incline here. Go ahead and put this first, but you can do it. All right. Get a little assistance now. Go ahead and put it into level two. There we go. That makes it much easier. And we're off and running.

So, there you have it. Using the brakes. And then, I don't know if you can see as well, but on the gears, I use my thumb for everything right here. And coming over to the other side, if you see on the pedal assist side, I like to use my pointer finger. You can use your thumb too to do the up and down, that works as well. Sometimes I could use my pointer finger for the top and my thumb for the bottom. Honestly, whatever is most comfortable for you, you'll figure it out as you start to ride more and more.

All right. There you have it. Coming in for a landing here.

All right, so that's a tour of how to operate and ride the e-rickshaw from Sixthreezero. If you have any other questions at all, please comment below or reach out to us, at theteam@sixthreezero.com, or you can call us at 310-982-2877. In addition to that, this product will be linked in our bio. So if you don't have one already, you can find it on our website, sixthreezero.com. And we have a 30-day test ride on your e-bike. If you don't love it in 30 days, you can send it back, no questions asked. No money out of your pocket, and we'll have a full one-year warranty on everything related to the bike to make sure you can be up and riding with no problems.

Now, lastly, you can also join our Facebook Pedalers group, and you can see other people already posting about their e-rickshaws in the group. If you want to ask them questions about how they use their rickshaw, different things that they've done, because now there's a community of people that have added certain elements, they put their dogs back here, their children, they've added some harnesses, so there's a lot you can do. So go ahead and check out the Pedalers group, and talk to existing riders. If you have one, you can bounce ideas off each other and find out some tips and tricks that'll work great for you.

So, thanks for sticking around and don't forget, it's your journey, your experience. Enjoy the ride.