It’s official, using a vehicle with wheels that find problems dealing with the average sized lump of gravel is dangerous.

The current craze for aluminium micro scooters is cramming US casualty wards with broken fashion victims according to the US Consumer Product Safety Commission. The report says accidents relating to scooters are 15 times greater than they were in spring and with 10,000 scooters being sold in the UK every week (according to ROSPA) bone counters are expecting to witness a similar carnage here.

ROSPA hysteria conitnues to encompass claims of 40km/h speeds (about 35km/h more than we’ve ever seen them go) and “unsuitability for use on roads”, which seeing as they’re a kids toy we’re not that surprised by (the same probably applied to Space Hoppers).

Is it us, or is this just another case of kids hurting themselves as much as before but doing it with the current fad. We’d bet there were similar ‘catastrophic rises’ in injury statistics with pogo sticks, skateboards, BMX’s etc. when we were kids. Seeing as the modern youth are capable of stabbing each over Pokemon cards surely it’s just the curent phase of natural infant darwinism rather than anything particularly evil about Microscooters.
That said proper sized wheels do make hell of a lot more sense, even if you only ride round the shopping centre car park on them, but we here the next generation of scooters are coming complete with suspension and “chunky off road tyres”.

Anyway we’ll keep you posted on the next “new toy hurts more children than it did before it got popular” shocker when it occurs, until then just content yourself with the fireworks warning adverts.