A real Bastert…

No, I’ve not suddenly lost my sense of blog propriety…that’s really the name of this extremely rare scooter…

It’s a 1953 200cc Bastert Einspurauto (a marque I didn’t even know existed), and it’s reported to be one of 15 left in the world.   I spotted this on a Facebook post by one of my buddies.   The ad from which it came is pretty interesting, including an admonition by the owner that “if you have to ask the price, you cannot afford it.”

All of this is pretty intriguing, so I did a web search to learn more about this scooter.

Turns out there actually was a German scooter manufacturer called Bastert.  It wasn’t that they were bad vehicles…that was the founder’s name (his name was Helmut Bastert…think about that the next time you decide you don’t like your middle name).   The company was located in a town called Bielefeld (another interesting name…my battery XO in Korea was Lt. Bill Bielefeld), and they made scooters from 1949 to 1955.  Einspurauto is the German phrase for “one-track-auto” (a characteristic shared by all motorcycles and scooters).    The Bastert scooters had aluminum bodies and solid aluminum wheels.

Bastert made about 1200 of these bikes (putting its rarity in the same league as the US Salsbury), and like the ad says, not too many are left.  Maybe that’s just as well.   Folks around here would have a lot of fun with that name.  It kind of reminds me of the joke about the priest who went fishing…but that’s another story for another time.

Sure is a pretty little Bastert…don’t you agree?