Oct. 28, 2024
&#;What kind of scooter should I get?&#;
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&#;Who makes the best scooters?&#;
In addition to getting asked these questions all the time, I also hear &#;Jeez, I wish I would have talked to you before I bought this Chinese piece-of-shite!&#;
I don&#;t begrudge people who buy Chinese scooters. Many savvy consumers do their research and still decide to buy Chinese scooters. The Chinese scooter solves a problem for them. They no longer have to walk around at the equestrian events they frequent. They can scoot around at the race track between heats. A Chinese scooter is the least expensive form of motoring transportation money can buy. For the money, Chinese scooters can be quite good, assuming you don&#;t end up with a lemon.
Based on my very informal study of Chinese scooters, lemons tend to be the exception rather than the rule. The vast majority of Chinese scooters can be reliable and fun, as long as they are assembled and maintained in a competent manner.
Are they as good as Italian and Japanese scooters? Heck no they aren&#;t! Do they do everything that Italian and Japanese scooters do, at least 90% as well as they do it? That they do! As usual, however, the devil is in the details. The Japanese pay attention to detail when they build things. You can see it in everything they build. The Chinese? Not so much.
With all of that said, I have three scooters sitting in my driveway at the moment. Among them there&#;s an old, Honda Elite. There&#;s a Chinese scooter of unknown origin. And, finally, there&#;s a Honda Metropolitan. Which one is the best of the bunch? Is it the newer Honda, like you might expect? Is it the old Honda? Or is it the Chinese scooter? Here they are:
Looking at them lined up like that, who knows which one is half decent? It&#;s hard to tell! So let&#;s dig a little deeper, starting with the gauges.
Despite being 24 years old, the Honda Elite&#;s gauges can be read easily and clearly. The same is true for the &#;06 Honda Metropolitan on the right. Look at the Chinese scoot in the middle though. The gauges are cloudy beyond all recognition. It might not even be possible to clear those gauges up, regardless of how much time I spend on them. If you want to be able to read your scooter&#;s gauges, the Japanese scoots win by a huge margin.
Now let&#;s look at the general appearance of the scooters.
Graphics are a big deal in the powersports industry. Sometimes the only change made to an existing model from year-to-year is the dreaded &#;bold new graphics.&#; But graphics kind-of-sort-of point toward how much thought went into the scooter itself. On the old-skool Honda Elite, we get &#;bold&#; graphics in black, teal, and purple shades. The Chinese scoot and the newer Honda scoot don&#;t have much in the way of graphics at all. Maybe it was just a 90s thing? I love 90s things. That&#;s the era I grew up in, so there&#;s a special place in my heart for the high-church-of-neon.
If you had to make a choice based on graphics alone, you would buy the old-skool Honda scoot over all the rest.
But appearances are just that: appearances, and graphics are skin deep. Let&#;s look a little closer, now with the taillights:
See how the Chinese scoot&#;s blinkers are cloudy? How well do you think that Hummer H2 driver can see those things on the open road? Not very well at all would be my guess. But what about the Hondas, both the Elite and the Metropolitan? The Elite has a clear taillight and clear blinkers even though it&#;s pushing 24-years-old. The Honda Metropolitan still has a perfectly clear set of rear blinkers as well, despite being over 10-years-old. But what about the China scoot in the middle? The lights have gone cloudy, and it&#;s a toss-up as to whether they&#;ll clear up ever again regardless of how much work I put into them.
Now let&#;s look at some really important &#;ish. Your tires are your last link between you and the road. The air goes into them through a valve stem. Valve stems are important. If they go, the whole wheel goes. So let&#;s look at these three bikes&#; valve stems.
Let&#;s have a look at that one in the middle, the China scoot, how those valve stems look:
Look closely, and you&#;ll see a heck of a lot of dry rot on that China scoot&#;s valve stems.
That means the valve stem, thus the tire, can go at any moment. One second you&#;re riding along at a nice clip, the next second you&#;re cruising along on flat tires. When they go from full to flat, all kinds of no-good-very-bad-things can happen. It could happen while you&#;re riding. It&#;s a good idea to change the valve stems on any kind of China scoot you plan on riding.
You&#;ll notice the early Honda has metal valve stems, and the newer Honda has solid-looking rubber valve stems. Both of these configurations work equally as well, but guess which one&#;s going to be more reliable? The valve stems on the early Honda aren&#;t quite as subject to wear and breakage as either the Chinese or the later Japanese scooter&#;s are.
The bottom line is Japanese scooters hold up better over the years than just about anything else. Now let&#;s talk about these scooters&#; engines.
The &#;93 Honda Elite is powered by a stupid-simple two-stroke (2T) engine. This means the spark plug fires and an explosion sends the piston rocketing downwards every single time it reaches top-dead-center (TDC). 2T scoots and motorcycles tend to make more power than those powered by four-stroke (4T) engines of the same displacement.
In other words, a 50cc 2T scooter will be faster than a 50cc 4T scooter. Speaking of 50cc 4T scooters, let&#;s talk about the much newer Honda Metropolitan, &#;Met&#; for short.
It&#;s liquid cooled. It has a throttle position sensor. The engine&#;s cases &#;clam shell&#; over the crankshaft, not unlike the way modern sportbike engines are designed. It has a very clever starter. The frame is made out of aluminum. It has an electronic fuel pump.
The Met is also as slow as the day is long and, because you can&#;t simply unbolt the cylinder from the cases, there&#;s not much you can do about how slow it is!
The &#;93 Honda has a 70cc big-bore-kit. The kit took about 2 hours to install. It does wheelies. It is much, much faster than the &#;06 Honda Met. I reckon it is just as reliable.
Another good, used 2T Japanese scooter to look for is the Yamaha Zuma.
They suffer from all of the build quality issues discussed earlier in this post. Their one saving grace is the fact that the engines are, in fact, really quite decent.
And you can make them faster easily by installing a big bore kit. A Chinese scooter will never &#;feel&#; like a Honda Metropolitan going down the road, but a Chinese scooter with a big bore kit installed will go faster than most Honda Metropolitans and Ruckuses.
Chinese scooters are good for occasional use, like at an equestrian event or as a pit-bike at the races. For every day road use, I recommend buying a Japanese scooter.
If you plan on keeping it stock, look for a nice, used Honda Ruckus or Metropolitan. 4T Yamaha scooters are available as well, and they are just as good if not better than the Hondas.
If you want to go fast, try to find a &#;94-&#;01 Honda Elite with the &#;DIO&#; or AF16/18 engine. Failing that, find a Yamaha Zuma with the horizontal engine. The ones with vertical engines are plenty cool, too but the parts aren&#;t quite as plentiful.
Have fun and stay safe out there!
A proud and noble beast
Earlier this year, I was faced with a dilemma. I had just finished university and was moving from Cambridge to a small town in Bedfordshire, about two hours away. I wanted to stay employed with the company I was working for, but their closest store was 15 miles away from me in Milton Keynes.
I took a place at the Milton Keynes store and had to find a way to commute to work. I tried, very naively, to cycle there and back once, and it was horrible. The way there via canal paths was fraught with peril, and returning via the dual carriageway was scary and reminded me that I'm horribly unfit.
For a while, I caught the train there and back, but this posed two problems: I would potentially have to work from 6:45 a.m. or to 9 p.m., and sometimes trains weren't available. Secondly, the walk from my house to the train station was 40 minutes. The train journey was a further 15 minutes, and then I had another 20-minute walk in Milton Keynes. Furthermore, it was bloody expensive (thank you, London Midland).
I decided I needed an engine. I have no full driving license, so I opted to take a CBT road test and buy a scooter. Since I'm lazy, slightly stingy and foolish, rather than take time out to hunt down an expensive Japanese second-hand bike, I simply bought a brand new Chinese-manufactured scooter, a Lexmoto Valencia 125cc. Enquiries online and with shop owners revealed it was apparently reliable and popular.
I paid £1,059 for the scooter, and the shop very kindly paid for the first tax disc and also threw in some L plates for me. Insuring the bike cost approximately £40 per month with Swinton Bikes, who sent me an extraordinary amount of spam (which, considering I had already bought their policy, was bloody annoying).
I was very pleased with my little scooter. Sure, it was a Chinese Vespa knockoff, but it was a good-looking one. Nice to ride, too. Supremely comfortable seat, nice engine sound and relatively good fuel economy.
The scooter wasn't without its problems, though. Firstly, the storage compartment under the seat wasn't big enough to store a helmet, which was quite irritating considering how fat the bike is.
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My girlfriend was sitting on the seat while the scooter's stand was enabled and the key was in the storage compartment key slot on the side of the body. The scooter rocked back, causing her leg to brush ever so lightly against the key and this tiny lateral force snapped the key in half.
Love nor effort would convince the damn key to come out so for more than a month, I was stuck with an inaccessible boot compartment and only one key.
Attempts to get a new key cut at well-known locksmiths (Timpsons) didn't work as they didn't have a template key to match my scooter. Luckily, an independent locksmith had a match, though only one of two keys made worked with the scooter. Weird. Eventually, the key was taken out at the bike's first service for the sum of £15.
Another major problem I had with this bike was when I returned from a two-week holiday to find a breather pipe to the engine had mysteriously snapped. How it managed to break during two weeks of inactivity is beyond me. It suggests a general fragility with the bike though&#;bearing in mind that all of these events occurred in the space of just two months.
I probably qualify as the world's least technical man, so I contacted the dealer who assured me that the bike was perfectly safe to ride in such a condition. It didn't affect performance&#;it just made the bike's exhaust noise rather shouty. Think of a kitten pretending to be a lion.
As you can see in the photos, the bike I bought was garnished with an amount of chrome detailing. If you do buy a bike with a similar design, please, for the love of God, cover it up every day. I neglected to for a couple of weeks and the English weather proceeded to tarnish the headlight housing with rust. All other areas were mercifully untouched by the rain.
The broken bit.
After a few months, a position came up in a local store in town. I changed jobs and my commute was reduced to just one mile rather than 15. I still kept the scooter as it was exceptionally handy for popping to work in five minutes or for late-night visits to the supermarket.
Ultimately, though, I couldn't justify keeping the scooter. It was making me really lazy (why walk when you can pootle?*), and my out-of-town trips were rare. Also, riding on dual carriageways in severe crosswinds is a life-endangering experience. I sold it a few weeks ago for £650.
Now that does seem like steep depreciation and it may be, but I am a terrible salesman. I hate haggling. I was happy to accept a number just to get rid of the thing.
I don't want to make it seem like my ownership experience was entirely bad though. I genuinely did like my scooter, and if I was rich and lazy, I would have kept it. I believe that the negative experiences I had were relatively isolated. The bike itself was easy to ride, pretty safe (fat tyres, a top speed of 53 mph downhill) and cheap. Even the problems that I had, if fixed out of warranty, would have only cost £40 or so. I genuinely hope the man that bought it off me is not having a bad time with it.
For anyone buying a Chinese scooter, rather than a Japanese second-hand bike, I offer the following tips:
* I'm a firm supporter of 'pootle' being the official verb to describe travelling on a scooter.
This article is accurate and true to the best of the author&#;s knowledge. Content is for informational or entertainment purposes only and does not substitute for personal counsel or professional advice in business, financial, legal, or technical matters.
Walter Shillington from Windsor, Nova Scotia, Canada on August 05, :
I recently purchased a very nice Liberty 150 from Piaggio. Before that, I owned a CPI Oliver City. This little 50cc Chinese bike (Yes, a scooter is a bike) lasted me twelve years. Maintenance was a breeze and even someone as mechanically inept as myself, could repair any of the problems that cropped up. This is because parts are easily accessible and cheap. Also, there is some sort of UK Chinese scooter forum on the internet that has plenty of information on how to repair these vehicles. I do prefer the Italian bike but, for sure, I had a lot of fun riding the little Oliver City. Sam Knight, I enjoyed your article.
Scott bell on June 05, :
Chinese sccoters are cheap, and the manufacturers donot make enough spare parts for them!! Buy from another part of the world for a good scooter
Larkspeed on October 22, :
So you are bashing a scooter because you broke a key doing something you should never do, have a passenger on it while it's on its center stand, and because someone vandalized it while it was parked.
Two things that are in no way the fault of the scooter or the way it was manufactured.
If you are getting roasted on forums for saying you ride a Chinese bike you deserve it, you don't ride a bike (motorbike) at all you ride a scooter.
This post reads more like a warning to get a clue about what you are doing and how to handle a scooter before you buy one than it does about the quality of Chinese scooters.
And yes I ride a Chinese scooter, as do hundreds of people around here, and I ride mine every day without any issues.
They are extremly popular because they are cheap, extremly reliable when treated right and very cheap to repair if they do break.
So my advice to anyone reading this is to ignore this entire post and by all means buy a Chinese scooter, they are great fun and last forever if you know how to properly take care of one.
AltaF on January 17, :
Vvvvv nice looking
Alicia on August 24, :
cheers for the advise mate. thinking of buying one but will perhaps look at a few other motors beforehand
If you are looking for more details, kindly visit electric motorcycles in china.
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