Lets say you want to travel 20 miles to see a friend for the day, so a 40 mile round trip. On a petrol scooter there would be no problems. On an electric scooter you could run out of power, and then what are you going to do?

Most petrol stations are not set up to recharge your batteries, so if you run out of juice in the middle of nowhere, you are basically stuck, having to push your heavy electric scooter all the way home. Not much fun, especially if it's raining.

In the next decade or two, electric vehicles will be everywhere, cars, planes, busses, scooters, you name it. But for now the infrastructure of our nation is not set up for electric vehicles.

In the future it is possible that charging strips will be installed underneath the road surface, which will automatically charge your electric scooter or electric car as you travel along the road.

Electric vehicle technology is in it's infancy, so like all new technologies, it will take time to iron out the teething problems and create new solutions to solve the more complicated problems.

At the moment, there are not many electric scooters available as they are expensive and not practical. If there were recharging stations all over the country then perhaps it would be worth getting one, but as there are not many recharging stations it simply isn't realistic to use an electric scooter for all of your transportation needs.

The initial outlay for your electric scooter will be higher than the price of the average petrol scooter you can buy online, and although electric scooter owners don't pay road tax, they will almost certainly be paying out a lot more money in terms of upkeep and repairs.

You will almost certainly have to buy new as you don't usually find very many used electric scooters for sale in the online classifieds.

Repairing an electric scooter

Another problem arrises when you consider the fact that your electric scooter will eventually break down. The problem is that the mechanics of today were trained on petrol and diesel vehicles, not electric ones, which means they may not know what they are doing. The time it takes them to figure out the problem will obviously be billed to you, not to mention the cost of the parts.

Spare parts for electric scooters are currently harder to get than for their petrol alternatives, they do not make a lot of parts for electric scooters, meaning increased part costs when something goes wrong. 

The mechanics may even have to import the parts from abroad, that's if you can find a mechanic willing to fix your scooter.

Your electric scooter may seem eco friendly, but in reality all of the repairing and transportation of the scooter to and from the mechanics (if it isn't working) all add on to your carbon footprint, including the air miles it takes for spare parts to be imported.

In summary, electric scooters are a nice idea, and in ten years time there may be the infrastructure to help support their use, but for now, they are not ready for the roads of Britain.