Gas Scooters

Thanks to a Scottish blacksmith named Kirkpatrick McMillan, we have relied on two-wheeled vehicles as an affordable means of transportation to cruise neighborhoods for more than 150 years. The Scot had invented the crank used to pedal a two-wheeled vehicle originally called a velocipede (today's bicycle). As the need for a faster mode of transportation grew, other European inventors experimented with ways to motorize the bicycle. In 1868, a Frenchman named Michaux-Perraux was the first to attach a small steam engine to a bicycle. The first successful gasoline powered bicycle would follow when Gottlieb Daimler (the "Father of the Motorcycle") invented the motocyclette. Prior to the turn of the century, a German manufacturing company, Hildebrand & Wolfmuller, created the first assembly line for producing an internal-combustion powered scooter called the Motorad.

Near the end of World War II, the first modern scooter was developed by an Italian manufacturing company, Piaggio. With Italian roadways nearly destroyed by the war, this former aircraft bomber factory was looking for an affordable form of transportations for their fellow Italians. One of Piaggio's aeronautical engineers, Corradino D'Ascanio invented a sleek monocoque frame with front forks and a small gas powered motor. When Enrico Piaggio first saw D'Ascanio's new vehicle, he said it looked like a wasp or "vespa" in Italian. The elegant motorized Vespa scooter was a huge success with the Italians and Piaggio began to export the pastel green scooters to other European neighbors. The post-World War II scooter provided the rider with a sense of freedom and independence. Piaggio's nearly defunct manufacturing facility rebounded and produced over 35,000 Vespa scooters in the first three years.

Another Italian pre-World War II manufacturer was also looking for an affordable alternative to the motorcycle. Ferdinando Innocenti, a pioneer in steel tubing technology, found a solution to the early problems encountered with other scooters. Innocenti installed a small 2-stroke engine that could go about 120 miles on a gallon of gasoline. With Europeans facing a major fuel shortage in the wake of the war, his Lambretta A scooter became the world's first fuel-efficient vehicle. The rider's feet rested on a floorboard, the lower body was protected from debris and a windshield was added for upper body protection. Once gas-powered scooters were seen in movies and used in print media to depict a fun-filled means of transportation, the U.S. market for Lambretta and Vespa scooters boomed. Italian made scooters would dominate the market for almost 40 years with their sleek two-wheel alternatives to the motorcycle.

By the mid 1980s, Japanese motorcycle manufacturers Honda and Yamaha had begun to design and produce a cheaper version of the scooter. These new entries into the two-wheel marketplace offered new designs that were lightweight and easy to handle. Honda's Aero 50 was released in 1983 and is often referred to as the first modern scooter. The Aero 50 featured an automatic transmission that coined the phrase "twist and go". The rider was no longer required to shift using a rotating grip. Most historians also credit the onset of emission controls in the United States as one of the primary reasons that the Japanese-manufactured scooters enjoyed such rapid success. The 49cc air-cooled 2-stroke scooter engines were environmentally friendly compared to the Italian 4-stroke scooters that emitted much heavier exhaust fumes. The Italian scooter manufacturers would choose to focus on the European scooter market rather than retool for U.S. pollution-control laws. With a wide open American market, other industrial nations like Taiwan, China and India started to manufacture affordable alternatives to the Japanese scooters.