Another day, another board release! This time, the Meepo Hurricane Ultra, one of the most option-packed prebuilts from China we’ve ever seen. Let’s go through some of the selling points:
GEARDRIVE:
The small controversy - we will soon see how similar it is, but the geardrive “designed” by Linnpower, is now present on the Meepo Hurricane Ultra. Allegedly, it uses a 4 gear design, similar to the one designed by Newbee. I still haven’t been able to see the total inside of it, not sure why they’re being so secretive. Kind of hard to purchase something without knowing all of the information.
Intrestingly, they’ve decided to go with Aluminum for the wheel gear. Weird choice IMO due to how alum can break down with cyclic fatigue loading.
Again, I wish there were more details here, but right now, there just aren’t.
OPTIONS:
The Hurricane Ultra has some of the most options I’ve seen in a prebuilt. Using their configurator, you can choose between several deck / truck combinations, including Bamboo, Carbon, and TKP / DKP.
I think it’s great to have these options available, and really cool to see Meepo bringing more light to the TKP truck. I do think there is something to be said for it being a crutch to stability versus a properly set up RKP, but hey, more options is cool.
Personally, I think both options look really cool, but I imagine the ride on the bamboo will be a good deal more comfortable.
WHEELS:
With the Hurricane Ultra comes the option to get the new Cyclone Tubeless wheels, also designed by Linnpower. Technically you could buy these a little while ago, I think, but I haven’t seen any in the wild yet. I’m not really familiar with the benefits of tubeless tires, but one major one I can think of is no more pinch flats or valve stem failures! This is a great thing for sure, especially because with a tire like this, you can put some slime in and make it last even longer against small punctures. On the other hand, changing it in the field may be quite difficult, if it were to have a catastrophic failure.
BATTERY
Unfortunately we come to a small sticking point here. They seem to have decided against using P42a in this build, for whatever reason, and are switching to the Samsung 40T. With Samsung’s widespread reputation of not staying balanced for long, combined with the (alleged) lack of a balancing BMS, I do not have high hopes for the longevity of this new series of batteries. Alternatively for a cheaper price, you can get the 18650 version, Samsung 20R’s.
20R. SERIOUSLY, not even a 25R. That is like the most ancient cell you can find. Terrible discharge rate, and at 4p? WHEW I can’t imagine how crap that setup will be, terrible range and terrible sag.
ESC
This really isn’t very exciting, Meepo didn’t really make a big fuss about it, so I assume it’s safe to say that it may be the same ESC as the Hurricane?
PRICE:
Here we come to one of the most crazy things. You can get a Hurricane Ultra Bamboo setup for ONLY 1199 when spec’d out to the basic specs and non-useless battery
Speced out to something awesome, it comes in quite a bit higher, but still, quite reasonable. Evolve Hadean looking absurd right about now…
So, what do we think?
I think this new build is going to take the world by storm, Meepo has done it once again. Some concerns though:
Battery longevity: Samsung notorious for balancing drift.
Gear drive durability: completely unproven, and barely even unveiled.
Tubeless tires: Are they good? Who knows, can’t wait to try eventually
Am I gonna get one? Well, no, I can’t afford to buy one of these out of the blue, but if I was going to buy a prebuilt right now, I would seriously be stuck between this and the Barrel… Maybe if enough of you bug Meepo about it, I’ll be able to review one on my channel! Wouldn’t that be awesome?
I would really like to take the gear drive apart though, it seems very cool, especially given that it also utilized shock-reduction tech in the wheel coupling.
Discuss below! Comments, concerns, etc!
@xsynatic mebe we can merge that other thread into this