Scooters, from 16 May also compulsory motor insurance

- the direct action of the injured party.

The scooter will thus become a full-fledged part of motor third-party liability regulations, with consequences in terms of costs, risk selection, claims management and penalty disciplines in the case of driving without cover.

It is precisely here that the first critical front opens up: users of a vehicle of often modest value are being asked to bear the burden of an insurance apparatus designed for classic motor vehicles, with premiums that will not be easy to make proportionate to the value of the insured asset. What is more, the market does not yet have reliable time series on the loss rate of scooters nor products truly built around that risk. The tariff may therefore arise more by analogy than by experience, with an inevitable margin of caution (and thus cost) that may call into question the very economic attractiveness of micromobility.

The obligation to contract will not suffice on its own to neutralise these effects: the risk is that the regulatory constraint will be 'circumvented' through de facto repulsive premiums, a hypothesis that will impose stringent control on the market by the supervisory authorities.

On the opposite side, it will be necessary to make users aware of the new insurance obligation: uninformed users could find themselves exposed to fines for driving without cover and significant personal liability in the event of an accident, with likely intervention by the Guarantee Fund - and therefore ultimately by the community - for damage caused by uninsured vehicles. At least in the initial period of the obligation's entry into force, therefore, the Fund could be exposed to particularly severe accident frequencies.

No less challenging are the technical-legal knots generated by the grafting of motor liability regulations on scooters. Here are some examples.

- Application of the special rules provided for compensation of third parties (Article 141 of the CP) to vehicles for which the carriage of passengers other than the driver is prohibited;

- Application of the direct indemnity procedure, which seems to pose some operational difficulties related precisely to the peculiarities of such vehicles;

- En bloc application of the 'basic contract' rules provided for classic motor vehicles and of the key instruments of the discount policy provided for the installation of black boxes or alcohol prevention devices, which are hardly compatible with scooters.

- The new 'tag' for scooters is linked to the person, not the vehicle; this will make it difficult to transplant rules designed for traditional vehicles, such as those on transfer of ownership, bonus malus and risk certificate. In the latter case, the mechanical application of the rules on the family class of merit and on the transfer from vehicles of different types will struggle to keep up with the specificity of the risk related to scooters, with potentially unjustified actuarial effects.

The real test of the reform will then be twofold: on the one hand, the ability of the system - legislator, Ivass and operators - to quickly adapt the regulatory framework (including the basic contract) to the characteristics of micro-mobility; on the other, the reaction of the market and users to premiums that will have to be sustainable, without however underestimating the burden of responsibility associated with the circulation of these vehicles on the road.

Finally, it remains to be understood what will be the fate of third party liability (TPL) policies taken out prior to the full operation of the obligation to cover motor TPL risks. In the absence of a transitional regulation, these covers - often constructed as simple personal Rct policies linked to the driver or inserted in broader liability insurance contexts - will no longer be sufficient to fulfil the legal obligation, which requires a policy linked to the 'plate'.

Users - as also stated in the recent Faqs of the Ministry of Enterprise (Mimit) - will therefore have to take out a new and specific motor third party liability policy, adhering to the law.