Introducing the Carbon Fingerless E-Skate Glove: More Freedom, Zero Compromise
If you've been riding electric skateboards for any length of time, you already know the dilemma: wear full protective gloves and fight your remote all ride long, or ditch the gloves and leave your hands completely exposed. For years, riders were forced to choose between safety and control. The Carbon Fingerless E-Skate Glove from flatland3d and Knox is built to make that choice obsolete.
The fingerless Carbon takes everything that made the original full-finger Carbon the most advanced e-skate glove on the market — Knox's legendary SPS protection system, premium materials, and purpose-built e-skate ergonomics — and opens up the fingertips for a level of natural dexterity that riders have been asking for. This isn't a stripped-down version of the Carbon. It's an evolution.
Why Fingerless? The Case for Open-Tip Protection
The fingerless design isn't about cutting corners — it's about understanding how e-skaters actually ride. Unlike traditional skateboarding where your hands are rarely involved during normal riding, e-skating means constant, nuanced interaction with a remote. Throttle control, braking, mode switching — the difference between a confident command and a fumbled input can be the difference between a smooth ride and a nasty fall.
Open fingertips give you direct, unmediated feel on your remote's trigger or wheel. No material dampening the feedback, no bulk between your finger and the button. For riders who've struggled to feel confident with their remote in thicker gloves, the fingerless Carbon is a revelation. And crucially, it doesn't sacrifice the protection that actually matters most in a fall — your palm and wrist.
The Knox SPS System: Why It's the Most Important Feature on Any Skate Glove
Most wrist guards and skate gloves are designed around one basic principle: stiffen the wrist so it can't bend too far back. It's a sensible starting point, but it misses a critical part of what actually happens when a skater goes down at speed.
When you fall forward off a board, your instinct is to throw your hands out. The moment your palm hits the road surface, friction grips your glove — and your forward momentum tries to carry your body over your hand. The result is a violent rotational force across the wrist and palm: a grab-and-twist effect that standard wrist protection isn't designed to address. That's how scaphoid bones get broken, and it's why wrist injuries are one of the most common — and most debilitating — injuries in skating.
Knox's Scaphoid Protection System (SPS) was engineered specifically to solve this problem, and it's the reason the Carbon stands apart from every other glove in this space.
How SPS Works
The SPS system adds two low-friction sliders to the palm of the glove. Rather than gripping the road surface on impact, these sliders allow the hand to slide, dissipating energy and removing the rotational grab-and-twist force before it can transfer to your wrist and scaphoid bone.
The first slider sits directly over the scaphoid — the small, comma-shaped bone in the base of your thumb that is notoriously slow to heal and easy to fracture. The second slider acts as a bridge across the palm, ensuring the entire hand slides as a unit rather than snagging unevenly.
The result is protection against two of the most serious fall-related hand injuries:
- Compression fractures — caused by the full force of impact driving down through the wrist
- Hyperextension injuries — caused by the hand being forced backward beyond its natural range of motion
Micro-Lock Impact Foam: SPS Gets an Upgrade
The Carbon's SPS sliders now include Knox's Micro-Lock impact foam built directly into the slider construction. This is a meaningful upgrade from the original SPS design. The foam provides the same low-friction sliding performance as before, but adds a layer of impact absorption on top — so your hand is protected from both the rotational forces of a slide and the direct shock of initial ground contact.
It's the same abrasion resistance you'd expect from Knox SPS, with an additional layer of protection that matters most in the split-second of impact.
Built for the Demands of Electric Skateboarding
Uni-directional Flexible Wrist Plate
The Carbon includes a removable uni-directional wrist plate securely fixed to the back of the glove. The engineering here is clever: the plate is flexible in the forward direction — the natural movement of your wrist while riding — but rigid in the other direction, where hyperextension injuries occur. You get full riding comfort with none of the hyperextension risk.
The plate is also removable, so you can adjust protection level to suit your ride or wash the gloves without worry.
Clarino Palm with Hex Grip Overlay
The palm is constructed from Clarino synthetic leather — a premium material known for its durability, softness, and abrasion resistance — with a hex grip overlay across the palm and key contact points. This gives you confident, consistent grip on your remote in all conditions, without adding unnecessary bulk or stiffness to the hand.
Knox Lift & Lock Wrist Closure
Getting protective gloves on and off quickly matters — especially when you're mid-commute or hopping on and off your board between stops. Knox's Lift & Lock closure system lets you get a secure, consistent fit fast, with no fiddling around with awkward velcro or loose straps.
Abrasion-Resistant Hex Knuckle Guards
The knuckles are covered with hex-pattern guards designed to take the brunt of road contact in a fall. Paired with double-reinforced carbon fiber thread stitching at all critical seams, the Carbon is built to survive the kind of high-speed impacts that would destroy a lesser glove.
Visibility and Convenience Details
The Carbon also includes thoughtful detail work that adds real-world utility: reflective overlays on the fingertips, a reflective logo on the small finger, and reflective piping across the back of the hand make you significantly more visible in low-light conditions — something that matters a lot for commuters riding at dawn, dusk, or night.
A heavy-duty webbing loop at the wrist makes the gloves easy to pull on solo, and doubles as a sturdy attachment point for a carabiner or hook — handy when you're carrying your board and need somewhere to clip your gloves.
Who Is the Carbon Fingerless For?
The fingerless Carbon is the right glove for riders who want maximum protection without giving up the fine motor control they need to ride well. If you've previously avoided gloves because they made your remote feel clumsy, or you've been riding unprotected because nothing on the market felt right — this is the glove built for you.
It's equally at home on a long commute as it is on a faster recreational ride. The Knox SPS system means you're covered if things go wrong, and the open fingertip design means nothing gets in the way when things are going right.
Your hands are worth protecting. The Carbon Fingerless E-Skate Glove from flatland3d and Knox is how you do it properly.
