Ever wanted to ride your briefcase? The electric Honda Motocompacto makes it happen!

In the new Motocompacto, Honda has resurrected a concept as old as I am – a compact, folding scooter that fits conveniently into the storage area of your car. In the 1980s, it was called the Motocompo — a gas-powered scooter that folded away neatly into a purpose-built storage cubby in the original Honda City (today called the Fit). Honda called it a “trunk bike.” It was meant to be a last-mile mobility device long before such things were swept up by the rising tide of electrification hype.

The Motocompacto is less specialized (and you don’t need to buy a Fit to get one) and consequently a bit more versatile. It offers just 12 miles of total range from a 6.8Ah battery. That's a far cry from the super-efficient Motocompo's 90-plus miles of theoretical ICE range, but at least this can't stink up your interior... unless you run over something unpleasant, of course.

Its small battery pays dividends in convenience. The Motocompacto can be charged from dead to full in 3.5 hours on an old-fashioned 110-volt outlet. It's just over 38 inches long and 35 inches tall when fully deployed and offers a 24.5-inch seat height, but compacts to just 3.7 inches wide by 21.1 inches tall and 29.2 inches long when folded. In total, the package weighs 41.3 pounds. That’s considerably less than most electric-assisted bicycles.

You might not expect much of a driver interface from a machine this small, but believe it or not, the Motocompacto has a full electronic control system with a digital screen interface. It’s a one-button-does-all setup that both activates/deactivates the scooter and manages its two drive modes. Oh, yeah; it has drive modes.

There are no “off-road” or “sport” settings here; in fact, the modes are simply labeled “1” and “2.” I suppose you could consider “off” to be a third “mode,” but suffice it to say that it’s a fairly basic interface. Mode 1 caps your speed at a walking pace and requires you to apply throttle from a roll. Mode 2 unlocks the Motocompacto’s 15-mph top speed and allows you to run it wide open it from a standstill if you’re so inclined.

Not that you’ll get blistering acceleration either way. The little motor offers just 490 watts of peak output, delivering 11.8 pound-feet of torque to the front wheel (of course, because Honda). For context, the battery-electric Mitsubishi i-MiEV was powered by a 49 kW — or 49,000-watt — motor. By comparison, the Motocompacto might as well be a set of USB accessory wheels mounted to a laptop.