Quote:
Originally Posted by WarrenS
For licensing purposes anything over 50cc and 30 or so mph are motorcycles. Motor placement is one more way to tell a scooter from a cycle. Scooters, including the Burgman have the engine under the seat. Cycles have the motor between your knees or legs. This distinction makes the Passport a cycle, as well as the chain drive and large wheels. I had an Express and it was called a no-ped because it was designed to meet the moped designation but without pedals. This evolved into the scooters being classed as mopeds if they met the requirements.
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The way I see it, for anything above 50cc you need a Motorcycle Endorsement, however the 2 wheeler not necessarily is a motorcycle.
We used to have a lot of these (what we call scooters) in Belgium in the eighties and nineties:
We called it a DAX, because above is based on the first european company DAX to release bikes with little wheels, and minimalistic looks.
They usually would come in 50cc 75cc, 100cc, or 125cc. Occasionally someone would have a 150cc, but not in the nineties.
We'd call it a scooter, eventhough many websites call this a motorcycle.
I understand there's a difference between legally defining the thing, and what the thing is in the street language.
In the nineties, usually anything with a small engine (sub 150cc) was called a scooter.
Then they started having Honda CBR 125 and 150cc, which where seen as a motorcycle. Heck, they even had a 50cc CBR clone; which was also seen as a motorcycle.
And then, in the 2000's when Suzuki got their burgmans, with 400, and 650cc, it's seen as a scooter.
So I suppose scooter had more to do with layout than cc's, or power.
Fact that those machines just happened, and never got universally defined, causes many to use different naming for the same bike.
On the motorcycle forum, some older gents, call their 250cc motorcycles, scoots, because it's nothing compared to a 650cc, or a 2200cc motorcycle.