[TacticalCoder]

Ah ah my youth! I had a Vespa with a 200cc engine, three speeds, from the 80s: this thing would do a wheelie in 1st gear. And very hard to control wheelie for the weight is uneven on a Vespa. My brother had a rare Vespa 125 cc from 1961 or something: when he left the country he sold it to a friend who still owns it.

Another friend of mine --the reason we all had Vespa back then-- could disassemble and reassemble them with his eyes closed, including the engine.

We'd go to flea markets and garage sales around the country looking for Vespa, Lambrettas and even french Solex for sale. Best find was not a Vespa though but a real Honda Monkey Z50.

One day I forgot to put oil in a Vespa and the engine just froze: cylinder expanded in the piston and rear-wheel locked in place. Somehow I didn't crash. I put oil (you typically had oil with you, in a tiny trunk), waited for the thing to cool down: it just started back up (!).

These were the days, thanks for posting that on HN.

P.S: it's really sad we cannot have nice things posted without having the majority of comments being from environmental-jihadists : (

[perching_aix]

> without having the majority of comments being from environmental-jihadists

Not to break your wishful thinking filled bubble, but those are very clearly not "will somebody please think about the environment" type comments. Plenty of people simply fucking despise the ever living shit out of this class of vehicle, just in general.

You really don't need to give two hot shits about the environment to find scooters obnoxiously loud smoke factories, to have a problem with that, and to be absolutely fucking over them as a result. Delivery drivers made sure of that in the past years. I'm sure it's much more convenient for you to just file it under your favorite political grift, but I assure you with confidence, the hate on these is entirely self-interested and genuine.

[lostlogin]

> the hate on these is entirely self-interested

I’ve never before considered altruistic hate versus self interested hate.

I’ve a foot in both camps over scooter noise and fumes, but do love a good Vespa.

[perching_aix]

FWIW, I have absolutely nothing against people loving these things, having fond memories of it, whatever. In fact, I do not see having a love for them and not wanting them on the/certain roads as fundamentally incompatible even. It was the absurd ideological pigeonholing that got to me.

Heartwrenching that OP has a hard-on against environmentalism and feels/is victimized by its proponents on the regular, but it's super not what people were yapping about, isn't at all required for the positions purported, and this really couldn't have been any clearer. Asserting otherwise is intellectually insulting.

I could even sympathize with not wanting to read scooter hate every time scooters come up, which I can definitely imagine to be a phenomenon, but then I would also appreciate not having to read people randomly soapboxing and projecting broad scale political alignments, so that's kind of a 1:1 unfortunately.

[herbst]

I had a 50cc and also could do wheelies. I loved my Vespa, it was always ready for whatever I wanted to do. Sometimes 45kmh, in a warm day even 55.