How to Charge an Electric Scooter
Charging looks trivial — plug in, wait, ride — but the details decide how long the battery stays healthy. This guide works from the charging data published for the AMOTO range and the battery guidance in the manufacturer's own manual material.
Start with your model's published charging time
Charging time is a published specification, and it varies more across this range than most buyers expect. The A11 commuter publishes 4–6 hours for its 48V pack. The EH02 Citycoco publishes 3–4 hours on its smaller fitment and 4–5 hours on the larger. The A21 publishes 6–8 hours, as do the A31 cargo tricycle and the A41 four-wheel cargo vehicle. The EH01 publishes 6 or 8 hours depending on fitment. At the top of the range, the dual-battery Citycoco fitments publish 10–11, 12–13 and even 16–17 hours for the largest combination. None of these figures is interchangeable: a charger routine built for an EH02 will leave a dual-battery Citycoco half-charged, and a fleet that plans turnarounds on A11 timing will fail with A31s.
The practical consequence: read the charging time off your model's specification page before the vehicle arrives, and plan the parking and socket layout around it. Overnight charging covers every model whose published window fits a night — which is most of the range, with the largest dual-battery combination (16–17 hours) the standing exception; opportunity charging during the day only works for the small-battery models, and even then a partial charge is a top-up, not a refill.
The below-20% rule
The manufacturer's published guidance for the A41 — the range's four-wheel cargo vehicle — gives two instructions for that vehicle's lithium battery. First: do not wait for a completely empty battery — charge when the remaining charge falls below 20%. Treating 20% as your "empty" turns charging into a habit instead of an emergency and keeps the pack out of the deep-discharge zone where lithium cells age fastest. Second, in the guidance's own terms: do not charge a lithium battery after it has been fully discharged. A pack that has been run to true empty and left there is a service question, not a charging question — the troubleshooting guide covers how that situation presents.
For removable packs — the EH01 and EH02 publish removable lithium batteries — the routine is easier: the pack comes indoors to the socket, which also keeps it out of freezing or overheated storage between rides (see the winter guide for why temperature matters). The dual-battery Citycoco fitments make the same point from the other side: two packs charged in sequence or parallel define that model's long published charging windows.
A charging routine that works
- Charge at the end of the riding day, not the start of the next one. The published windows (4–8 hours for most models) fit an overnight pattern exactly.
- Use the charger supplied for the model. Chargers are matched to voltage platform — 48V, 60V and 72V systems all exist in this range — and a wrong-platform charger is at best useless and at worst a fault.
- Note the state of charge when you plug in. A charge started without knowing the starting point cannot be checked against the model's published charging window — and an unexpected state of charge is itself information: it says the last ride drew more, or less, than the route should have taken.
- Unplug when charged; do not leave the pack on the charger indefinitely. The published charging times are the guide — a pack that is still "charging" far beyond its published window is showing you a symptom, and the fault guide's first entry is charging failure.
- After a fault or a long storage, charge supervised. A swollen, leaking or overheating pack is never a charge-it-and-see case (see the troubleshooting guide).
Charging for fleets
Fleet operators should read the published charging times as infrastructure requirements. A depot of A31s on 6–8 hour charging needs one socket per vehicle per night and a parking layout that lets every vehicle reach one. The cargo family's charging data is on the A31 page; the range-wide platform map is on the batteries, motors and controllers page. If your duty cycle needs a midday turnaround, the honest options are a second vehicle, a second pack where the model supports removable batteries, or a different model — not a faster charger the manufacturer does not publish.
What this guide does not claim
Charging advice beyond the published material — optimal state-of-charge windows, cell-balancing behaviour, charger efficiency — is not something the manufacturer's catalog data settles, and we have not invented figures for it. The model's user manual is the authority for the vehicle you own; published manual pages exist for several models in the range (the A21 and A41 among them) and are worth requesting with any order. When manual guidance and habit disagree, follow the manual.
The range's charging times, in one table
| A11 commuter | 4–6 hours (48 V 20 Ah) |
|---|---|
| EH02 Citycoco | 3–4 hours / 4–5 hours by fitment |
| EH01 Citycoco | 6 hours / 8 hours by fitment |
| A21 | 6–8 hours (detail-page figures) |
| A31 cargo tricycle | 6–8 hours |
| A41 cargo vehicle | 6–8 hours |
| CP-8 | 8–10 hours |
| Dual-battery Citycoco | 10–11 / 12–13 / 16–17 hours by combination |
Read the table the way a depot manager does: the models split into "overnight" machines (everything up to about 10 hours) and one "plan it a day ahead" outlier, the largest dual-battery combination at 16–17 hours. That outlier is not a defect — it is the arithmetic of the range's longest published travel distance, 140 km — but it changes how the vehicle is scheduled, and it is exactly the kind of figure that should be read before purchase rather than discovered after.
Chargers are platform equipment
One more discipline the table implies: because the range runs 48V, 60V and 72V platforms, a household or depot with several models owns several chargers, and they are not interchangeable. Label them by model code. A 60V charger on a 48V vehicle is not a slower charge; it is a fault in waiting — and the fault guidance's first entry, charging failure, is where that story ends. Dealers delivering a mixed order should treat charger labelling as part of the handover, alongside the manual.
A note on partial charging
Not every plug-in needs to end at full, and a top-up during a long stop is a normal part of working use. Two cautions keep it honest, and both are matters of planning rather than chemistry: do not treat a partial charge as a completed one when planning the next day's range, and do not let top-ups become a way of living at the bottom of the gauge — the published range figures assume a full charge, so plan partial-charge days on partial range. What the manufacturer's published guidance addresses is the full-charge routine above; it does not publish a partial-charging protocol, and this guide does not invent one.