What makes a scooter?

But where doe they come from? Here's a potted history...

Okay, so what makes a scooter? It seems to involve an increasingly broad definition, but the mob that's generally credited with starting all this trouble is Piaggio.

Let's go back to 1945. WWII has just finished and there's a need in many parts of the world (particularly if you happened to be on the losing side) for cheap motorised transport. All sorts of interesting enterprises and icons grew out of this need, with the Vespa (Italian for wasp) being among the most famous.

We'll let the Vespa on-line museum take up the story: "Piaggio came out of the conflict with its Pontedera plant completely demolished by bombs. At the company's helm was Enrico Piaggio, having taken over from his father Rinaldo. Enrico decided to leave the aeronautics field and pay his attention to problems of personal mobility. 

" Italy's broken economy and the disastrous state of the roads did not lend to fast developments in the automobile markets. But hunger for mobility required immediate answers. From an intuition of Enrico Piaggio's, in the spring of 1946 the Vespa was born.

" Corradino D'Ascanio undertook to design a simple vehicle, robust and economic but comfortable and elegant, one which could be driven easily by anyone, women too, and which would not dirty the driver's clothes and would permit carrying a passenger.

" D'Ascanio, a genial aeronautics engineer, had been with Piaggio since 1934 and was responsible for the project and construction of the first modern helicopter.

" D'Ascanio, who could not stand motorbikes, dreamed up a revolutionary vehicle. Dipping into his knowledge of aeronautics, he imagined a vehicle built on a frame and with a handlebar gearchange. He mounted the engine on the rear wheel. The front fork, like an aircraft's landing gear, allowed easy wheel-changing.

" In April of 1946, the first 15 Vespas left the Pontedera works.

The first Vespa had a 98cc two-stroke engine giving 3.5 hp at 4,500 revs. It reached 60 kilometres per hour and had three gears."

You'll find that there are now a lot of variations on the architecture, with motorcycle-like frames creeping onto the scene, the occasional roof, auto transmissions (now almost universal) and powerplants mounted in the frame rather than on the swingarm.

The interesting thing though is there's a strong market for classic scooters, such as Vespas and Lambrettas from the 1950s and '60s. Good examples will fetch as much and very often more than a new equivalent.

By Guy Allen