With Diesel at $5.00 a gallon I was thinking about scooters yesterday (I know!  but my commute is only 10 miles, so why not.)  The funny thing is, Scooters "only" get about 80-90mpg.  Now I know that may seem like a lot, but a hybrid car in the city can get 50mpg, and that's a whole car, not a 200 lb. scooter.

I realized that scooters don't get better fuel economy because they are super small engines at super high loads, operating at full throttle all the time.  It's like if you took a super fuel efficient vehicle like a honda hybrid and floored it all the time wherever you went.  Your fuel economy then wouldn't be 50mpg, it would be more like 20mpg.  The solution?  A diesel scooter.  Diesels get about 20% better fuel economy under light load conditions, but that advantage increases to 40-70% under heavy load conditions.  That means a comparable diesel scooter could get about 150 miles per gallon, and my trips to work would cost about 35 cents a day instead of $5.00 a day.  That's about a thousand dollars a year, money I would be glad to put right back into my truck to make it go faster.  Just some fuel for thought.