Charging Your Onewheel With a Car Charger

There is nothing more frustrating than running out of battery when you are having a good time with your friends. As a Onewheel Pint owner, this is something that definitely will happen. Charging in the car gives you an opportunity to add some charge to the Onewheel battery during breaks or while traveling.

There are a couple of ways to accomplish this while on the road, either by the official car charger from Future Motion, your home charger connected to a suitable car inverter, or using a portable power station.

What to think about before buying

An important thing to note is that if you are using a power inverter or car charger connected to your cigarette outlet you will be limited to 120W (1.6A). It’s recommended to either drive or have the car running to recharge the battery with the alternator, don’t risk running your battery down.

An alternative is to get a spare battery that you use for charging your board. The benefits of this solution are that you can easily direct connect the inverter to the battery and therefore pull more power from the battery. The charing will then be limited by either the inverter or the charger you are using for your board.

Getting an inverter

If you are getting an inverter try and get a pure sine wave inverter that is 600 watts or more. With any sophisticated circuit board, the common recommendation is not to go with a modified sine wave inverter. The official wall charger is just a switching power supply going back to DC so it should be fine. Still, it’s up to you to decide.

Are you planning to use the inverter for anything else like charging a laptop, then get a pure sine-wave. To use the full output you will need to either connect the inverter to your car battery directly or get a spare in your trunk.

Onewheel Pint car charger used in car (source)

Can you charge a Onewheel in a car?

Yes, you can charge a Onewheel in a car. With the Onewheel car charger, it is possible to use your car’s cigarette outlet and charge up your board while you are driving. The charge current will be limited to 1.6A.

The cigarette outlet in most modern cars is fused with a 10A fuse making the highest possible power output from the 12V battery 10A*12V=120W. That’s why both the Onewheel Pint and Onewheel XR chargers are having the same 120W (1.6A) output. This makes the car charger for the Pint a bit less powerful than the normal charger and the XR, a lot less. To compare the standard XR home charger has a 3A output.