All for car recovery

The first Mototaxi was probably the brainchild of a Peruvian motorcycle-taxi owner who welded a couch and wheels onto his bike so he could carry more than one or two passengers.  The next step was a vinyl roof to differentiate his one-wheel drive Mototaxi  from sidecars and trikes.  Today, most Mototaxis are fully enclosed and have been customized to look like futuristic space transport (our bone-stock Lifan 'taxi was roof-only).  A typical Mototaxi has front and parallelogram-swinging rear doors, a leather bench seat in the back and all manner of superhero and go-fast stickery.  More heavily customized 'taxis have jingle-playing horns, car-battery-powered stereos, batman symbol-shaped tinted rear windows and Octopus-waddle watershields on the front of the cabin. That the Mototaxi is one-wheel drive could almost be forgiven, except that the left wheel is the driven wheel.  If the road has any sort of crown it is necessary to push hard on the right grip and to tug on the left to go in a straight line. Ours had a gearbox with a neutral-up, five-down gear arrangement and shortened gearing that refused to climb any sort of incline if the engine weren't spinning above 6,000rpm.  Keep in mind though that it was a 125 carrying a passenger and 30kg of gear and that we were riding between 3000m and 4500m during our 1250km trip.  The thin air and luggage meant there wasn't enough power to slide the thing and it took a great effort to turn the bike to the right or the left due to the motorcycle front end being unable to lean. The vast majority of taxis have mag wheels; our spoked wheels were plagued with loosening spokes stemming from the immense side loads during cornering. While it would seem that a fully-laden Mototaxi might have trouble keeping up with traffic, it turns out that except in Lima, Peruvian intersections generally don't have traffic lights -- people honk and continue through intersections if there is no traffic coming. ...

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