Two-Stroke Engines

Two-stroke engines seem to be in a lot of places in Germany: scooters as well as leaf blowers, lawn mowers, hedge trimmers, lawn edge trimmers and chainsaws. In all cases the advantage of the engine is that it is rather light and cheap to produce.

But these savings are paid externally. Only using two strokes means that oil is burned in the process, leading to really nasty exhaust fumes. Also these devices do not have an exhaust cleaning system to save weight. Lastly they also don't have a muffle system, so they are obnoxiously loud. All of this is understandable, but alternatives with electric engines are available for quite some time.

While I was in China for four weeks in 2019, I only saw two scooters with a combustion engine. All others had an electric engine. The battery pack could be taken out and looked standardized. I imagine that it was similar to a car battery and the owners would just charge it in their appartment. According to other people who visited China, these have been around since at least 2010.

As I am regularly either woken up or disrupted during work by the usage of the loud gardening tools outside, I would really wish that they would migrate to electric engines very soon. Additionally when I cycle behind a scooter (often limited to 25 km/h), I hate to breathe in all the two-stroke exhaust fumes. Fortunately there are already few electric scooters around, but I would really wish that the change in propulsion system would quickly catch on.