Apr 7, 2008

Scooters for Summer

With warm spring weather here and record gas prices with it, you might think about supplementing your transportation fleet with a quiet, easy-to-park and “green” electric scooter. For around-town errands, it’s hard to beat the convenience and cost-savings of a scooter. Especially if your pogo stick is in the shop.

If someone told you that electric vehicles are slow, they weren’t giving you the straight story. The newest electric scooters, like the Zap Zapino, have a new secret weapon: a powerful motor technology built into the rear wheel. This motor is so powerful, it can win drag races against gas scooters, with speed and acceleration that leaves the gasoline-powered models in their own emissions. The Zapino is a moped-class electric vehicle that offers a sporty, if traditional, scooter design, and its power is smoother than you might guess.

It features a high-tech wheel-motor rated at 3000 watts. ZAP says this offers customers the most powerful wheel-motor available on the scooter market today, allowing unprecedented performance. Engineers found that wheel-motors actually squeeze an extra 20 to 30 percent more efficiency out of the vehicle, allowing it to go much farther than similar scooters without wheel-motors. In tests, the Zapino was found to travel up to 30 miles per charge, varying somewhat upon the rider and road conditions. (If you’re fat you can go as far.) The Zapino is designed to plug into any normal household outlet and comes with all the features and equipment you would expect in a scooter, like a seat and a light, for instance, without using gas.