Where to Store an Electric Trike

The machine arrives and you find out in about four minutes.

You wheel it up the drive, you turn it towards the side door, and it stops. Not because you did anything wrong — because the door is narrower than the thing you have just bought. So it goes in the garage “for tonight”, in front of the car, and eleven months later it is still there.

This is the most common way a trike stops being ridden, and it has nothing to do with the trike. It is a storage problem that was decided before delivery, by two numbers on a spec sheet that nobody reads as storage numbers.

They are the width and the weight. Everything on this page follows from those two.

What this covers

Upright adult electric trikes, roughly 65 to 71 in long, 27.6 to 30.7 in wide, and about 99 lb. Where they live between rides: indoors, in a garage, in a shed, or outside under cover. Folding bicycles and lightweight trikes are a different problem and are out of scope.

Every dimension quoted here is a manufacturer’s published figure. Where a number is our arithmetic or our estimate, the sentence says so.

The two numbers that decide everything

Search for bicycle storage and you will be shown a wall of products: hooks, hoists, gravity stands, vertical racks, ceiling pulleys. Every one of them is designed around a machine you can pick up with one hand and hold at shoulder height with the other.

Ninety-nine pounds is not a lifting weight. It is not a two-person lifting weight either, not up a step, not at arm’s length, and not by a frame with no clean place to hold it. So every product in that category is out — not marginal, out. If a storage solution requires the machine to leave the ground, it is not a solution for this machine.

That leaves the floor. Which makes the second number the one that decides which floor.

Only the narrowest machine in this range passes a 30 in door, and the widest passes neither. That single line is worth more to you than any storage accessory, because it decides whether the trike lives in the house at all — and it is knowable before you order.

Folding does not do what you think it does

The obvious escape is to buy the folding model. It is a reasonable instinct and it is worth less than it sounds.

Folding takes the footprint from about 13.3 sq ft to about 7.9 sq ft. That is a real saving — roughly two fifths — and if your problem is a garage where the car has to fit too, two fifths might be the whole difference.

But notice what it does not do. It does not make the machine liftable, and it does not free you from needing floor. A folded trike is a 99 lb object occupying eight square feet instead of a 99 lb object occupying thirteen.

There is a wrinkle in the published data that we would rather show you than smooth over. Four machines in this range publish a folded size. The one sold as the folding model publishes 39.4 × 28.7 × 26.8 in — and the model that is not sold on folding at all publishes exactly the same three numbers.

We cannot tell you from published specifications whether that reflects a genuinely different mechanism, a shipping carton, or simply a spec table that was copied across a range. What we can tell you is that “it folds” is not, on this evidence, a reason to choose one of these over another, and that if folding is your reason for buying you should ask the seller what folds and how far before you order.

The verdict

If the trike has any chance of living indoors — a hallway, a utility room, a ground-floor flat — then width is the only specification that matters, and it is decided at purchase rather than afterwards.

Best chance of fitting through a door

MoonCool TK2 Pro Electric Trike

Total width

27.6 in

Wheelbase

43.3 in

Seat height

29.5-36.2 in

Max load

450 lb

What we like

• +Narrowest in the range at 27.6 in, the only one with clearance through a 30 in door on our allowance
• +Shortest wheelbase of the non-folding machines at 43.3 in, which helps in a turn at the top of a ramp
• +Publishes a folded size of 39.4 by 28.7 by 26.8 in
• +Same 450 lb payload as the rest of the range, so the narrow track costs nothing in capacity

What we don't

• −27.6 in still will not pass a 28 in door, which is common in older houses
• −At 99 lb it needs a level, rolling route — one step is enough to end the plan
• −Narrowest track also means the least cornering margin of the trikes here
• −Twenty reviews at the time of checking, so this is ranked on published geometry

See the narrowest trike→

The field

Product	Total width	Best for	Buy
MoonCool TK2 Pro Electric TrikeOur top pick	27.6 in	The only one with a chance through a 30 in interior door	Check price →
MoonCool TK Pro Electric Trike	28.4 in	A garage or a wide side door, with the lowest step-over of the range	Check price →
MoonCool TK2 Folding Electric Trike	29 in	A garage where the car also has to fit, if the fold is as published	Check price →
MoonCool FT1 Fat Tire Electric Trike	30.7 in	Outdoor or barn storage, where width stops being a constraint	Check price →
MoonCool POP Folding Electric Bike	Two wheels	Anyone who could store a bicycle normally and does not need three wheels	Check price →

It has to live indoors

Measure the narrowest point on the route first, then buy to it. A 30 in door is roughly 28 in clear once the stops and trim are allowed for, and that leaves one machine in this range with a margin you could actually push through without scraping a knuckle.

See the narrowest trike→ See the low step-over trike→

It lives in the garage, and the car still has to fit

This is the case where folding earns its keep, because two fifths of thirteen square feet is roughly the width of a person walking down the side of a car. Buy the fold if you will actually use it — and be honest about that, because a fold that takes four minutes gets done twice.

The other thing a garage needs is an anchor. A trike’s frame sits well inboard of its rear wheels, so a short U-lock frequently cannot reach from the frame to anything fixed. Length beats security rating here, which is a sentence we do not get to write often.

See the folding trike→ See the four-foot chain lock→

It is going to live outside

Then the cover is not an accessory, it is the storage. And there is a trap in buying one that catches nearly everybody: bike cover sizes are named by the number of bicycles, not by dimensions. A trike is 28 to 31 in wide, which is roughly the footprint of two bicycles parked side by side, so the two-bike size is the one to buy. Anyone reading “one bike, one trike” buys the wrong one.

Second thing about outdoors, and it is the one that actually costs money: the battery. Lithium cells do not like sustained cold or sustained heat, and the manufacturers of every machine here say to charge indoors. The practical answer is that the trike can live outside and the battery should not.

See the two-bike cover→ See the four-foot chain lock→

You want it upstairs

You do not want it upstairs. Ninety-nine pounds does not go up a flight of stairs, and the frame gives you nowhere good to hold it. If your only storage is above ground level and there is no lift, that is a reason to buy two wheels rather than three — a point we make at more length in electric trike or electric bike.

See the folding electric bike→ See the folding trike instead→

What storage does to the machine

Storage is not neutral. Three things degrade a parked trike, and only one of them is obvious.

Damp, at the fasteners and the chain. Iron corrodes fastest above about 60% relative humidity, which is also the ceiling most guidance gives for indoor mould — so a hygrometer solves two problems at once. We went through that threshold properly in home gym equipment maintenance; the chemistry does not care that the object is a trike.

Flat spots and pressure loss in the tyres. A tyre left soft for months takes a set, and on a trike a soft tyre is a handling problem rather than a comfort one — it squirms under exactly the cornering load that the tipping guide is about.

The battery, on a calendar. It ages whether or not you ride. Nothing about storage stops that; storing it somewhere temperate slows it.

Before you buy

1. Measure the narrowest gap on the route, at the narrowest point, with the door open at 90°. Subtract two inches for stops and trim.
2. Count the steps. Any number above zero changes the answer.
3. Walk the route pushing something 66 in long — a ladder does nicely — and see where it will not turn.
4. Measure the floor you are actually prepared to give up, in square feet, and compare it with 13.3.
5. Check the slope of where it will stand. A trike parks itself, which is the point of one, but it will roll on a slope with no kickstand to hold it.
6. Decide where the battery will charge, indoors, near a socket, before you decide where the machine will live.

Questions people ask

Can you store an electric trike outside? Yes, under a cover, with the battery brought inside. The cover is the storage rather than an accessory, and it needs to be the two-bike size.

Can you hang an electric trike on the wall? No. At 99 lb it is roughly three times a heavy bicycle, and every wall hook, hoist and vertical rack in the category is built around bicycle weights.

Does a folding electric trike save much space? About two fifths of the footprint, on the published dimensions — 13.3 sq ft down to 7.9. It saves none of the requirement to have floor.

Will an electric trike fit through a standard door? Only the narrowest will. A 30 in door is about 28 in clear, and these machines are 27.6 to 30.7 in wide.

Can it live in a garden shed? If the shed door is wide enough and the floor is level, yes — but a shed is a humidity problem, so put a hygrometer in it before you put a trike in it.

Should I take the battery out for winter? The makers all say to charge indoors, and a battery left in an unheated space ages faster. Taking it in is the low-effort version of that advice.

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Sourcing. Widths of 27.6 to 30.7 in, lengths of 65 to 70.9 in, folded sizes and the 45 kg net weight are MoonCool’s published specifications, read from their product pages on 29 August 2026. The door clear-opening allowance, the square-foot areas, and the typical bicycle weights in the weight chart are our arithmetic or our estimate and are labelled as such wherever they appear. The identical folded dimensions on two different models are reproduced as published; we do not know what explains it and have not guessed.

Nothing here has been stored, lifted or measured by us. If you own one of these and the tape says something different, tell us — that is the correction we most want. More on how we research, and the rest of the cluster is in electric trikes.