Filtering by Tag: scooter

Summer Scooter Selection

Added on January 14, 2016 by C. Maoxian.

I plan to buy a scooter next summer to zip around the countryside on ... there are two 49cc choices offered by the Japanese for tough guys like me: the Yamaha Vino and the Honda Metropolitan.

From an aesthetic viewpoint, I prefer the Vino: two-tone paint and sharper wheels. Not sure how much they differ in price. Would be nice to take the kids to school on a scooter instead of firing up the CR-Vibrator for a five minute trip twice a day. Wonder how well a 49cc machine can handle the hills of Ithaca, especially while hauling my Falstaffian bulk.

Very Low Costs with Very High Mobility

Added on May 19, 2014 by C. Maoxian.

Carnage on China Roads Shows Dark Side of Electric Bikes

By some estimates, 200 million Chinese now use e-bikes, a 1,000-fold increase from 15 years ago. About 90 percent of the world’s e-bikes were sold in China in 2012 [and] another 249 million will be sold there by 2020.

Very low cost until your batteries are stolen.

Scooter Batteries Stolen

Added on May 3, 2014 by C. Maoxian.

Yesterday afternoon when I was grocery shopping at the local Carrefour, I came out to discover this:

Battery well empty, cleaned out in broad daylight.

I bought the scooter in September 2011 and have replaced the batteries several times over the years, though never due to theft. The scooter totally changed my life. We've always had a car, but I hate driving it (there are now five million cars in Beijing) so it just sits in the garage collecting dust. With the scooter I'm truly free.

The scooter the day I bought it ... cost 4000 yuan (US$640) all-in ... it looks considerably worse for wear now and is carried as a fully depreciated asset in my mind. Yes, I really do think like that.

Four 12-volt batteries (20 amp) cost 750 yuan (~US$120). If you have your old batteries their trade-in value is 200 yuan (US$32). My scooter repair boy said he'd fashion a lock for these new ones and I'll update the post once he does that and I get a photo of it (assuming the batteries are not stolen again in the meantime).

Update: My scooter repair boy can't weld, so he just installed a conventional motion-activated alarm.