Three bucks a gallon!
That is the average price of gas in Maine as of Monday. Even with a hybrid car’s 50 miles per gallon, getting around is more expensive than ever.
Motor scooters, which can get over 100 mpg, are making their way back on the roads. Although ever-present in European cities like Rome (and the classic 1953 Gregory Peck-Audrey Hepburn movie Roman Holiday), Maine doesn’t yield warm weather long enough for comfortable scooter riding. But with gas prices like this, the number of scooters on the road this summer is increasing.
Steve Cloutier, owner of Cloutier’s Power & Sports on Route 1 in Biddeford, is in his first year of selling two-stroke Keeway motor scooters.
“I’ve sold about a dozen,” Cloutier says, “but I see more people taking them out of the barn.”
Cloutier has had an influx of customers coming in for parts to fix up their old motor scooters. “A lot of it is gas motivated,” he says. Referring to the new Keeways, he says “these get 60 to 80 miles per gallon.”
When it comes to the environmental impact of motor scooters, Cloutier is well aware of Maine’s adaptation of the emissions standards of the California Air Resources Board. According to a California Environmental Protection Agency press release, the regulation requires automakers to sell vehicles with reduced greenhouse gas emissions by model year 2009. Cloutier encourages his customers to use smokeless two-cycle oils and synthetic oils that run cleaner.
Although classic two-strike engines do not meet emissions standards (in part because they burn a mix of gasoline and motor oil), production of motor scooters with cleaner-burning four-stroke engines is increasing. Scooter makers are also moving towards liquefied petroleum gas, which will significantly reduce the scooters’ emissions. Electric scooters that run on rechargeable batteries create no emissions at all, apart from however the electricity was generated.
Rodney Collard of Biddeford bought a Keeway Venus about a month ago in an attempt to save on gas going to and from work. The $1300, 65 mpg Chinese motor scooter was just the ticket. Do the emissions concern him? Collard is quick to pull out a bottle of Swiss-made motor oil, Motorex, which boasts low smoke and low emissions.
“When I turn it on, it smokes for three seconds, then stops,” says Collard. He is also on his fourth fill-up of the scooter's 2.5-gallon tank, “and I haven’t used a quarter of a bottle yet.”
