It looks like people have started to resort to using scooters to get around during this gas crisis. No, we don’t mean Grandma’s motorized shopping trolley or your little sister’s kick scooter. We mean full sized, fuel sipping motor scooters with room for up to two and the ability to hit the speed limit if you are lucky.
According to the Houston Chronicle, scooter manufacturers ranging from Honda to Vespa have seen their sales spike by upwards of 25% in the first months of 2008. The reason? Most scooters get gas mileage ranging from 40 to a whopping 120 miles per gallon depending on the size of the engine. That’s a whole lot of extra trips back and forth to 7-11 to get your daily pack of cigarettes and a Red Bull.
Scooters come in two flavors, those with engines ranging from 125-150cc and those going from 400-600cc. The latter category scooters can keep up with most any traffic on any road. Even though these larger capacity engine scooters can keep up with freeway traffic, we wouldn’t see it as advisable if a side street option was available. Gas mileage for these models is 40mpg and up.
For the smaller, Vespa-sized 125-150cc scooters, the speed limit can be anywhere from 35 to a possible 60 mph (if you are going downhill!). These are the choice for people who are just going to use them as a daily runabout back and forth to college or the local strip mall.
Scooters have another advantage besides high mpgs. While tooling about on the smaller scooters, you can also scoff at the eco credentials of those not that much faster Prius drivers who brag about their 42mpg. You can get over 90 mpg! Take that, Al Gore!
Prices for scooters range from around $2,000 for a brand new 96mpg Yamaha Vino to nearly $10,000 for a nearly Fit-sized Honda Silver Wing scooter that even features anti-lock braking.
To get that uniquely Italian look, Vespa scooters run about $4,900 and get gas mileage in the high 60's. In addition to being easy on the wallet, Vespas have always managed to be both unique and stylish.
Our take? With this boom in United States scooter sales, there is always the possibility that our cities will start to look like the urban centers of Rome and Mumbai. These two cities are over-run with mopeds and scooters and feature sky high gas prices as a standard reason of course. We have the high gas prices, will downtown Newark and Detroit soon be over-run with Scooters as well? Only time will tell.