2016 Piaggio MP3 500ie Review

Maybe somebody beat you with a kickstand when you were a child, and you carry an irrational fear of them? Let it go, with the MP3 you can relax, you don’t need one. With a little practice, you can flip the right-thumb button inward just as you’re coming to a stop, which clamps the caliper to the ¼-of a brake-type disc which holds the MP upright. The people in the cars look at you with even greater suspicion. As soon as you twist the throttle to blast off, the lock releases and in town, most of the time, you’d never really know you had two wheels up front. (If you’re rolling backwards, though, the upright lock won’t release until you thumb the lever!) The lock-up mechanism even has its own ECU.

Things that can go wrong include: You can be creeping slowly ahead in traffic with your feet up, just fast enough to disengage the upright lock without realizing it, and you can then topple over sideways in the middle of two lines of cars waiting to turn left. I don’t know if the MP3 will fall all the way onto its side, but it definitely falls far enough that you need both legs off that side to heave it back upright ASAP, red-faced. And it ain’t light; 577 pounds dry is Piaggio’s claim. That’s about the same as the contestants in our 2013 Uber Scooter Shootout, but then you sort of expect a little extra heft since the Piaggio gives you an entire extra front wheel and suspension.

It’s also a good-sized scooter, plenty big for two, with good storage, and it’s pretty cool that it gives you all that for $8,999–quite a bit less than a BMW C650GT and fully $2K less than a Suzuki Burgman 650 ABS (the MP3 also has ABS and even traction control). As a matter of fact, Piaggio hasn’t brought the MP3 to the U.S. since 2010, but it’s back for 2016 with a raft of improvements.

2014 Piaggio MP3 500 ABS/ASR Review

Its 493cc liquid-cooled four-valve Single is now fully ride-by-wire, and puts out a claimed 40.1 horsepower and 45.5 Nm (34 lb-ft) torque. Piaggio says that’s enough to push the MP3 up to 89 mph (don’t tell anybody I saw 98 indicated). Nobody will be able to complain about throttle abruptness, thanks to the CVT transmission.

Forty horsepower are plenty for a scooter; dropping the hammer when the light turns green leaves everybody in the dust and drowns out the annoying “beep” the MP makes when the thing that keeps it upright stops doing it. In spite of Peter Egan’s observation that the real purpose of a trike is to allow you not to miss any bumps in the road, the MP3’s 16.5-inch track means you can avoid a lot of them just like on a motorcycle. And it deals with the ones you can’t avoid pretty well thanks to nearly four inches of wheel travel up front, and 4.25 inches out back, controlled by a pair of preload-adjustable shocks.

A new three-channel ABS system developed with Continental manages each wheel independently to prevent lockup. Strangely, the MP needs a lot of lever pressure to get the tires chirping, with a wooden feel TR described last week in this three-wheeler comparison. Now there’s ASR, Piaggio-speak for traction control, disable-able with a dashboard button.

Front wheels are up from 12 to 13 inches, and now pack one 258mm brake disc each. There’s more room for both rider and passenger now, more accessible underseat storage, and there’s a new glovebox atop the new dashboard with a USB port. The front’s been given a facelift and an LED running light, the rear end is completely redesigned.

To 5-foot-8 me, it’s all pretty swell; the broad seat’s not low, at a claimed 31.9 inches, and not narrow, so it’s nice to be able to just lock yourself in the upright position, which you can do with the button below about 2 mph.Taller people complained about the seat bolster (which is removable but leaves two holes visible), but the bolster’s there to solve a complaint from the previous model of passengers sliding forward. The new adjustable windshield, in its middle position, lets people my height see right over, and is remarkably aero and quiet at freeway speed – and the fairing is wide enough to keep your body out of the windblast, too.

Around town, surprisingly, you can still lane-split through gaps about as easily as the average sport-touring bike, which is a must-have for us California riders – the bike is narrower than the handlebars. Speaking of California, we were hoping for some el Nino to kick in so we could try the MP3 in the rain; it’s real reason for being is so that you’ll never lose the front end again in a low-traction situation.

What we found instead of water was a beach parking lot full of sand; you actually can get going 10 or 15 mph and throw the MP3 on its side in a way that would have you instantly down on a two-wheeled scooter; it countersteers just like a motorcycle. The MP just does a few side-shuffles and carries on, no problem. When one front wheel’s losing traction, maybe the other one isn’t. And when both are losing grip, the simple triangulation of the thing keeps you up until you cease doing the stupid thing you’re doing.

A physicist would need to tell us if the MP has twice the front grip of a normal scooter, but I did throw it into a few experimental tight corners faster than I would’ve dared on anything with one front wheel. The MP’s front tires were totally unfazed, and Piaggio says the thing will lean as much as 40 degrees. The only weirdness is that you feel input from two front wheels not always 100% in agreement, which is an easy thing to get used to given the payoff. The front end is so planted, you can get the traction control to hiccup out back if there’s a bump midcorner. On the other hand, you can turn off the TC in a big dirt parking lot, and it feels like it wouldn’t take much practice before you’d be performing power slides that would make Jay Springsteen jealous. (It would, however, take more practice than I could get in that day before one of the dog walkers also in the dirt lot was gonna call the cops.)

Here in the modern Dust Bowl, an extra front wheel might not be a big advantage, but I could totally see the attraction if you lived in a walk-up apartment with street parking in a foggy old-world city full of damp cobblestones, and had no choice but to send the wife out in the snow for supplies and to drop the kids at school. You don’t have to spend much time in places like Milan to understand the many reasons you’d rather not own a car, along with the other many reasons the MP3 makes more sense than a two-wheeled scooter, some of them for safety and some just for fun. Piaggio, in case you didn’t know, is the world’s largest manufacturer of scooters last time we heard, and has sold a ton of these in Europe.