I guess it's new transportation product week here. Honda announced that they would be coming out with the scooter because scooter demand worldwide is up. This is a 600cc scooter.

However it will only be available in Europe and Japan. They are coming out with their most powerful American scooter at the same time but it'll only be 250cc.

It's blasphemy here in the USA, where motorcycles are king, to say you would like a scooter, but I really would like to have a scooter. It's a lot of fun and the fuel savings on little trips would be amazing. A friend of mine bought the smallest Honda scooter way back in '82. It would only go 40, and was really unsuited to daily transportation, but it was tons of fun to putt around on.

Scooters

That thing would be great for short sommutes (ie getting around downtown, avoiding traffic). You don't blow too much smoke into the air, which makes the greenpeace assholes happy, you aren't caught in traffic jams, which is real nice (can you ride these in bike lanes?). I know I'm one of a million people who've said this over the years, but these things really are a lot better suited for urban traffic than cars.

Steve

I don't know if scooters like this would be allowed in bike lanes!

The Elite 50, which is the baby scooter, definitely isn't safe in traffic. It isn't stable enough at 30-40 mph, and if you hit a bad bump or some stones, you're history.

The 250 coming out soon will be something like $5000, and it surely will do highway speeds. But the fun of a scooter would be buzzing around the side streets to pick up chinese food. You just have the satisfaction of knowing that you could hit the highway if you wanted to or needed to.

The 250 looks a lot like this one. The exhaust is smaller and I don't think it's set up for two passengers.

I'm guessing that Honda doesn't make any money on this line in the US but is hedging its bets. In Europe where fuel is more expensive, they are much more common. The other advantage is parking; in Europe they are generally more densely crowded than we are, believe it or not.

re:scooters

You're probably right about the bike lanes. The last thing I need is to be on my bike or walking, and some scooterjerk barrels down past me at 40mph. My history class (I'm in 10th grade) just had a guest speaker from China, which, you may know, has some of the most densely populated, and poorest cities in the world. She said that scooters are to bicycles in China as cadillacs are to hondas here. Most people there have bikes, and the few who can afford them have scooters. Almost noone drives a car within the city limits.