ORIENTAL AGLES
I’ll unashamedly go on record to happily state the first powered two-wheeler that I ever owned was not some rorty Japanese 50cc motorcycle thinly disguised as a moped. Oh, no – I began my motorcycling adventures upon a Mobylette SP93 replete with variomatic type transmission and both brakes activated from the bars à la bicycle. It wasn’t especially fast but it did have a restrained style to it… or so I thought.
That the little ‘Moby’ opened up huge vistas and possibilities is a given – we all experienced similar I’m quite sure – yet it wasn’t actually the first motorised bike I ever rode. No, that initial experience was upon a British machine of strange parentage. Back in time, somewhere around the mid-to-late 60s and long before political correctness, there was an annual event at one of the big London exhibition centres called The Schoolboy’s Own Exhibition. Presumably there was a similar event for young ladies?
At said event there were seemingly countless stands indulging the passions of the male youth of the period with the aims to variously aspire, impress, educate and loosen money from indulgent parents’ pockets. One stand had a faux trials course and a few motorcycles for lads to ride around on. Amazingly, decades before Health & Safety neutered any creative thoughts from the British psyche, someone had worked out that older boys and younger lads really shouldn’t be allowed to ride petrol-powered motorcycles indoors. Honestly, I cannot imagine what they thought could possibly go wrong!
The quartet of bikes on hand were all smart-looking BSAs I seem to recall, yet their normal motive power had been swapped out for DC electric motors powered by Exide batteries. If you were thinking: “Flipping heck, was the BSA conglomerate that far thinking?” the answer is, sadly, no. BSA’s board may have been out of touch with reality but I seriously doubt it’d been popping mind-altering psychedelic drugs. The electric motors were there to prevent asphyxiating thousands of kids and their parents, along with a realistic desire to prevent a teenage youth from immolating a large national exhibition centre.
The experience left the rider perplexed more than inspired as there was no noise, no sensation of latent power and little in the way of real speed – the latter being a good thing in retrospect, to be honest. Times have moved on, BSA is but a faint memory for many and electric vehicles have progressed immeasurably. This is most emphatically a good thing as no one with a soul would genuinely wish to ride the twowheeled equivalent of a 1970s milk float.
We are, and have been, told by our supposed betters that the future for individual transportation is electric and that anyone besotted by the evil ICE (Internal Combustion Engine) will be perceived as a gross polluter. Although any ICE will pollute, there’s more than one side to the story; many take issue with such thoughts and here’s why. No vehicle pollutes when it’s not being used – therefore our old machines only emit nasties when they are actually in use. An extant machine of any type has already been made, on the other hand just how much pollution is evolved in the production of a new electric vehicle? While still at school I was taught that the likes of lithium were termed ‘rare earth metals’, so, unless the revisionists have reinvented the periodic table and its constituent elements, then lithium is indeed not a common material. Check out the mining and refining processes mandated by the production of the requisite batteries. The waste products of the ICE device are well known and we’ve been dealing with them relatively efficiently for some time now but ask a car dealer just how the batteries of a hybrid or all-electric car are recycled and watch them change the subject!
That we need to reduce emissions (of all types) is an immutable fact but what we don’t need to be doing is cheering for the motorised equivalent of The Emperor’s New Clothes! If only that BSA had been hydrogen powered, eh?