It all goes really well until the dispatch rider asks me if I got it from Fisher-Price. Cheeky bugger. And no, it's not mine. I'm just trying it out for the afternoon, OK?

I end up telling a lot of people it isn't mine. Dispatch riders are the worst - they look at it with utter contempt. And the fashionable people of London's fashionable Hoxton aren't great either. I take a spin through the area, it being the place to be right now, and me being on - or should that be "in"? - what I had naively imagined was something to be seen on/in. But they look away, embarrassed, or openly pity me.

Others are more charitable. A boy in the back of a people carrier gives me the thumbs up. Some Italian tourists on top of an open topped tour bus video me. A man selling the Big Issue in King's Cross looks genuinely delighted by the spectacle and shouts "Wicked, man".

It's the C1, the world's first bike/car hybrid according to the people at BMW. I don't know about that; it has two wheels right? That, in my book, makes it a bike; cars have four wheels. The C1 is a scooter with a roof - presumably to protect the driver from rocks hurled by disdainful dispatch riders, or Longbridge sympathisers when they spot the little blue and white BMW symbol.

But what's this? Seatbelts; that's not very scootery. Plus a windscreen wiper? And the basic model costs £3,945 - hardly scooter money. On the other hand, it doesn't exactly have the people carrying capabilities of a car; you're not supposed to carry someone on the back so there's only room for one - that's exactly half the number of people as my Vespa carries. This is getting confusing. Maybe the people at BMW were right.

Whatever, I set off from the office in Covent Garden (they've handed over the marketing side of things to a posh PR company for the C1 - we could be talking "lifestyle" product here), do a couple of laps of Trafalgar square and head off up the Mall.

It takes a while to get used to the C1. Everything works well, the brakes are brilliant, but it's quite different to driving a scooter. For a start the centre of gravity is a bit higher so it feels wobblier and on this particular day there's a wicked April gale blowing through London, especially over Waterloo bridge, and I'm being buffeted all over the place. It's also less manoeuvrable so you can't weave like you can on a scooter or small bike. And the extra weight means it's not so quick away from the lights as a 125cc scooter.

When it comes to parking up, the two-lever stand lowering system, though clever, is perhaps a little over- complicated. And you can't squeeze a C1 into the same tiny gaps in bike parks as you can with a scooter. (Crap name too - have they forgotten the C5, Clive Sinclair's ill-fated experiment?).

There are two major pluses though. When an April shower hits you don't get wet (at least not from above). And you feel reasonably safe, much less vulnerable and exposed than on a scooter. The driver is strapped in between shoulder height protective bars, there's an impact absorbing front mudguard and, of course, that rigid aluminium roll-over cage. In a safety video, a crash test dummy comes out a lot better after driving his C1 into a car than doing the same with a conventional bike. This has got to be the main selling point of the thing. In most European countries you don't have to wear a helmet in a C1. Here you do, but that might change.

So would I trade in my Vespa for a C1? I don't think so. Longbridge aside, I think four grand is too much to pay for something with only two wheels and a125cc engine. (The executive model - with mobile phone holder and reading light is £4470, but I never find much time for reading on my bike.) Although the C1 is a very clever design and clearly the future and all that, I have a slight problem with the way it looks. It may have been that Fisher-Price comment that did it.

But if I was someone who drove a car to work, and wanted to get there a bit quicker, but was scared to get on a bike, I might think about one. So long as the route to work didn't go through Hoxton.