Leading the charge this week is the unusual combination of a rare French vintage scooter with a modern Honda powertrain. We also feature a stylish Triumph Bonneville, a barely touched Ducati MHR Mille, and the shiny new MV Agusta Serie Oro 1000.

Bernardet x Honda hybrid scooter by Seb?s Atelier and Objet Marcant Having just returned from a trip to Italy, the urge to buy a classic Vespa or Lambretta is exceedingly strong. On the graph of life, age, and taste are directly correlated with how much sense scooters make?even if they are the oft-maligned segment of the two-wheeled world. They are cheap (-ish) to buy, cheap to run, and far more practical than a traditional motorcycle thanks to their onboard storage and lack of gears.
Today, Japanese, Taiwanese, and Chinese-made scooters are more common than anything else, but in the 1940s, manufacturing at a local level was more common. That gave rise to boutique European companies like Bernardet. Founded by the three Bernardet brothers, the company started by making sidecars in a small workshop just south of Paris.
Efforts eventually turned to making scooters between 1947 and 1959. The bodies and running gear were made by Bernardet, while the engines were provided by Ydral, Marcel Violet, and (eventually) Bernardet themselves.
Parts from those brands are hard to find these days, which makes old Bernardet scooters difficult to maintain. This is the exact situation that Seb Ledis of Seb?s Atelier and Marc-Antoine Giorgi of Obj...