How Much Faster Can You Go on the Dual Motor Rickshaw? Speed, Power, and What Two Motors Really Do

The Short Answer: The Dual Motor Rickshaw Tops Out at 20 MPH

Few questions land in my inbox more often than this one: how much faster can you go on the dual motor rickshaw? I understand where it comes from. You look at the spec sheet, you see two motors and 1500 watts, and the natural assumption is that twice the motor should mean a lot more speed. If you already own one, maybe you've been cruising the neighborhood with the kids buckled in behind you and you're wondering whether there's another gear hiding in there somewhere.

I'm Dustin, and I've spent 20 years in the bike and e-bike industry. The relationship between power and speed is one of the most misunderstood topics in this whole category, so I want to walk through it properly. The short version is simple, though, and I'll give it to you up front: the dual motor rickshaw is capped at 20 miles per hour. The second motor doesn't raise that ceiling. What it changes is how hard the trike can pull, how quickly it gets moving with a load on board, and how comfortably it handles a hill.

That might sound like a letdown if you were hoping for a bigger number. Stick with me. By the end of this, I think you'll see why 20 is the right place for a machine like this to top out, and why the dual motor is still worth every bit of the attention it gets.

What you're actually working with

Let's start with the hardware, because it explains a lot. The dual motor, dual battery rickshaw carries 42 amp hours of battery, split between two 21 amp-hour batteries. Power comes from a pair of 750-watt motors, one in the rear and one in the front, for 1500 watts combined.

That's a serious amount of energy and torque for a tricycle. It's also a very specific kind of tricycle. The rickshaw exists to carry people: kids, a partner, a parent, a friend, whoever needs a ride. Everything about the way it's set up, including how we handle speed, comes back to that job. If you want to see how it sits alongside the rest of the family, you can browse our full lineup of electric rickshaws, or look more broadly at our e-trikes built for carrying passengers.

And if you're still early in your search and just getting a feel for three-wheelers in general, our complete collection of electric tricycles is a good place to see the range of shapes and setups out there.

Why the cap exists in the first place

Every product we make is designed to be ridden in bike lanes and on paved trails. That's where these trikes live. It's where families ride to the park, where people run short errands, where folks take an easy loop on a Sunday afternoon. It isn't a highway, and it isn't a racetrack.

To follow the legal limits that apply in those spaces, you're limited to 750 watts of power. That's what you'll be running on when you're cruising in a bike lane. The rickshaw makes that easy, because you're never locked into one configuration.

On top of that, we cap the top speed at 20 miles per hour. So while there's enough power on board to go past 20, the trike won't. That's a deliberate choice on our part, and it doesn't change based on how many motors you have running.

Three ways to run the motors

This is the part a lot of people don't realize until they ride one. You can switch between three setups:

• The rear motor on its own
• The front motor on its own
• Both motors working together

That flexibility is the whole point. You get to find out what works best for the way you ride. If you're in a bike lane and need to keep it on a single motor, you can do that. If you hit a steep climb with a full bench behind you, you can bring the second motor in and let both of them share the work. You're choosing how much muscle to use based on what's in front of you, rather than living with one fixed setting.

I like to compare it to gears on a regular bike. You don't ride everywhere in your easiest gear or your hardest one. You shift for the terrain. The motor modes on the rickshaw give you a similar kind of control, just with electric power instead of your legs doing all the deciding.

So, in theory, how much faster?

In theory, you're not going to go faster than 20 miles per hour on the dual motor, because it's capped. Rear motor, front motor, or both, 20 is the ceiling. The question that's left is what would happen if that cap weren't there, and why we chose to keep it. That's where things get interesting, and it's what I want to dig into next.

Let's say we pulled every restriction off the dual motor rickshaw. No speed cap, nothing holding it back. How fast would it go?

If it were totally uninhibited, I want to say you'd get to about 26 miles per hour. That's my honest estimate from riding these, not a lab-tested figure, and I want to be upfront about that. But it's in the right neighborhood. And I'll say just as plainly: it is not safe to ride a tricycle at 26 miles per hour. It would also put a lot of strain on the motors. Neither of those is worth a few extra miles per hour.

There are really two separate reasons behind the cap, and they're worth taking one at a time. The first is what speed does to the motors. The second is what speed does to a vehicle with three wheels.

Reason one: the motors

The motors on this trike are 750-watt motors. They're strong, and they're well matched to the work the rickshaw does. But 750-watt motors aren't designed to push e-bikes or e-trikes in excess of 20 miles per hour.

As you start to push a motor faster than it was built to run, you put a lot of strain on it. It works harder than it was meant to, for longer than it was meant to. That's where you risk burning a motor out. And on a rickshaw, you're not just pushing the rider. You're pushing a long, heavy frame and, a lot of the time, a bench full of passengers on top of that.

I've been in this industry long enough to see what happens when people chase speed past what the hardware was built for. It rarely ends with a happy rider. More often it ends with a repair, a replacement part, or a bike that never felt quite the same afterward. Keeping a motor in the range it was designed for is the simplest way to keep it running well for years.

That's a big part of why you'll often see trikes limited to 16 miles per hour. It isn't that manufacturers can't build something quicker. It's that the motors, and the trike as a whole, hold up better and behave better in that range.

Reason two: stability and safety

The second reason matters even more, and it comes down to what makes a trike a trike.

From a safety standpoint, stability and the risk of tipping over are the big concerns. That's why manufacturers generally don't want you going faster than about 14 or 16 miles per hour on a tricycle. Those are pretty common top speeds across the category.

A two-wheeled bike and a three-wheeled trike handle very differently. On a bike, you lean into a turn. On a trike, you stay upright and the wheels stay planted, so the faster you're going, the more the trike wants to push outward through a corner. At a relaxed pace you'd barely notice it. At a high pace, especially in a turn you misjudged, that's when trikes get into trouble.

So where does the rickshaw fit? In our case the cap is 20, a bit higher than you'll see on a lot of trikes. That's because of how heavy and how long the rickshaw is. The length and weight keep it nice and stable when you're out riding. It sits planted in a way a shorter, lighter trike doesn't, which is why 20 is a comfortable, controlled top speed for it.

But that extra stability has limits. It's what makes 20 reasonable. It isn't what would make 26 reasonable.

Think about who's riding in the back

There's one more piece of this I think about constantly, and that's the people on the bench. When I'm on the rickshaw, I'm usually not alone. My kids are back there. A lot of our riders are carrying grandkids, aging parents, or friends who can't ride a bike on their own anymore.

Those passengers didn't choose the speed. You did. That changes the math. A pace that feels fine to you as the rider, with handlebars to hold and brakes under your fingers, can feel very different sitting on a bench behind you. Keeping the top speed in a calm, predictable range is part of how you look after them.

It also changes how you should think about a ride as a whole. Nobody remembers the afternoon they shaved two minutes off the trip to the park. They remember the conversation on the way, the wave from a neighbor, the kids laughing on the bench. A passenger trike does its best work at a pace where all of that can happen.

If stability and confidence rank higher on your list than top speed, which honestly describes most of the people I fit for trikes, it's worth browsing our electric trikes for seniors too. Many of those riders are looking for exactly the same calm, planted feel.

The bottom line on unrestricted speed

Could the dual motor go faster without the cap? Yes, probably to somewhere around 26. Should it? No. It would be harder on the motors, and more importantly, it would push a tricycle past the speeds where it stays stable and safe. The cap isn't there to take something away from you. It's there to keep the trike doing what it does best.

Once people understand the cap, the next question I usually hear is about motor size. If two 750-watt motors give you 1500 watts, what about bigger ones? What happens if you keep going up?

It's a fair thing to wonder, because dual motor setups don't all look the same across the industry. Motors come in different sizes, and they can be mixed in a lot of different ways.

The combinations you'll see out there

Here's how the numbers stack up with a few pairings you could run into:

• A 1,000-watt rear motor with a 500-watt front motor
• A 1,000-watt rear motor with a 750-watt front motor, for 1,750 watts total
• A 1,000-watt motor in both the rear and the front, for 2,000 watts total

There are also 2,000-watt motors that can go in the rear on their own. So you don't even need two motors to get to that kind of number.

When figures like that show up on a spec sheet, it's tempting to assume more is automatically better. On a trike, I'd push back on that.

Where it starts to become too much

Fifteen hundred or 2,000 watts in a single motor on a trike starts to become a lot of power. Honestly, a setup like that would make me feel like there are real safety concerns.

Two-wheel bikes are a different story. They handle differently, they're built differently, and the conversation about power on a bike isn't the same one we're having about trikes. If you're curious what that side of things looks like, our full range of electric bikes is a good place to start.

But when you get up into 1,500 or 2,000 watts on three wheels, you're talking about motorcycle-level power. And that really kind of defeats the purpose of what a trike is for.

What a trike is actually for

I want to spend a minute on that, because I think it sits at the heart of this whole conversation.

People come to trikes for stability, comfort, and confidence. They want to get on without worrying about balance. They want to stop at a light without the bike tipping. They want to bring someone along, carry groceries home, or ride with a friend who can't manage two wheels anymore. Speed is rarely the reason someone picks a trike in the first place.

When you put motorcycle-level power onto that platform, you're working against every one of those reasons. You're taking a vehicle built around calm, predictable riding and giving it the ability to do things it wasn't designed to handle. That isn't an upgrade. That's a mismatch.

That's why our dual motor rickshaw uses two 750-watt motors instead of chasing bigger numbers. It's plenty of power to do the hard work a passenger trike needs to do, without turning it into something it isn't.

A better way to read a spec sheet

If you're comparing trikes, here's how I'd suggest thinking about motor numbers. Instead of asking how many watts something has, ask what that power is for. On a passenger trike, the honest answer should be about moving weight and getting up hills. If the pitch is mostly about top speed, that deserves a second look, because on three wheels, top speed isn't where the value is.

I'd also encourage you to think about the whole vehicle rather than one number. A motor doesn't ride on its own. It's attached to a frame, a set of wheels, brakes, a seat, and in our case a bench full of people. A sensible amount of power, matched to a frame built to carry it, will almost always give you a better ride than a huge motor bolted onto something that was never meant for it.

And that brings me to what the dual motor actually does well, which is the real reason it exists in the first place.

So if the dual motor doesn't make the rickshaw faster, what is it for? This is the part I get excited about, because the reality is that the dual motors on the rickshaw are really about two things. One is easing the workload when you have passengers on the back. The other is hills.

Neither of those has anything to do with top speed. Both have everything to do with how the trike feels when you're actually using it day to day.

Torque and acceleration, not top speed

When you have people on the back, the job isn't about how fast you can go. It's about acceleration and torque. It's about getting the load moving.

Think about what happens every time you start from a stop with a full bench. You've got the weight of the trike, the weight of the rider, and the weight of every passenger, all sitting still. Those first few seconds of getting everything rolling are where a motor works hardest. With the dual motors, that gets a lot easier. Both motors share the effort, the trike pulls away smoothly, and you're not grinding through those first pedal strokes.

That matters more than it might sound. On a typical ride you might start and stop dozens of times: driveways, crosswalks, stop signs, the parking lot at the park. Every one of those starts is easier with both motors working. Over a full outing, it adds up to a ride that feels relaxed instead of feeling like a workout you didn't sign up for.

If carrying weight is a big part of how you plan to ride, our collection of electric trikes with high weight capacity is worth a look as you compare.

Hills are where it really shines

Taking on hills is the number one best thing about the dual motor. If you have passengers on the back, you want to be able to handle hills, and this is where the second motor earns its place.

I can speak to this personally. I live at the top of a very large hill. Every ride I take from home finishes with that climb. Having the dual motor means I can put my three kids on the back and actually get to the top.

Without the dual motor, I can still do it. I want to be honest about that. But it's quite a bit of work for me to get up that hill. With both motors running, it's nice and easy. The difference isn't whether you make it. It's whether you get to the top and still feel like going out again tomorrow.

That's the part people tend to underestimate when they're shopping. A hill on a solo ride is one thing. The same hill with three kids on the bench is something else entirely. If where you live has any real elevation, that's where you'll feel the value of the second motor, every single time.

Adding a second row of seating

The rickshaw has a hitch, and if you attach an additional row of seating to it, the dual motor becomes even more useful. More seats means more people, and more people means more weight to get moving and more weight to carry up every incline.

With that extra row on, the dual motor just makes everything so much easier. You're asking the trike to do a lot more work, and having two motors to share it changes the whole experience. If you find yourself thinking about the hitch for gear as much as for people, it's worth comparing our cargo electric trikes too, since the same logic about torque and load applies.

Riding on throttle only

Here's one specific situation I want to call out. If you're riding on throttle only, with no pedaling, the dual motor handles that additional row of seats a lot better than one motor working alone does.

That's a big deal for a lot of riders. Not everyone wants to pedal, and not everyone can. Some of our riders rely on the throttle for most of their riding. Once you take pedal power out of the equation and add a second row of passengers, the motors are doing all of the work, and that's exactly where having two of them makes the biggest difference. If throttle riding matters to you, take a look at our electric tricycles with throttle control.

Using the motor modes to your advantage

Here's how I'd put all of this into practice on a real ride. Out in a bike lane on flat pavement, run it on a single motor and enjoy the cruise. When a hill comes up, or you're pulling away from a stop with the whole family on board, bring both motors in and let them share the load. Once you're over the top and back on level ground, you can drop back to one.

That's really the beauty of the setup. You have the extra muscle on tap for the moments that need it, without having to use it all the time. It's power when you want it, not speed for its own sake.

Now for the practical question: do you actually need the dual motor? I've had the single motor rickshaw and the dual motor rickshaw, all of them, at my house. I've ridden them on my own streets with my own kids on the back. So I can give you a pretty grounded answer.

If you ride mostly on flat ground

If you're riding strictly on flat ground, the single motor rickshaw has enough power in most cases. Honestly, on flat ground, a single motor is a lot of power. For neighborhood loops, a level beach path, or rides around a mostly flat town, the single motor is going to feel strong and capable.

I don't want anyone walking away from this thinking the single motor is underpowered, because it isn't. For a lot of riders, it's exactly the right amount of trike. If your rides are flat and your loads are moderate, there's no shame in skipping the second motor and putting that money somewhere else.

If your rides include hills or rougher surfaces

But if you do have that kind of terrain, the picture changes. Hills are the obvious one, and we've covered why. The other is trail riding. If you're going to do any kind of hard-pack trail riding, the dual motor rickshaw makes it a lot easier. Packed dirt and uneven surfaces add resistance, and the extra pull helps you keep moving steadily instead of bogging down.

If mixed surfaces are a regular part of your plans, it's also worth browsing our fat tire electric trikes to get a sense of what riders look for when they head off smooth pavement.

If you're carrying a lot

Load is the other deciding factor. If you're regularly filling the bench, planning to add a second row of seating on the hitch, or riding mostly on throttle with passengers on board, the dual motor rickshaw is the one I'd steer you toward. Those are exactly the situations where one motor has to work hard and two motors make it feel easy.

A simple way to decide

When I'm helping someone choose, I usually boil it down to a handful of questions:

• Is there a real hill on a route you ride regularly, especially near home?
• Will you be carrying passengers on most rides, not just once in a while?
• Are you planning to add a second row of seating with the hitch?
• Do you expect to ride mostly on throttle rather than pedaling?
• Will you spend time on hard-pack trails or other rougher surfaces?

If you answered yes to one or more of those, I'd lean toward the dual motor. If your answers are mostly no, with flat routes and lighter loads, the single motor is likely all you need.

What the dual motor won't change

Whichever way you go, don't choose the dual motor expecting more top speed. Even if you had the power to go beyond 20 miles per hour, it really wouldn't be the safest choice on a tricycle like this. The dual motor's value is in acceleration and handling loads. That's the huge benefit of the dual motor setup on the rickshaw, and if that's what you need, you'll feel it on every ride.

If you're still on the fence, talk to us. Every rider and every route is a little different, and our personal fitting is a good way to get advice that's specific to you rather than a general rule of thumb.

Try it yourself before you decide

If you have any other questions at all about the dual motor rickshaw, or about how speed and power work on a trike, please reach out to the team. You can call us at (310) 982-2877, and we're always glad to talk it through.

We also make it easy to find out for yourself. We offer a 30-day test ride policy. If you don't love it in the first 30 days, send it back. No questions asked, no money out of your pocket. That's the best way I know to settle the single-or-dual question for good: ride it on your own hills, with your own passengers, and see how it feels.

We also stand behind what we sell. Everything is covered by our one-year warranty. If anything goes wrong in the first year, we'll take care of it, parts and labor.

Come ride one in person

If you're near Southern California and want to try before you buy, come see us. We're in San Clemente, California, and you can visit our store to test ride any of our e-bikes and e-trikes. Getting on a rickshaw in person, feeling how it pulls away with someone on the bench, is the surest way to make sure you're making the right choice.

Talk to people who already ride

Before you purchase, I'd also encourage you to join our community. We have a Facebook group called sixthreezero Pedalers with thousands of members. Join before you buy and talk to existing riders, ask them about their hills, their passengers, and whether they went with one motor or two. Then, once you have your own, post in the group and make some friends.

Finally, download the sixthreezero app to track your rides and compete on the leaderboard. It's a fun way to see how far that 42 amp hours of battery takes you.

Thanks for sticking with me through this one. Remember, it's your journey, your experience. Enjoy the ride.