I’m just gonna throw it out there that if you only spend ~$500 on a board there’s a pretty good chance you won’t like it enough to want to spend on the $1k+ boards, even though you might actually like the more expensive boards.
In this hobby you really get what you pay for most of the time (at least with established brands) so if you cheap out, your experience will suffer as a result.
Just some food for thought.
Based on what? Outgrowing your cheapo board is exactly the way you get bloodlust for expensive boards.
The waa definitely the case 3-5 years ago. If i think about how shitty the prebuilts were in 2018 and compare them to know for sometimes the same price. These would’ve went for triple the price back then.
I’m thinking of someone riding a cheapo board, not being able to blast up hills or go more than 20km and being disappointed in esk8 as a whole, never actually trying the nicer side.
TBF I’ve never seriously rode a board under $1k, at least not more than a few dozen meters.
Its when you outgrow the premium boards when your wallet really starts to hate yo
or when we ride hard to the point of failure 
I haven’t met a board that i couldn’t ride til failure… except the exway x1. That thing is bulletproof.
doesn’t matter what board, I know a hill near me that will burn the motors.
they make big motors get really hot, and small motors release magic smoke.
never met a board that could climb these mountain roads from standstill, it’s the ultimate stress test.
i ride pretty exclusively in san fran, that or just hilly backroads 
only time i’ve fried motors is riding stairs, or after a very salty week
SF is basically flat compared to the Canadian Rockies
i’ll come by at some point and make my attempt
maybe you just got trashed motors
need to see pics first
burned 3 different motors, the Flipsky 6384 BH just got really hot but no smoke.
no pics? videos?
photography wasn’t really on my mind when watching motors burn… who sees some freaky shit like that and thinks “oohh I’ll snap one for the photo album”
anyways
prebuilts!
A lot. Have you not seen videos of esk8, bikes, cars, drones, houses, trains, planes, people burning?
I just assume it’s that 1 in 100 people that’s just a creepy sadistic bystander and whips out their camera instead of helping. not like… normal behaviour.
Good luck putting out a fire as a pedestrian that previously minded his own business doing his own stuff.
I usually don’t run around with a fire extinguisher.
if I saw some shit like that I’d still try to help, not “post it for the gram” or w/e goes through people’s heads
