Exion Scooters

Exion Scooters – Cees Bakker’s amazing home-built speedsters
By Jeffrey the Barak

Just one look at the carbon fiber creations above tells you, now those are some fast looking scooters! And fast they are. Designed for the racing circuit which exists in Europe, but not in the USA, these home built human-powered scooters make everything else (except the gorgeous Kickbike) look mundane. The name is Exion, remember it.

Netherlands racer Cees Bakker is simply an individual with talent. He does not own a scooter factory or an airplane factory or a racing car factory or a boatyard. But somehow his desire to get something better to race with was all it took for the emergence of these amazing carbon fiber contraptions.

Light weight and aerodynamics are the key to going faster and longer in the scooter world. Its the same for both racers and cruisers. Lower the weight and cut through the air, and your muscles will get you further and faster. While scooters do not have the mechanical advantage of the gears and pedals, found on the more familiar bicycle, the considerable weight savings can almost make up for it in the long run. Cees’ Exion Scooters are so light and strong that you can easily walk around holding one in one hand for a while. Try that with a bicycle!

Aside from low weight and good aerodynamics, designer Cees has introduced a low footboard, essential for efficient kicking, a stiff frame and good steering, as well as a custom front wheel braking system more in tune with the needs of a scooter. Even the fork is carbon fiber.

As his subsequent models evolved, the footboards got lower and narrower and the side views continued to surprise with new eye-popping looks. About the only disadvantage of the higher frame on this scooter is the loss of the ability to quickly dismount to one side for an uphill run without swinging your leg over the top. But with a rear wheel and fender just a couple of feet high, its no big deal. If you really care about that one little thing, well there’s always the Kickbike (see the article “Human-Powered Scooters” elsewhere in this magazine).

Even the prototype model was pretty stunning:

And the variations keep on coming as Cees Bakker keeps on Scooting:

The red scooter shown racing above even has a carbon fiber curved nose handlebar cover to cut through the air. I’d like to see that in a velodrome or on a downhill.

Cees is not a world champion, but he did take second place behind scooter king Hannu Vierikko in a race in Wales.

So if you are a scooter rider with a desire to have the latest and fastest in your stable, why not contact Cees Bakker and commission him to build you an Exion? His email address is: exionman @ wanadoo .nl (spaces inserted to foil the Spambots)

Jeffrey the Barak is the publisher of the-vu and a human powered scooter fan.

Tick Tock Goes the Love Clock

By The Advice Diva

You wake up in the morning, still tired from staying up too late the night before, and hit snooze about seventeen times before stumbling into the shower. By the time you start rinsing the shampoo out of your stinging eyes you are already thinking about everything you have to do today. You put your makeup on in the car and get to work late as usual in desperate need of a caffeine fix, do errands at lunch, pick up your dry cleaning before the store closes after what is most likely another late day in the office, make time for tanning and an hour at the gym, and get home to a house you have to clean.

Every day is almost the same, you are busting your hump trying to get this and that done while your list of errands keeps growing. And thanks to living in an exponentially growing population in an overpopulated city you spend an obnoxious amount of time in the car giving you more time to think about everything you still need to do. By the time you get home each day, you clean a little, shovel your special diet food that you ordered online (who has time to actually shop in a store and leisurely browse anymore?) which costs a small fortune and tastes like chicken feed and crawl into bed. Then you stay up late with your mind like a maelstrom worrying about everything you did not get accomplished. When does anyone have time for a relationship?

People who live and work in the city without a significant other or children are always on the go. You might think that a single man or woman lives the life of leisure: no obligations, no pressure, just complete freedom. And I suppose that there are plenty of single men and women who just stroll home after work, order pizza and plant their tushes on the couch to watch their usual prime time television line up. But these are the people whose tushes are the same size as the couch. Hey, no ambition, no life. However, these days our lives are getting busier and busier for most people. There is so much for us to do every day. Even the singlets of this world are screaming for more time. I seriously wonder how people are able to raise children today. I know I barely have time for nookie at the end of the day.

Perhaps it is because many people living in the city go through several stages of social behaviors and desires in their lives. At first we are the struggling young professionals straight out of college, accepting a bottom of the food chain job and struggling on a $20K salary. These were the days of buying raman noodles in bulk and picking up a bartending job in the evenings. You can’t even afford to date at this age. And if you could, when would you have time? Finally you get a better paying job and you move up in the business world. But now you have entered a whole new social world. You are financially able to drop the second job, get some new digs without holes in the seams and start enjoying the night scene with everyone else.

Swiftly you discover the beau monde and your life is consumed with keeping up to date with all of the latest trends, making sure you look perfect in every way and of course making sure everyone thinks you are the “it” guy or girl. How can you possibly start a relationship now? He or she might actually find out that your not fabulous. Besides, it is much more hip to have a new fling every week. This is the period of our lives where we are all poseurs. After a few years of fun and reckless behavior, you get promoted to a more prominent position in the business world. Now you realize your responsibility and you may even take it seriously. Your life might change, but your busy schedule does not. It just gets worse.

When you actually get involved in that serious relationship, you must devote time to it. To do so, you have to give up things that you don’t necessarily want to give up. I always believed that we work so that we can have time. We buy time. We work so that we are able to luxuriate in vacations with our loved ones and so we can buy expensive lingerie to keep the spark alive. But instead of spending as much time as we can with our sweethearts, we end up spending our time washing the car, burning the flab in Pilates class, picking up the cat food and cursing the poor slob who broke down in the middle of a one lane road during rush hour.

We are so greedy and obsessed with our appearance and materialistic needs that we find it difficult to give our own time, our most precious commodity, to someone else. Then again, when we daydream about the kind of future life we want, we envision a life surrounded by family and friends, a house in the burbs, a loving spouse and children and spending the days at home being independently wealthy. We see ourselves doing what we really want and need: spending time in the arms of our darlings.

For questions and comments contact The Advice Diva at: thediva@advicediva.com Please visit www.advicediva.com for more articles by the Diva