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I never charge mine; I ride it often enough and long enough where it doesn't need it.

Groovy... I recognize that intersection! My first thought was, "Hey, that looks like an intersection close to where my grandparents live." I came back to the thread and checked your location, and sure enough... Birmingham, AL

I made a thread over on the Modern Vespa forum about buying the BV 350 without test driving it first because if I got it from my local dealer, I would not be able to. I started calling around to other Vespa dealers within an hour or two drive from here to see if any of them would let me test drive a 350. I talked with the guy at Vespa Orlando for a little bit and he said that they sell out of the BV 350s really quick and that it's proving to be a really good scooter with lots of demand. He literally just sold the last one 15 minutes before I called and said it will be 1 - 2 weeks before another shipment (I think he said of 3) would be coming in. He said it would be totally fine for me to take one out for a test drive. He got my name and number and everything and will call me when they come in.

Then he threw a wrench at me. The guy that just bought the last BV 350 had traded in his BV 250. The Vespa dealer said that this guy is a regular customer who trades his scooter in about every 3 years, takes real good care of it (waxes it every month and everything) and is only at 3,800 miles. They're closed tomorrow, and he said he'd hold off listing it for sale until mid-day Tuesday when they reopen, but he expects it to sell really fast. He quoted me $3800 out the door. Also, strangely enough, going from my Chinese 150cc to the Piaggio 250cc will decrease my yearly insurance premium by $16. I had expected it to go up. I did a quote for the 350 while I was at it, and it increase by $48 (so a $64 difference between the two, not a big deal imo).

Here are a few pictures the dealer e-mailed me.

I'm a little torn. Honestly, I think the 250 would be perfect for me if I were the only one riding it. However, it would be nice to have a little more power and comfort for slightly longer drive with 2 people. I'd really like to be able to, for example, hop on the scooter with my wife and drive the 1.5 hours it takes to get to the beach or just be able to take a weekend, go drive out to the middle of nowhere and go camping and come back the next day or whatever. The 350 would definitely open more doors for that sort of thing. I also really like the 350s extended maintenance intervals. Really, the only reason I'd consider this 250 over the 350 is cost.

my 150 gets up to 58 according to the speedo. GPS says about 56

[replyingto=payneib]payneib[/replyingto]If you're considering the Downtown 300i, make sure you check out the People GT 300i as well. They are nearly identical; just different bodies. I'm actually going to be giving the People GT 300i a test drive later today if it stops raining.

I'm torn between the Kymco People/Downtown GT 300i and the Piaggio BV 350. Just from reviews I've read I'm leaning towards the Piaggio. I really like the long maintenance intervals. Oil change every 6k miles (10k kilometers), belt and sparkplug every 12k, and don't have to adjust the valves until 24k miles. I believe Kymco recommends oil changes every 3000km, so I'd be doing maintenance three times as often on the Kymco.

It goes so fast, you could even say it travels through time

That's actually a common misunderstanding of the no-fault law we have. If the person that hits you doesn't have insurance all you can do is sue them. If they don't have any money then you're just screwed. I know this from experience. I got rear ended by this lady and she screwed my car up bad. Hardly put a dent in hers. We could have taken her to court and caused her to go into bankruptcy because she wouldn't have been able to pay for the damages, but we settled outside court. We didn't want to have to deal with it. I was out quite a bit of money though.

The way to protect against that is to have uninsured motorist insurance. If the person that hits you has no insurance or is under insured that's when your uninsured motorist insurance kicks in.

If you are a pedestrian and you get hit by a car it's basically the same thing, except you can't rely on your uninsured motorist because it only applies if you are in your insured vehicle. At this point, you have to rely on your health insurance to foot the bill.