Scooter Eco-Analysis

Wired Magazine
October 2008

Dear Mr. Know-It-All I've always been proud of my scooter's great gas mileage. But a friend tells me its emissions make it no greener than a Chevy. Have I been deluding myself?

Your use of the word always implies that your scooter is rather aged. If that's the case, then your contrarian pal may be right. Older scooters with two-stroke engines emit far more smoggy pollutants per mile than their four-wheeled counterparts.

True, you probably get double the fuel economy of a Chevy and can thus crow about your ride's smaller carbon footprint (and thus smaller contribution to climate change). But your tailpipe may also be belching out 10 to 15 times more smog (nitrogen oxide and hydrocarbons) than that Chevy, to the severe detriment of your city's air quality.

If you switched to a new, four-stroke scooter, you could pop your eco-jersey a bit more. New federal regulations on two-wheeler emissions kicked in for the 2006 model year, and they're slated to get even tougher for 2010. Look for a scooter with a catalytic converter — the emissions-scrubbing gizmos aren't required, but they are becoming more common.

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/16-10/st_kia#

At scooterhire.co.nz, we do not spend a lot of time wringing our hands over environmental guilt.  We do however get a wee bit annoyed over environmental misconceptions and hysteria about Scooters. 

Scooters are at the other extreme of engine size of a "Chevy" (or most other “vehicles”) and typically have 50cc to 150cc engines. Admittedly some of these engines do have more lenient EPA emissions standards. However, while they may pollute more per displacement size, they are far smaller in engine displacement and will emit a smaller total amount of alleged pollutants into the atmosphere than larger motorcycles or automobiles.

Most modern scooters have a catalytic converter. If this article was written 10 years ago, the writer might have more of a point. But the fact is that these days most reputable manufacturers offer modern emissions-controlled, CARB and Euro III certified scooters.

Scooters are also cheaper energywise to build and maintain, which is a factor the writer forgot to mention. Half of the emissions created during a vehicles life are in the manufacture and cars and trucks lose that game in a huge way.
Cars emit CO2 in direct relation to how much petrol they burn, so using a lot less fuel should keep the environmentalists happy!

How much petrol does a scooter use?

From our last post, us folk at scooterhire.co.nz firmly believe that the focus on the frugalness of scooter’s fuel use is … well, boring! We would rather commentate on the amount of FUN that scooters are to ride.

We must admit that the most common question that we are asked by our customers is “how much petrol do our scooters use”. Coming up with reasonable, legitimate fuel economy figures for our scooters is next to utterly impossible. There are so many variables. The rider’s weight, total load, traffic, speed, driving style, operating temperature, and many more factors dictates the fuel economy of a scooter.

In the absence of any form of official L/100kms (MPG) figures, we have been keeping track of average fuel use.

We prefer to use V-Moto Milan and Monza scooter models that are all 50cc models that have fuel capacity of up to 5-litres.

Our unofficial Fuel Economy figures are:

V-Moto Monza 3.2L/100kms (74MPG)

V-Moto Milan 2.8L/100kms (85MPG)

What does this mean – well… our scooters use bugger all petrol!

Keep in mind that these are not exact fuel economy figures and there is no guarantee that any of these scooters will return this exact mpg figure, but it should serve as a somewhat reasonable guideline.