We ride the Scooter Electric
by Dexter Ford
Published July 17, 2008
I’ve got it all figured out.
The beach cities — and just about every other city on the planet — has
a traffic problem. Too many cars, packed into too little space. And
there ain’t no more space — unless you want to line up in miles-long
traffic jams, and commute from Palmdale every
day.
We also have a climate problem. Too much smog, too little atmosphere to cram it into. Is it me, or is it hot out here?
Oil is over $130 a barrel. We still need to fly airplanes, light
lights, move stuff, grow crops, and power our electric toothbrushes.
Every drop of oil that goes into a car, truck or Hummer is a drop we
can’t use for something else. See those big ships moored off
Dockweiler? They’re not carrying rainbows.
How can we help solve all these problems – and have a zippy, yee-ha good time in the process?
On, Dasher! On, Vectrix!
It’s called a Vectrix.
It’s half scooter, half motorcycle, and all-electric powered. It’ll
outrun most cars from a stoplight. It’ll go 100 kilometers an hour — a
little over 61 m.p.h. It’ll take you, and the passenger of your choice,
and a couple Trader Joe’s fabric bags of groceries, between 25 and 40
miles with a single charge. And that charge costs you about 30 cents.
So now the energy needed to move you,
and a friend’s butt round town costs about a penny a mile.
The Vectrix is also a hoot to ride. It’s smooth, silent, and incredibly
easy to manage. To go forward, roll the right-hand grip backward, just
as on a hot, smelly, noisy gas-powered motorcycle. To slow down, roll
the twist-grip the other way. And voila, your forward motions gets
converted back into homesick electrons, neatly recharging the batteries
as you stop.
Backwards Into The Future
To go backwards — not even a $30,000 Harley will do this — just get
stopped, then do that same forward-twist thing with the grip. You wind
up crawling backwards, squirting out of parking spots like a watermelon
seed from your fingers.
So. If a substantial percentage of people rode their Vectrixes to work
each day, the streets of our fair cities, from Montauk Point to
Manhattan Beach, would suddenly look half-empty. Yes, I know 61 m.p.h
feels a little slow for a freeway. But when I rode from downtown L.A.,
down the Harbor Freeway, and home to Manhattan Beach one evening during
rush hour, glorying in my moral superiority, I had no problem keeping
up in the car-pool lane. What happens when somebody wants to get by?
Well, you let them by.
For all the little trips we all make, all the time, the ones that give
you such lousy mileage in the family truckster, the Vectrix is perfect.
You don’t have to start it, warm it up, take it to a gas station or
change its oil. You just unplug it, throw its cool braided- stainless
cord into its underseat trunk, and hum off into the sunset.
Too cool for school
For the couple months I had one, I rode it all over the place. I rode
to Hollywood to buy a new suit. I toured Palos Verdes. I took my
daughter, TJ, back and forth to Pacific School every day. She loved it.
I loved it. The other kids at school thought she — OK, and I — were
pretty cool. Even Ed Begley, Jr. loved it. Or would have, were he a
Manhattan Beach fifth grader.
Before you start muttering about how the electricity we were using was
made in an oil-fired, or coal-fired, or gas-fired, or uranium-fired
power plant — no, it wasn’t.
It was home-brewed on our roof with our 36 solar panels. For the month
of March, when we were using the Vectrix almost every day, our Edison
bill was negative 45 cents. Yes, Edison owes me money for March. I
don’t know which one of you other Edison customers used that extra 45
cent’s worth, but I hope you used it wisely.
Is the Vectrix — or any two-wheeled contrivance — for everybody? Heck
no. You have to wear shoes, and pants, and a helmet, and actually know
what you’re doing on a motorcycle before you even think about riding
one in traffic, no matter how puppy-like and benign it seems. It helps
if the weather is always great — which it pretty much is here at da
Beach. And before you take your kid on board — even for the quiet
half-mile between our house and Pacific School — you’d better be
really, really good.
This is a test
It’s no big feather in my helmet that I’m proficient at riding
motorcycles. I’ve been testing and riding them for a living, for
motorcycle magazines and various newspapers, since the Ford
administration — that’s why, and how, I got my hands on this hot new
Vectrix. So from all those years of riding, I have a pretty good idea
of where the next careening Land Rover is going to come from, and how
to get the hell out of its way. And you’ve never seen a more alert,
more careful motorcycle rider than me when I’ve
got TJ on the back. Or a more carefully helmeted 11-year-old.
Let’s examine the premise that the more people ride motorcycles and
scooters, instead of cars, trucks or de-militarized landing craft, the
nicer L.A. — and, by extension, the world, which seemingly wants to
grow up to be L.A. — will get, even for those people still locked
inside those landing craft.
The Amazing Dissolving Motorcycle
In the grand scheme of traffic, at least in California, motorcycles
essentially disappear, kind of like sugar crystals dissolved in your
coffee. They thread their way in, around and through the lumpy
molecules of idling cars, getting their riders where they need to go
almost as if all those cars weren’t there. They do this without
significantly adding to the total traffic — a motorcycle or scooter
usually doesn’t take a full lane, or a vehicle space in dense traffic,
so they are a win-win proposition, rush-hour wise.
If 25 percent of all the people streaming into L.A. each morning rode
two-wheelers, it would free up nearly an entire lane of traffic. And
when 25 precent of the vehicles out there are two-wheelers, people
driving four-wheelers will get much better at not pulling in front of
them or crashing into them. Which, in the typical urban street
environment, is by far the leading cause of
serious motorcycle/scooter accidents.
Imagine: Free freeways.
Imagine how nice life would be if there were 25 percent more freeway
lanes — without spending an extra dime building roads. Imagine how easy
it would be to find a parking spot, even in downtown Manhattan Beach.
How easy it might be to breathe in
Riverside. Because not only do even gas-powered motorcycles and
scooters emit relatively little carbon, the faster slow traffic goes,
the less time all those other vehicles spend idling, burning fuel and
getting nothing but smog and drowned polar bears in return.
Time magazine does an annual issue devoted to the “Best Inventions of
the Year.” Which is always packed with completely lame, cleverly
art-directed vehicles, some with three wheels, some with four, that are
going to save the planet with their incredible efficiency and zippy
design. Well, I’ve got news for the fine people at Time: we’ve already
got them. They are far-better-
engineered than all these Art-Center-Student specials, the ones
designed on the cocktail napkin of a Pasadena brewpub. They’re called
motorcycles. All we have to do is learn how to use them.
Riding for a reason
Europe, of course, pretty much has this figured out. In the U.S., so
far, motorcycles are pretty much toys — portable ego enhancers and
personal brand statements. In France and Germany and Italy and England,
however, motorcycles and scooters are much more likely to be considered
highly respectable, very efficient transportation — often used for
good, solid, useful purposes, in other words.
Not that riding a 175 mile-per-hour Ducati 1098R Superbike isn’t a
rush. But it’s a rush best sampled on a racetrack, not on the way in to
the esteemed law firm of Sheppard Mullin.
The Vectrix is the ultimate example of the kinder, gentler
motorcycle/scooters that are becoming more and more popular as gas
prices skyrocket. If you don’t want to go all the way to an electric
vehicle like the Vectrix, there are many gas-powered scooters like it.
Honda and Suzuki and Yamaha make nice ones, as do Piaggio and Aprilia.
These are called maxi scooters — very nicely
engineered and developed transpo-pods that are designed to get you to
Sheppard Mullin, or USC, or Costco, with a minimum of hassle and a
maximum of fun. They don’t carry the macho brand and emotional baggage
of a big, thundering Harley, or a 190- m.p.h. Suzuki Hayabusa. But for
most of their (current and prospective) riders, that’s just fine.
They’re built for the: “I don’t want
to rattle the windows out of your BMW’s doors, and I don’t need to feel
more manly by putting something hot, throbbing and thrusting between my
legs,” set.
Three-way action
Right now, I’m testing a very cool gas-powered maxi scooter called a
Piaggio MP3 500. It has a very clever, very new steering/suspension
system: it has two separate wheels on the front end, side-by-side,
instead of the traditional single wheel.
This makes it quite a bit more confidence-inspiring — and presumably
safer — than a conventional maxi scooter or motorcycle. Yet the
breakthrough design still lets the MP3 bank into corners, like a
regular bicycle, scooter or motorcycle. It’s just less prone to tipping
over in a corner, or under hard braking, if the front end loses
traction.
This is a hold-the-testosterone scooter, mind you, designed more for
slipping into something Prada than for racing superbike- squid kids out
in the Malibu Mountains. Its riding position is vintage Pee Wee Herman,
its engine a small, hidden, single- cylinder thumper, its transmission
shiftless, its exhaust note closer to an idling campsite generator than
a fire-breathing GSX- R600 canyon bike. But somebody forgot to tell the
MP3 that it’s not supposed to go fast.
In the hands of a skilled, demented rider — or even me — the MP3’s
amazing front-end traction and arrester-hook braking can make it an
instrument of sheer torture for any unsuspecting sport-bike Xtremists.
So for those who are not quite sure about this two-wheeled
transportation thing, there are upcoming three-wheeled alternatives —
even Vectrix is threatening to come out with their own 3-wheeled design
— that may add a bit of extra confidence and wife- ability to the
enterprise. Not to mention the ability to humiliate anti-social
motorcyclists whenever the roads gets twisty, grumpy, sneezy or Doc.
Yes, But…
Yes, riding a motorcycle is less safe than riding in an Escalade. But
knowing the real facts about motorcycle/scooter accidents goes a long
way toward helping you prevent that accident from happening to you.
First off, the leading cause of serious motorcycle accidents has
nothing to do with their power, speed, or propensity to tip over. The
most dangerous thing about a motorcycle is that it’s hard to see.
Motorcycles are especially hard to see, apparently, if you are in your
car or SUV, waiting for a gap in oncoming traffic so you can turn left.
You see the barreling bus, the cement truck, and the Honda Accord well
enough to bide your time — they might actually hurt you. So you wait.
But an oncoming motorcycle blends in with the gray background jumble of
the urban street environment all too well — especially if you aren’t
programmed to look for them — and if you’re juggling a latté, a
cellphone, a Blackberry and
a deposition on that motorcycle-crash personal injury case .
About half of all serious-to-fatal motorcycle accidents happen in that
same scenario: a car turns left into the path of an oncoming,
legally-ridden motorcycle, and the bike rider, with no time or space to
stop or swerve, crashes into the side of the car. Boom. It doesn’t take
much speed to make this a very bad experience. In fact, the average
speed of impact in these crashes,
according to study after study, is below 25 mph.
The next-most common accident is the traditional, late-Saturday-night,
head-full-of-beer crash into a tree, phone pole or guardrail. This
usually involves a Harley, a long visit at a roadside bar, and an older
rider. Motorcycle fatalities have been going up fast in the last few
years, and the average age of their riders has been going up with them.
Ten years ago, the average rider in a serious crash used to be in his
mid twenties, Now it’s 40s to 50s. Hmmm. Let’s see. What kind of
motorcycle has been selling like
hotcakes recently? Harleys. Who buys them? 40-ish to 50-ish men ---
many of them with little or no recent riding experience. What do they
do with them? Ride them to bars to meet their buddies on Saturday
nights.
What could happen?
Together, these two accident types make up a good 70 percent of the
serious motorcycle crashes, in study after study, year in and year out.
So, if you can avoid these two crash situations, you’ve found a pretty
good way to minimize your risk in riding a two- wheeled vehicle. First,
make damned sure that nobody’s going to turn left in front of you, or
lurch out of a parking lot into your path, or weave over into your lane
on a freeway.
How do you do this? By watching them like a hawk. Expect every
left-turning car to do it, abruptly, right in your face, at the least-
opportune possible moment. Be ready to stop, fast, if an oncoming car
even twitches near your path. Don’t enter an intersection unless you
know it’s safe. Not by the color of the light — but by the speed and
position, of every car, coming from every direction.
I treat every car out there as if it’s driven by an escaped convict, on
the run from the cops, who’d just as soon turn me into marinara sauce
as say hello. And if a car runs a red light, or lurches into my path,
and hits me, whose fault is it?
Mine. Because I was too stupid to avoid getting nailed.
So this two-wheeled thing may take some attitude adjustment. But the
good news is that the more motorcycles and scooters there are out there
on the road, the more of us start paying attention to them when we’re
driving our cars. We learn to watch for them in our mirrors, especially
on the freeways. We get to know some of those riders personally, so we
realize we’d feel bad if we killed them. We’d realize just how good it
is, for us and the world, to have more, not fewer, people moving around
on small, light,
traffic-slicing, park-anywhere scooters and motorcycles.
Real men (ands women) may apply
If your tastes run more to the overtly butch, there’s good news on that
score too. Modern sport and sport-touring motorcycles — the mid-sized
and big ones from BMW, Ducati, KTM, Honda, Yamaha, Kawasaki, Suzuki and
the rest — are almost as environmentally swell and congestion-reducing
as the more metrosexual maxi scooters.
Some of these bikes have simply amazing performance — by far the
fastest, quickest machines ever offered to the public. There are 10 or
so models that will go over 170 miles an hour, and out accelerate a
Navy F/A-18 in the quarter mile. Really.
The racing-superbike-based machines we call “literbikes” can hit 100
miles an hour in first gear. And have four or five more gears to go.
They can beat any production street car from zero to 60 — even street
cars costing hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars.
Most of these are made by the Big 4 Japanese companies, and they are
not expensive at all. For $12,000, out the door, with easy payments,
you can ride one tomorrow.
How crazy, how insane, how outrageous an experience would that be? It all depends on you.
A Honda CBR1000RR, for instance, is pretty much ready to go out and
race at California Speedway. Ready to race really, really fast — at
over 180 mph. It makes over 160 horsepower, and weighs just 450 pounds,
full of fuel — about one tenth of what your 4-wheel-drive Volvo
weighs.
Pussycat Doll
How hard is it to ride? It’s a pussycat.
It starts instantly, idles smoothly, steers beautifully, and is as
quiet as a vintage motorboat. All the controls have the same silky
glide as the controls in your Acura or Lexus. It’ll stop like that F/A
18 hitting the number-three wire. You can ride around on it all day —
to the market, to work, to take your kid to school — and never feel as
if it were not under your total, soul-of-sobriety control. Except for
the racer-crouch riding position, which takes a little getting-used-to,
it behaves with all the decorum of a
gaudily dressed butler.
If you never revved the engine past 4000 rpm, it could be your own
personal go-to-Traders-Joe’s scooter — a scooter that gets more than
its share of respect at stoplights. But like the Incredible Hulk, its
mild-mannered persona goes through a big, bad change when you crack the
throttle. In that next 7000 rpm, the skies will open, the clouds will
part, and angels will begin to sing.
Real angels, if you don’t keep your eyes focused a good quarter-mile into the future.
But we’re grownups, right? Yes, it has enough acceleration to warp the
very relationship between space and time. Enough thrust to make
jet-fighter jocks weak in the knees. But there’s no rule that says you
have to use it. Most routine street cars — Accords, Camrys, Altimas —
will go over 120 miles per hour. I recently found myself going 130 mph,
in a controlled racetrack test, in a four-cylinder, rental Accord with
cloth seats and an automatic transmission. Yes, we opted for the extra
insurance.
Almost every car we drive can do this. Don’t even think about how fast
your AMG Mercedes, or your Porsche, or your BMW M3 can go.
But we don’t routinely go out and do it. We behave ourselves. A
two-second space-out in your Prius, while driving past a school, could
wipe out a kindergarten class. So if you want to have it all, why not
be the soul of vehicular circumspection and environmental
righteousness, while riding the king-hell beast of adrenaline-addled
performance?
Even a big, bad racer-replica motorcycles like the Suzuki GSX-R1000
deliver 35 to 45 miles per gallon. More, if you click her into sixth
gear early and work the throttle gently. And if you ever want a quick
blast of velocity, to merge quickly with traffic, to get out of a tight
traffic situation, or just clear out the cobwebs every now and then —
you’re in the right place.
Hogs in Space
Even a big, bad Harley Fat Bob can get you work faster, reduce traffic,
and help save the planet. Though if you bought your Harley to further
your Marauding Visigoth self-image, you might not want to bring up that
saving- the-planet thing at your next Hells Angels clam bake. Harleys
are relatively slow, usually reliable, and relatively good on fuel
mileage, compared with most of
their foreign-made counterparts. Like other similar cruisers, they
aren’t the fastest-turning ormost-responsive rides out there. And their
sluggish front brakes often make them harder to stop quickly than other
machines — a characteristic that may become problematic when that car
turns left in front of you. But if that’s how you roll -- heck, get out
and roll.
Let’s split
Can you take your bike — be it a Vespa or Valkyrie — in the car-pool
lane? Certainly — and without any annoying stickers or quotas. And if
that gets clogged, you can always split lanes to make it to your 8:30
meeting.
Speaking of lane splitting: Doesn’t it tick you off when those unshaved
guys on motorcycles roar past you on the Harbor or the 405? Especially
when they shock you out of your conference call and your double-half
decaf? You’re driving your $150,000 Panzer V-12 — and the knucklehead
on the $5,000 rice-burner just went by you like you were a billboard
for your $150,000
Panzer V-12.
Well, hear this. What he’s doing is completely reasonable and legal.
And it’s helping you to get where you’re going faster — because if that
guy wasn’t on a bike, he’d be in a car, making traffic even worse.
California allows two vehicles to inhabit the same lane, if it’s safe.
If you try to change lanes without checking your (car) mirrors, and you
blunder into a passing, lane-splitting
motorcyclist, it’s your fault. Every now and then, some dill-weed
California legislator will try to outlaw this eminently reasonable
practice. The California Highway Patrol inevitably objects. They
believe that the lane-splitting-motorcycles concept is good for their
motorcyle-riding officers, good for us, the civilian riders, and good
for the rest of the poor schmucks waiting in line in their Escalades.
Safety studies have shown that motorcyclists splitting lanes are safer
than those who wait in line. Which makes sense: if drivers are so
spaced out that they routinely plow into the back of each other’s cars,
imagine how easy it is for them to squash a bike between those
rapidly-converging bumpers.
Where to now?
Yes, riding out in the breeze, even with the right protective gear, is
not for everyone. But every person who does it helps all the rest of
us, by saving oil, time, freeway congestion and parking space. And in
the case of the eclectic, electric Vectrix, it does that little extra
bit that might just save a drowning polar bear or two.
I’ll race you to Sheppard Mullin, starting at 8 a.m. No helicopters allowed. ER
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