There Goes...Here Comes...Velosolex!
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Richard Erickson's Paris Journal - Freelance Correspondent to the Paris Pages
All images copyright (c) 12 June 1995 Richard Erickson - used with permission
Paris:- June 1995 - There are a lot of oddly-engineered things in
France. The original 'Deux Chevaux' had only one headlight. My car
has only one windshield wiper, and a single-spoke steering wheel. It
also has hydro-pneumatic suspension instead of springs, but you can't
see that.
What you can still see around are the ever-black
Velosolex's. In your memory's storage area, you might be able to pull
a picture of one, perhaps ridden by a long-scarfed student in a
Novelle-Vague movie from the 50's or by a priest wearing a sort of a
'was-ist-das' as headgear, similar to the one who stills eats
spaghetti for God in TV commercials.
When you see a real one you
won't be surprised to know that production was halted in 1988. They
looked like some unlikely prototype that nodoby would build and
certainly nobody in their right mind would use, but still, five
million were built over 42 years and a good many are still in use.
A Velosolex is a bicycle with a 49 cc motor. It really does need the
bicycle pedals that are standard equipment. The Velosolex' strong
point was not power.
A new Velosolex was cheap; cheap to buy and
cheap to run. It was simple; 80 percent of it could be fixed with one
wrench. Running on a mixture of gas and oil, its 1.25 litre tank
could propel you for 100 kilometres - and further, if the downhills
outnumbered the uphills. And if you just loved yours, that was
maintence enough.
Like a lot of French vehicles, the Velosolex has
'traction avant,' by friction - no transmission - and later models
had the luxury of a brake at the rear. If you were 'motoring'
on a level surface, you could take your feet off the pedals and put
them on the convenient foot-rest. This saved your socks from getting
sprayed with oil. However this raised the already high
center-of-gravity even higher.
France felt itself to be prosperous in
the mid-80's and the Velosolex' production logically ceased. The
Japanese had been waiting for this moment to market their new, shiny,
multi-coloured, modern, powerful and fast scooters - and they did.
Before any European manufacturer could react, the Japanese had the
majority of the market. The new scooters look nice, but they cost a
quarter as much as a new four-wheeled car with two doors, a roof, and
with a heater.
So now the good news: Here
Comes...Velosolex! However, the French company that is having them
built in Hungary does not want to pay 300,000 francs for the name,
owned by an Italian company, and now the Velosolex is called the 'S
3800,' which was the last model number.
Or maybe it refers to the new
price: 3900 francs, without haggling. Since the new one is identical
to the last one, the list of handy accessories is the same. There are
motor-heated 'cuffs' for the handlebars for example. But no speedo.
That would not be logical.
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Updated 04/95
