Tired Tyre Technology  

Harry Wills - Bo CTO - November 2025

- What makes an e-scooter tyre premium 
- How that affects the puncture resistance
- What the e-scooter tyre market lacks (and we believe is coming)

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.

The author holds a Bo Model-M tyre

What does ‘premium scooter tyre’ even mean; it would seem completely reasonable to say a “tyre is a tyre”, especially for a lightweight vehicle like a scooter.

For years car makers have had to come up with dramatic headlines about suspension technology, clever traction control and advanced brake systems. In truth the biggest improvements in a car’s ability to stay on the road has come almost entirely from tyre innovation. It just doesn’t make such an exciting headline to write ‘we put the latest Pirelli on it’.

Before starting Bo we were all working on cars - either in design or engineering. In fact a couple of us came from Williams F1, where tyre technology goes into absolute overdrive. It is not an overstatement to say the number one job of an F1 car is to keep its tyres the right temperature. Achieve that, you win the race - fail at it and it’s like you are driving on ice. 

Photo taken by Bo CEO Oscar Morgan at a Silverstone practise day in 2017

As such, we started the Bo journey with perhaps more interest in what tyres could do than would otherwise have been normal. This was compounded when we started working with a scooter company called Pure Electric, and discovered the number 1 reason for customer returns and service centre visits was punctures. 

When any tyre punctures it is a nightmare, but when a scooter tyre punctures it is a nightmare on steroids. Because the tyres are small there is no 'stretch' to help get it over the rim, and because the engineers did not plan for it early scooter rims had no ‘channel’ for the tyre to slip into when changing them over. That made swapping tyres a multi-hour odyssey of trapped fingers, swearing and broken tools. 

As such, the first thing you want to check on any scooter wheel / tyre combo is whether it has a nice deep wheel channel to facilitate changes, and secondly whether the tyres fitted have the absolute maximum natural rubber content with the most pliant sidewalls possible. This doesn't make punctures a joy, but it certainly makes them easier to fix. 

When we refer to the 'channel' we mean that valley in the centre of the rim. When you change the tyre that allows one side of the tyre to 'drop in', which enables you to rotate it off the wheel. 

The most frustrating thing we uncovered was that the tyres primarily punctured because they had inner-tubes, and when you hit a kerb or pothole the rim of the wheel would ‘pinch’ those inner tubes against the kerb and puncture them. In practice this meant every time we went to change an inner tube we’d find ‘snake-bite’ marks, where the two sides of the wheel rim had bitten it.

Cars solved this problem years ago by moving to a tubeless tyre - a tyre where the sides fit snugly into a ridge on the wheel rim, and that holds the air in. No inner-tube to puncture means no punctures - thorns and glass notwithstanding. As such, our first action with Bo was to scour the world for the best tubeless tyres that could possibly fit a scooter-sized wheel.

In the process we expanded even our own understanding on what makes a tyre great. It turns out there are three key aspects to a tyre:

1. The fabric carcass inside the rubber

2. The sidewall

3. The tread 

When you talk about tyre quality that refers to the density of the fabric weave, the quality of the rubber content, the layers of rubber in the sidewall - practical, cost driven elements that make a tyre grippier, more pliant, more durable and more efficient. 

When we visited elite tyre brands like Schwalbe they showed us how the weave on their tyre carcass compared to other makes. We bought and tested the same ‘treads’ but at different price points, meaning some had more natural rubber content and some had more plasticky oil-based material. 

All-in over the last 5 years there were almost 30 different boots Bo could have ended up wearing. In the event we selected a tyre that had three characteristics we felt offered the best combination of performance:

1. Pliant, balloon sidewall - the curvaceous design of tyre has a good volume for its 2.50 inch width, which gives lovely bump absorption characteristics 

2. High natural rubber content - this makes it incredibly tough but also grippy. In testing we were able to run a set 15km with 0psi of inflation, before re-inflating them. We don’t label this as run-flat for safety and liability reasons, but it was reassuring to see that it was possible. 

3. Great design - this may seem an odd constraint, but the scooter tyre market is still early and so many of the tyres available are seriously unattractive. It seemed a sad outcome to spend years refining the Bo design, only to fit a toy-like set of ugly tyres. 

We’re certain that this sector is going to start drawing in more and more big-name brands. Recently Pirelli created a unique 11 inch tyre for a German scooter brand, and we believe that with volume and clarity over size requirements other brands will see fit to invest in the necessary tooling.

At Bo we keep our eyes open for new premium scooter tyre options - partly to increase the seasons and conditions that the vehicle can operate in, but also to ensure that the fundamental design of our scooter is always optimised to the available tyre technology. If an absolutely sublime balloon tyre or alternative tread pattern comes to market we want to be first to re-design our fork, mudguards or wheel to accept it. 

In the meantime, you can enjoy every Bo ride knowing that the tyres are the best all-season we could buy, have the best puncture resistance of any natural rubber compound tyre on the market, and in the unlucky event of a glass or thorn puncture the wheel and tyre design is also the easiest to change. 

HW. 


If you're interested in reading more - Link to Articles 

If you'd like to look at Bo M more closely - Link to Model M 

If you'd like to read about The Turbo Land-speed scooter - Link to Turbo