Picture this, if you will: It’s the 2025 Los Angeles Distinguished Gentlemen’s Ride to help raise funds and awareness for men’s mental and prostate health. There are over a thousand incredibly well dressed people, mostly riding classic (or classically styled) motorcycles. Think Triumph Bonneville convention where others are also welcome as long as they look amazing and are out to help deliver the message of kind awareness. My Valentine and I were dressed to the nines and aboard a shiny 2025 Moto Guzzi V9 Sport Chrome, feeling all kinds of handsome and righteous with our fund raising success for something we both believe in. We parked the bike in a crowd of beautifully dressed folks on the corner of Venice and Abbott Kinney’s high fashion shopping district. You can tell that it’s going to be an expensive and fashionable place when there’s an Erewhon on the corner.

I digress. Once dismounted, we started to mingle and mix with the awesome folks at LADGR. From the corner of my eye I saw a shiny red thing and turned in time to see 3 fabulous women astride 3 fabulous scooters: a white, a black, and a typically Italian red one. There’s something magical about people on scooters. I can’t tell if I’m making it up but they’re all smiling and full of the kinds of joy that only a scooter can bring to one’s psyche. Our friend Hailey Arnold, who is in charge of Piaggio America’s press fleet, was riding the red one and I simply forgot about the nearly one thousand motorcycles at the 2025 LADGR event. I sheepishly asked if there was a chance for me to baby sit one of the cuties and she surprised me by bringing the white 310 to my house.

When I was growing up, scooters were dirty noisy little things that people with extremely limited funds used to get around the city streets of Iran. My perspective has wildly changed as I’ve grown older and traveled to Europe on multiple occasions where there are still dirty noisy little scooters for folks with limited funds and also big fancy shiny ones for commuters who want to get there quicker, with more style, and still be frugal about their fuel consumption. And then there’s Vespa which is to scooters as Kleenex is to tissues. The cuteness overload is almost unbearable and burley grown men talk to it as if it’s a puppy. There isn’t a mean bone in this thing’s body, even though it now boasts an upgraded 310cc motor that will propel you to highway speeds with ease. Those 12″ wheels look as if they’d be very unstable but the engineers at Vespa have upgraded the suspension and the beast is steady as can be on the imperfect LA streets and was silky smooth whilst my Valentine and I had a date day of grabbing breakfast and scooting around town, looking at pretty houses and giggling our way through Hollywood-land. The seat is incredibly comfortable and the passenger pegs unfold into secure spots for back seat rider. There is a bit of getting used to with how wide your stance needs to be, at a stop, when you have a passenger as their feet get in the way when you need to put yours on the ground. That may be my only complaint about GTS Super 310 scooter. A testament was given in the form of a 60-something year old fella in a gleaming silver Mercedes S550 Coupe: “you two look so cool on that thing!”. Thanks kindly LA resident. We thought so, too.

At $8,199 it isn’t the most affordable scooter on the market. Its metal body, upgraded electronics suite – including the Vespa MIA app that will connect your scooter to your smartphone – and the bike finder feature that will allow you to find your Vespa in a sea of scooters, bring a lot of value to what is a tidy little package. I particularly enjoyed the remote seat unlock feature and the very impressive LED headlight unit. In the midst of all this technology, Vespa kept things old school by giving the rider a perfectly usable analogue speedo along with an easy to read LED info display that’s easy to toggle. Don’t even get me started with the horn. It may be my favorite feature because in Los Angeles, where honking is a pastime activity, the little Vespa says “hi everyone! I’m cute!”. Yes you are, little GTS 310. And mighty, too.