Sooner or later, and usually sooner, every man of my vintage has had to pose himself the key existential question: Am I a mod or a rocker?
As a boy, these twin taxonomies flitted around the edge of my consciousness, looming into focus only on holiday weekends when the rival tribes would perform the ancient seaside ritual of beating each other with deckchairs. But there was no escaping the decision and, all things considered (the greasiness, the leather and the fact that I couldn’t ride a motorbike), I came to the conclusion that I wasn’t a rocker.
That said, mods could look bloody silly, what with the mohair suits, long parkas and strange haircuts. The only stylish thing they had going for them were the Italian scooters, but even then they tended to spoil them with an excess of lights. It wasn’t until I visited Italy and saw that the scooter was the cool means by which urban youth, particularly heartbreaking young women, moved between assignations that I realised that the mods were a naff take on something really quite natty.
All of which is to say that I got a surprisingly big thrill out of seeing the Zepii V60 in my front yard. With its pleasing retro curves and bright modern sheen, the Zepii makes an obvious but nonetheless successful bid for what its marketing people call, with cavalier disregard for originality, the “iPod generation”.
The idea of an electric scooter is not particularly novel either. There are plenty of others out there, but it’s fair to say none looks quite so attractive. The Zepii comes in nine different finishes — in an eco-version of Henry Ford’s famous maxim, you can have any colour you like: they’re all green.
But looks really do count here because, truth be told, they’re not that much fun to drive. Top speed is 48kph and it feels as though you’d need to be going downhill with a following wind to achieve it. Despite lacking a fuel tank, it’s by no means a light machine. For those whose most strenuous daily task is removing a BlackBerry from their pockets, pushing the Zepii to a parking spot may prove a challenge.
The Zepii is very much a metropolitan concept. In his vision for a green capital, London mayor Boris Johnson has promised that by 2015 no electric vehicle driver will be more than 1,5km from a recharging point. In the meantime, it’s an easy process to plug the Zepii into a domestic mains socket.
As the distance delivered by a fully charged bike is around 65km, that rules out the prospect of armies of Zepii V60 drivers going on mass awaydays. But city-dwellers be warned: behold the dawn of the i-Mod. —