Emissions: I've seen the future. It's got two wheels, a body made of cheap plastic and a 125 cc engine that sounds like a food processor in mourning, writes Kilian Doyle.
It is - as the geniuses among you will have deduced - a scooter.
But before you start dredging up my past tirades at the expense of said machines, in which I dismissed them as the sole preserve of snotty teenagers and Italian policemen, yes, I have eaten my humble pie. And it tasted just fine, thanks for asking.
I got my knife and fork out after finding myself thrown on the back of a friend's Peugeot while on a trip to London last weekend.
Deeply sceptical, and well aware of the potential for ending up under a truck, I only consented to it while under duress. It was that or get home on two tubes, a train and a bus. London is very big, so it is.
"Please don't kill me," I beseeched him as I climbed gingerly aboard. He smiled cheekily, looking just like the teenager that I remember driving us all around in his mother's car, terrorising us. Not a good omen, I thought.
But it was a complete revelation. For a man who has spent the past five years on a bicycle, ducking and diving and dodging through Dublin traffic, synapses firing on a delicate mixture of confidence and insanity, nerves twitching with the sheer danger of it all, it was an eye-opening experience. Everything I could do on a bike, this spluttering little yoke could do too, only twice as fast.
It wasn't quite a Road to Damascus conversion, more like a spark going off in my head on the off-ramp to Notting Hill. This is the only way to travel, I thought as I sped down the Westway, excited beyond belief.
I've had a few jaunts on motorbikes, but, frankly, they scare the pants off me. The first one I ever rode, I wrapped around a lamppost.
I've seen someone come off the back of one on the humpbacked Baggot Bridge. Not a pretty sight. And as for the childhood trauma of watching Barry Sheene being scraped off racetracks with a spatula, I'll probably never get over it.
But this was different. I never felt in danger at all, sure the thing could only go 35 mph, and that was downhill with the two of us on it, wind at our backs.
And the faces of the drivers stuck in traffic as we tore past them? Priceless.
As I've said before, I'm a great man for the schadenfreude, the discomforts of others have brought me no end of pleasure over the years, but this really took the biscuit.
London is full, and I mean full, of seriously flash cars. Porsches are quite literally two a penny. Ferraris barely get a second glance, apart from those wishing to make a point about the onanist proclivities of the drivers.
I even saw one idiot in a Humvee cruising down a city street, fer chrissakes. To say we ripped past dozens upon dozens of eejits in supercars, admiring themselves in the rearview mirrors for lack of anything better to do, is no understatement.
The sheer joy in completely burning someone in a hundred grand's worth of car on a few hundred quid's worth of moped is beyond description, especially for the likes of me, a resigned-to-penury, embittered, old trout.
That said, I don't think I'll be selling the bicycle and rescinding my share in the girlfriend's Suzuki.
Much as I'd like a scooter, I don't relish being challenged to races at every traffic light in Dublin by 17-year-old louts with their helmets perched on the backs of their scrawny heads, whose idea of a good Saturday night is revving their engines around suburban shopping centres trying to impress bored young wans.