Fifteen thousand kilometres, no warning light, and a very specific feeling on the causeway.
Of everything that goes wrong with an automatic scooter, this is the one that could be avoided by almost everybody and almost never is.
Inside the transmission there is a rubber belt running between two pulleys, and a set of weighted rollers that push one pulley together as the engine speeds up. That is the whole gearbox. It is elegant and it is cheap to maintain and it wears out without telling you.
There is no warning light and there is no noise. What there is, in order over a few thousand kilometres, is this. First the bike is a little lazier away from a junction, which you will put down to the bike getting older. Then it revs higher than it used to for the same speed. Then, and this is the moment people remember, you open it up to get past something on the causeway and the engine rises and the bike does not, and you feel it slip. Then, usually within a month of that, the belt lets go and you are pushing a scooter in the sun.
On these roads, with these stops and starts and this much salt and sand in everything, a belt does about fifteen thousand kilometres. The rollers last roughly twice that, and there is no point changing one without the other because a new belt on worn rollers does not sit right. A belt that has done twenty thousand is a belt you are riding on luck.
What the job involves: the cover off, belt and rollers out, both pulley faces and the clutch cleaned of the black dust that builds up in there, new belt and rollers in, cover back with its gasket, and then a road test, because a belt fitted slightly wrong pulls worse than the old one did and you would rather we found that than you.
Ninety minutes and a fair price, done on time. Done after it snapped, it is the same ninety minutes plus getting the bike here, and there is a real chance the clutch shoes have been cooked by months of slipping, which is another figure. We will ring you with it before touching it.
Two practical things. We write the kilometres on your sheet when the belt goes in, so the next one is a decision rather than a guess. And we will show you the old belt, which is the most persuasive object in this workshop: a new belt is about eighteen millimetres across and a finished one is about fourteen, and once you have seen them side by side you never argue about this again.