I've also been worried about people getting too much power out of them while being too young to know how to handle it. Up until about two years ago, there was no age restriction on scooters here in Russia. Often I would see kids about 9 years of age in heavy traffic, with a passenger on back. I'd even seen some that had to have been no more than 6 years old. So they now require the driver to be at least 16 and have a special scooter liscence. If you are an adult, then any drivers liscence will do. Up to 50cc's mind you. So when someone chats me up here at a traffic light, I've started telling them it's 50cc's just in case. But there are tons of pitbikes on the road with like 150+ cc's and they can't be registered and have no legal right to drive hem on roads. People drive them to work in the morning anyway and they are not rare to see. Cops usually dont chase bikes unless it's a mad streetbike racer that has broken the sonic boom barrier and got the traffic police honing in on him by two-way radio. The Soviet Union had tons of motorized bikes since way back. After WWII a huge factory was set up to make motorized bicycles. Engine kits like the Chinese sell were available for a small price at shops in every little town and millions of motorized bicycles were on the road. Today nearly every man over 50 years of age here in Russia and the former Soviet republics had a motorized bicycle in their childhood. They gladly will stand and chat with you for 15 or more minutes about how you did it, ...Chinese clone of the D8 Soviet bicycle engine and so on. So there is like no chance they will be banned here. Whenever I pass cops on the road here or they pass me, they are all smiles, drueling with thumbs up! I do however hesitate to teach all these kids (mostly from 9 - 16) on forums here how to make the engine become powerful. There are a number of 20+ year olds, but again, Russians love to drive fast. That was an age old proverb from back when they drove two and three horse sleds! Honestly there are tons of Porsches, Ferrari's, some Lamborghini's and tons of other really souped up automobiles and a whole street racer problem here. No matter what, these bikes cause cops to look at the machine like grannies look at kittens. There are no laws really about loud mufflers, unless you are trying to pass a mechanical inspection of your registered vehicle. Under 50cc's doesnt require any registration or inspection. They do not ticket people with loud or missing mufflers here. I don't have a muffler, but I take the stinger exhaust out of the middle of the torque pipe, so it's really not that loud even at high rev. Typical Russian drivers do not look carefully when changing lanes or expect bicycles to move fast amoung other things that further tarnish their reputations as drivers. Loud pipes save lives! Now I specially rev it up when approaching vehicles in traffic, from behind or any direction and the drivers take notice and are actually quite curtious usually and let me go first and don't squish me to the curb....usually. So I never blush about being loud on Russian roads))) Whenever I'm riding on a sidewalk or in a park or forest, as soon as I see people with children, strollers, pets or the elderly, I immediately turn off the engine and pass them as a bicycle. This usually makes mom's strolling with sleeping baby's smile at me and I smile back =-) With my bike having become capable of accelerating quite fast and sounding pretty wicked with that low rpm power, most people smile and it's easy to see that they would like to have one. Perhaps it's something specific to the crazy Russian people(in a positive way). All of the Russian motorized bicyclers have pretty much stock power ranges despite the moderate mods they have tried. Most of them don't even know about the ignition system problem and the bearings. I haven't gone riding with them when they all gather together for big rides even though I personally know the organizer and worked in a custom bicycle garage two years ago. I'm afraid that when they see what the bike can do, they will all start to do it and somebody might get hurt... It's one thing putting along like a turtle, and another to whiz around like a rocket.