One of my favorite comedies of the past few years is Spy, featuring Melissa McCarthy. In it, she steals a BMW C1 scooter, the one with the canopy, and she falls over in it and famously says “Who puts a roof on a scooter, what are you, The Pope?” It’s funny because it is odd to see a canopied scooter fall over. What’s even funnier, watching a video of the very same scooter slam into other BMWs set to music.
This video is a crash-test video of BMW testing the C1 scooter’s safety by crashing it into E36 and E46 BMW 3 Series’. The idea was to create a scooter that had the same level of safety as a small European city car. Did BMW succeed? I’m not sure. Apparently, they’re still popular in European cities, such as Paris.
Whether or not it was actually any safe is irrelevant at the moment, as it’s just funny to watch the roofed scooter smash into BMWs and seeing the crash dummy flop around, all while set to music. Maybe that’s childish or immature but this genuinely makes me laugh.
In some situations, it seems like the roof on the BMW C1 is actually sort of helpful. For instance, in a side impact, the roof can hit the car before the driver’s body does. Sometimes, though, it just seems useless. Also, the top-heavy nature of it might make it even more dangerous in the event of a crash. Still, it doesn’t really matter. The only thing that matter is how funny it is to watch it smash into E46s with music in the background.
I probably laughed more than I should have but I’m also a child, so there’s that. And the question still remains, who the hell puts a roof on a scooter?
