Shaken, not Solid - Are Solid Scooter Tyres a Good Idea

Harry Wills - Bo CTO - November 2025

• Solid scooter tyres are a popular replacement for pneumatic tyres
• A solid tyre cannot puncture
• Solid tyres have downsides - both for ride comfort, and damage to the vehicle - and there are alternative solutions
  

Zero ai: Bo does not use Ai to write, because we believe you’ve come here to speak to humans not Nvidia GPUs. That will mean that some of our language has errors, and we feel that’s a price worth paying. 

Warning in advance, this article is going to be a strong argument against fitting solid tyres to your scooter - with a look at three alternative solutions. 

Segway Ninebot own-brand tyre on left, Bo on right

The upside of solid tyres is they cannot puncture - that much is certain. It is the same reason that they are fitted on forklifts and warehouse trucks: working in a warehouse comes with guaranteed exposure to screws and nails. Combined with a requirement for stability, heavy lifting and only slow speed operation on smooth concrete floors this makes perfect sense. 


Credit to Trelleborg for image

However your scooter is not a forklift truck, and it needs to perform in certain conditions for which solid tyres are a very bad idea.

If you’re thinking of fitting solid tyres that probably means you have just had a very negative scooter puncture experience. The worst is when you leave somewhere a little behind schedule, reliant on your scooter to save you time and beat the traffic - then find you have a flat. It’s particularly bad at this moment because by definition you haven’t left enough time to take the car, walk, or public transport - so now you are guaranteed late.

It’s also a sad moment when you are half-way home, slam a kerb or pothole, and hear an aggressive hissing following by the wumpwumpwump of the rim running on the tyre. Because scooters can easily cover 10+ miles, that can mean a seriously long walk.



All this is to say, I do understand why a solid tyre is an attractive solution. 

However, there are some major downsides: 

• Loss of ride comfort
• Loss of grip 
• Damage to scooter
• Cost to fit 
• Impossible to remove
• Poor durability
• Loss of performance and efficiency

As a manufacturer, the area we are most focused on is damage to scooter. The vibration from solid tyres will literally shake components like your motor controller to death. This is such an issue that three years ago the brand Pure Electric invalidated the warranty of scooters that had them fitted - and at Bo we have adopted the same policy. It simply isn’t possible to engineer components to survive with that abuse. 


Credit to Bird for image

As a rider, it is comfort and grip that matter most. Because they have no pliance, solid tyres bump and skip their way down the road. The designers try to give the ‘appearance’ of built-in suspension, carving out holes and slots in the side of the ring, but this is not serious. A solid tyre which has enough strength to support the rider - by definition - will not have the material properties to give any meaningful suspension properties. 

Because solid tyres weigh so much they also increase the work a direct drive motor has to do to spin up the wheel, reducing the vehicle’s acceleration and increasing the power consumption. 


Ignore the holes - they are weight saving at best

Perhaps all of this would be less of a concern, if one could try it and then pop it off and go back to pneumatic. But once these solid rings are fitted on the rim, there is basically no way for a normal home mechanic to remove them - they have to be cut off, normally with an angle grinder or similarly aggressive multitool. You spend a fortune fitting them, destroy the ride and longevity of your scooter, and then cannot even get them off. 

So, if punctures are a nightmare and solid tyres are unacceptable, what are the alternatives to never have a flat again?

Firstly, pressure pressure pressure. It almost does not matter which tyre you are riding (more on that in a second) if you keep it at the maximum pressure rating written on the sidewall then it will be extremely rare to get a flat. 

Worth remembering, when you remove the inflator nozzle you often lose 5-10psi, so depending on your nozzle type it can be good technique to slightly over-inflate, such that it ends up at the right pressure over-all.

I do appreciate that checking pressures weekly or monthly might seem mad to anyone used to a car, where the big volume of air - thick tyre walls - high quality valves - and rim sealant all mean you check it once a year. 

To make this easier, treat yourself to a neat little electric pump. It will feel worthwhile within the first month.


Chao Yang - tough, not comfortable 

Secondly, tyre quality does make a difference in this space. Ideally you have a scooter which can take ‘tubeless’ tyres (tyres with no inner-tube, sealed directly on the rim). However, whether that is the situation or not, look for logos. Even though the big cycle and automotive brands (Schwalbe, Pirelli etc) have not yet entered the sector, there are still brands making higher quality product. CST, Chao Yang, and at the very top end PMT  tyres are consistently the best tyres you can buy in normal scooter sizes. Chao Yang are the toughest, and most puncture resistance, however you sacrifice comfort and grip for that.

Interestingly, Segway have developed their own tyres with a puncture-resistance gel layer. Neat technology, and for pin prick punctures (think, small nail) it works well. Our biggest issue with our experience on them so far is the same as the Chao Yang - low grip and poor comfort - but they are leagues better than the low cost alternatives.

To give some indication of how much the quality makes a difference, we have run the Bo tyres for 15km on zero PSI before re-inflating them, no harm done. It’s not true ‘run-flat’ technology, where the tyre maintains a good level of performance even when flat, but it is a lot better than a tyre that shreds itself within 500 metres. 


Three different tyres, three different toughnesses. Tyre at the top of image is best avoided... 

Thirdly, do invest in a bottle of low-speed puncture sealant gunk. The gunk contains strands of fibre and congeals in air-flow, so it can seal small holes. The best technique is to insert it, fully-inflate the tyre and give it a spin. Normally you will hear when it finds the hole - and if air keeps coming out then you need to change the orientation of the tyre so that the gunk can achieve full coverage. These bottles come with a little tool to remove the tyre valve so you can insert it - and it really does work! 

A word of warning, however - if you insert the gunk and it does not work, you are in for a messy clean up when you eventually get the tyre off. It is a risk worth taking. 

HW. 



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