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The e-scooter isn't new – London was zooming around on Autopeds a century ago
Related: https://horizonmicromobility.com/blogs/micromobility-blog/history-of-powered-scooters https://horizonmicromobility.com/blogs/micromobility-blog/hi...
- nickdothutton 10mo agoI also like to point out that we had electric powered food delivery services in London from 1932.
- thenthenthen 10mo agoThese are ICE and not electric.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- jtbayly 10mo agoNo way that’s a 15 inch wheel.
- hylaride 10mo ago> The e-scooters that clutter up pavements may seem like a new thing, but a hundred years ago, there were already people zooming around London on powered scooters. The problem is that we've given so much space to automobiles that there's no room for anything else (bikes, scooters, etc). Pedestrians have been given a sliver only because drivers need to walk between parking and their destination. This is true even in cities where the majority of people don't even drive!
- sheepscreek 10mo agoProbably cause modern logistics, especially last mile logistics, is dependent on trucks/delivery vans/etc. So even though folks in a local area might like to walk around, their groceries won’t make it to the stores and packages won’t get to their homes without a robust road network. I think Bacerlona hits a good compromise. The city has the concept of a superblock, which is a few city blocks grouped into one calm zone. Most car traffic stays on the streets around the outside, the perimeter of the superblock. Inside, driving is restricted and only at low speeds where allowed, so people and bikes get the space. So deliveries and residents can still but only slowly. That’s far from the only example - many cities in Asia follow a similar model.
- ajb 10mo agoLondon is edging in that direction with the introduction of "low traffic neighbourhoods". Basically this involves preventing vehicles using them as a through route, by limiting some connections to only emergency vehicles. The problem is that it's also annoying for residents as it means the allowed entry/exit routes aren't necessarily in the direction you need to go. Does Barcelona have a smarter method?
- alistairSH 10mo agoIsn’t the presumption that residents walk/bike/transit far more often than drive?
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- bondarchuk 10mo ago>"(street background expanded)" As in... expanded using generative AI? (The perspective on the lamps is really off unless they're different size lamps)
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- funwares 10mo agoYes, using AI as per the filename "backgroundexpandedusingai" [0], it seems to be an expanded version of this pic from Wikipedia [1] (but blurrier). [0] https://8400e186.delivery.rocketcdn.me/articles/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/12/Lady-Florence-Norman-autoped-backgroundexpandedusingai-01-768x469.jpg https://8400e186.delivery.rocketcdn.me/articles/wp-content/u... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priscilla_Norman#/media/File:Lady_Florence_Norman.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priscilla_Norman#/media/File:L...
- xgulfie 10mo agoI hate this. Why not show us the actual photo. Infuriating
- agumonkey 10mo agoI wonder how we'll deal with the inability to tell what's true or not in the coming years. Even without full deepfakes.. just a gradual hypothetical restoration turning subtle hallucination in many many places.
- hnbear 10mo agoMy father was gifted a pair of these for his 50th birthday, would have been 1989, in London. Little ICE scooters. They were a lot of fun and not very safe. We had drunk guests damaging themselves in the street. They became toys for my brothers and I, who had plenty of accidents but learnt to ride them reasonably. The engines didn’t idle particularly well and had no gears. You had to pull start, hop on and go quickly while reving just enough to idle without it moving. It took practice. You could push start too with some practice, especially once warm. Lots of fun, but mileage wouldn’t have been great for serious use and refilling a pain at a regular petrol station. Might have been 2-stroke, I can’t remember. Tiny engine, closer to a strimmer than lawnmower. Huge fun though for just bombing around on as a tween and young teen.
- pcdoodle 10mo ago[dead]
- _yb2s 10mo agoMust have been two stroke, 4 stroke motors are too large and heavy for an application like that.
- Epa095 10mo agoAccording to Wikipedia > The engine was an air-cooled, 4-stroke, 155 cc engine over the front wheel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoped https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoped
- _yb2s 10mo agoGuess I was wrong, that’s a shocking engineering choice, that engine looks massive and heavy. A four stroke engine is about twice the weight and size for the same power output, but much more fuel efficient.
- gerdesj 10mo ago"Fuel efficient" - that's probably why. If the fuel efficiency more than off sets the additional weight, for range then four stroke might be indicated. There are lots of other factors to consider.
- vessenes 10mo agoBoy I had a liminal moment looking at these photos and videos - this all could easily have been a fun AI media project. In fact, I think the first photo used outpainting (“street background expanded” reads the subtitle). I’m enjoying my last year or so of visual media trust, as ephemeral as that is in reality.
- wzdd 10mo ago> In fact, I think the first photo used outpainting And it looks bad. The streetlamps on the right are way too close together and the building on the left looks like a prison or something out of Dickens.
- vessenes 10mo agoI think this is precisely why I locked in so hard on the essay; I got suspicious right from the gate. Interesting troll to have uncanny valley AI about a real and unusual thing right up front. There should be a word for it.
- tw04 10mo agoDid someone actually think scooters were new? We had them growing up, I thought it was common knowledge the only thing novel about e-bikes and e-scooters were the lithium ion batteries and electric motors giving adequate runtime and performance. You could drive a moped on city streets before you turned 16 which got a lot of teenagers in my hometown to work and sports in the summer when their parents couldn’t. But they were slow, noisy, and smelly compared to a modern ebike.
- renewiltord 10mo agoI’ve seen the original of the main photo before which is the only reason I know that two-stroke ICE engine powered standup scooters like that existed. So, yes. Things do get invented so it’s not surprising. Luggage with wheels is a pretty recent invention considering when luggage and wheels were invented.
- sejje 10mo agoWhen I was a kid my cousin had an old moped from, I think, the early 70s. We rode the hell out of it all over our weird, empty, pre-planned city. If I remember it got just over 100mpg. The grown ups didn't even mind buying us gas.
- Al-Khwarizmi 10mo agoWhen I was a kid in the 80s scooters weren't a thing in my country, I never saw one, but they did appear in the comics I read (from the 50s-60s). I remember asking my parents about them, and they telling me that they were toys from their time but no longer existed. Now of course they're very common, my son has one.
- cons0le 10mo agoGod every website is such garbage these days. 1 second timer, full page pop up. Geolocation logging to sell to advertisers... I'm just not gonna read the article. It's a shame cause it looks interesting
- baxtr 10mo agoI googled Autoped and found this site about the topic. Much cleaner. https://horizonmicromobility.com/blogs/micromobility-blog/history-of-powered-scooters https://horizonmicromobility.com/blogs/micromobility-blog/hi...
- cons0le 10mo agoThanks for this. Now I can send the pic to my local PEV group
- moffkalast 10mo agoOh but don't you want to login with google? Please accept these cookies we need for good reasons we promise. Do you want to chat with our customer bot? Your needs are important to us. Also view this video you need to see right now, with sound on!
- sejje 10mo agoYou rejected all our cookies with the toggles? Great, now accidentally click the big green button that says "allow all" and overrides the toggles you just spent time selecting! And now the popup will disappear forever. Goodbye.
- dang 10mo ago"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- tgv 10mo agoFirst off, the price: £36 was much more than "£1,600 in today’s money". A railway clerk made £2 12 0 in a week in 1917, (less than £10/month if I did the shillings and all that properly), which makes the scooter price the equivalent of 3.5 months, which is £7,000 at the lowest end of today's London North Eastern Railway salary range. The fact that the picture has Lady something in it, suggests it was more of an upper-class thingy. Second, the scooter may not be new, the cluttering certainly is. Look at that empty street!
- soared 10mo agoAgreed - though street is AI generated from a close up image but it’s unknowns better it was actually empty or not :(
- gambiting 10mo ago>>A railway clerk made £2 12 0 in a week Made how much? I have no idea how to parse this
- RobotToaster 10mo ago£2 12 shillings and 0 pence. A shilling was 1/20th of a pound. 12 pence were in a shilling (so 240 pence in £1)
- albumen 10mo agoI’m sorry but this article‘s headline/thesis is atrocious. The headline strongly implies there were e-scooters back then; there weren’t. Second, London’s pavements weren’t cluttered with autopeds; or if they were, there’s no evidence offered. Third, why expand the image with AI? The original is fine. I do appreciate the dive back into history, but ianvisits.co.uk (which I usually like) can do much better.
- observationist 10mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoped https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoped It's interesting that the engines are roughly the same as the 4 stroke china girl engines you can get for bikes and scooters today, a 155cc and 191cc model. I wonder if it was a weight/size to power tradeoff, or convention that stuck - was there a targeted engineering reason behind the similarity in size, or have enough things stayed similar in the world of standard parts and sizes that we still have roughly the same engine sizes? Neat article.
- torgoguys 10mo agoDoes anyone remember the 1980s PBS show Newtons Apple? A segment on that show was called "Newtons Lemons" and would show an old newsreel from I'm guessing from the 1940s or 1950s. Each one would feature some sort of "futuristic" gadget, and invariably it would be something that never panned out and I had never heard of as a kid. I distinctly remember one of these featuring basically a scooter with a small gas motor and the narrator talking about great it would be for commuting to work when we can all own these. By my recollection, it looked very much like escooters of today, just gas. When escooters became a thing, I looked for this newsreel for a while and never found it. Anyone else remember this?
- riffic 10mo agoMuch like the motion picture industry, there are hardly any original ideas anymore.
- cornonthecobra 10mo agoAnyone read that thinking they're claiming the Autoped was an e-scooter? It used a petrol engine. It had a novel idea of pushing/pulling the handbars to engage the clutch/apply the brake. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoped https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoped
- DeepYogurt 10mo agoWe need to bring the term Autoped back. Beats the snot out of escooter
- gerdesj 10mo ago"Beats the snot out of escooter" Shit not snot. Please do the job properly! I agree: Autoped is a far better name.
- stuaxo 10mo agoMaybe we should pretend escooter is a spanish word.
- Nasrudith 10mo agoPersonally I suspect Autoped wouldn't do too well, it would provoke too many jokes about robo-pedophiles, not quite as bad as Nonce Finance, though.