I ride an electric scooter to work. An older friend of mine saw this, and reminisced about how he rode a gasoline-powered scooter to work 20 years ago in the early 2000s, and how he had to deal with the fact that it was loud and smelled of gasoline. I'm sure it was possible to buy some kind of electric scooter then, maybe even one that would've worked for his commuting needs. But I'm not surprised that lithium ion battery tech got significantly better over those 20 years, such that when I bought my scooter last year it didn't even occur to me to look and see if there was something gas-powered I could've bought.