I think we can all agree that the world is serious enough. And so whenever you find the opportunity to bring a bit of levity to the masses, you should take it. That's especially true when it comes to riding and reviewing scooters, an inherently silly machine.
Yet, between the marketing and first ride reviews of BMW's new all-electric CE 02 scooter, writers have taken what I would consider a far too serious tone. I'm not saying those stories or the information within them were wrong, I think our review of the little machine is accurate, especially having now ridden it myself.
But whereas their assumptions about range, usability, and price are correct—something I'll get to in a second—they failed to see the forest for the trees. That is, everyone got lost doing capital-J journalism when they could've tempered that by also doing capital-H hooning, finding the joy in this incredibly unserious machine.
I mean, there's a sticker on the side of it that says "E-Parkour." Come on, folks, lighten up and find the fun. Even the most serious Germans are putting "The Office: jokes on their scooters.
And so I think I maybe found the machine that BMW meant to market, but that got lost in the articles about its specs. This dumb-fun scooter was made to make you smile...and slide.
I got to experience the CE 02 on the streets of Las Vegas, Nevada, where our convoy of 1%ers took the streets by force. I kid, but it was hysterical watching 20+ EV scooters running down the Vegas strip like we were the Hells Angels. Again, very unserious.
What I learned was that, yes, its range sucks and charging it requires you to bring its proprietary charger with you if you want to extend its range. That's not ideal when the US' charging infrastructure is getting somewhat better.
Furthermore, the marketing of this scooter toward city dwellers isn't going to work without access to public charging. For most folks living in an apartment, you won't be able to charge it at your complex because most apartment garages don't have 110v outlets in each space. And bringing the 291-pound scooter up to your place in the elevator will likely be a no-no based on weight limits, and your building likely won't allow you to do it anyways as it poses an insurance liability of fire.
What this scooter was made for, though, was standing up on the passenger pegs—yes, the passenger pegs, as they're positioned better—jumping off curbs, and generally treating the rear tire with wanton mechanical abandon, using the handlebar-operated rear brake to wiggle, wiggle, wiggle, wiggle, wiggle, and slide.
With Aaron Colton's stunts still fresh in my brain, at one point on our trek, we were waiting along a dead-end street for our photographers to finish up. There was literally nothing else to do aside from either bake in the hot Vegas sun and sit or have some fun. I chose the latter, in that I spent the afternoon locking up the rear tire and do a bunch of skid figure-eights, something that's beyond easy to do.
Honestly, I couldn't stop laughing and the rear tire just kept taking it. "This is what this was made for," I told myself with the biggest smile on my face, as the old mantra of "slow bike fast" came to mind.
Track-rat BMW S1000RRs don't have as much fun as I was.
That's not all, at one point in our day, as I waited for everyone to don their riding gear, myself and another rider took to circle tracking the CE 02 in the parking lot where we were staged. And the goal of our antics was to see who could scrape the scooter's pegs. But because we weren't doing a billion miles per hour—maybe 12mph—or worrying about dying or crashing, we likely had far more fun than anyone and their liter bikes.
If you're a car person, the best way to describe the BMW CE 02 is it's an electric Miata.
I do think the CE 02 suffers for its price (as tested nearly $10,000), range, and charging issues, all of which has been rightly detailed previously in our own coverage as well as in other outlets. And I think BMW's marketing of it being for city dwellers isn't accurate, despite getting around Vegas without issue.
If you were to eschew its Hoonigan-esque antics, this makes more sense for European hamlets than any sort of industrialized city. It makes sense as a village-to-village bike or small-town runabout. BMW will, unfortunately, never get American city folks to buy this. They literally couldn't run it.
But I bet dollars to donuts that they'd sell this thing like hot cakes if they threw a dirt tire onto the back and called it an electric flat-tracker/back-alley drifter for antiestablishment millennials that've gone corporate and can afford a garage with an outlet and its price tag.
Apparently, the CE 02 was built for me. Who knew?
