But it went just fine ... just like a "normal" motorcycle.
Today the only cars you'll find carburettors on have big steel bumpers, and the motorcycles are of the small capacity variety.
Technology is a marvellous thing, but also a crazy thing.
The first TV remote-control system we had was a toddler daughter who I had taught simple, but valuable, mathematics to. She knew what a one and a two looked like.
So a simple "hit one" resulted in her leaving whatever she was doing and happily wandering over to the television set to press the appropriate channel button.
"Hit two" would result in a return to TV2.
However, by the time TV3 came around at the end of 1989 we had a television set which had a real remote control - albeit one which sent its messages to the crate-like set via a thin six-metre cord.
The bee's knees!
You'd turn the set on and insert the little input into the little input thing on the set and unravel the cord back to your chair and sit there and change the channels like magic.
Ahhh, technology ... it is something which is designed to make life easier ... sort of.
And then again, it is not.
You buy a new television set today and have it attached to a pay-TV service and you receive two remote controls.
One for the set and one for the pay service.
They are impossible to decipher, and dialling in a new set to find the channels and work out how to find the pay ones is now the domain of the clever chap who turns up to deliver the thing.
They run you through it and you end up writing it all down on a piece of paper ... a very large piece of paper.
When the once-vaunted VCR system finally found itself shifted aside by new recording processes built into sets and control boxes I made the conscious decision that recording something for viewing at a later time would no longer be part of my television life.
If it's on too late I just flag it and keep an eye out for a probable repeat in a few months.
Take a look at one of the new remote-control systems and try and convince anyone that technology relates to simplicity.
It does not.
And so, back to the world of combustion engines.
Cars today are like electronic and computerised accessory shops.
Even the engines run with computer assistance, and if that computer decided to freeze for some reason you couldn't unplug it from the wall and plug it in again to unfreeze it.
I heard one horror story about the owner of a certain European car discovering the computer-controlled door unlocking system had gone into melt-down and he couldn't get into the car.
They had to get some electronic thing down from Auckland to eventually free it.
I kind of like the idea of a key but there you go.
And now I read where French carmaker Citroen is developing new technology so that the facial expressions of the driver can be read, interpreted, and advised upon.
All to do with calming a driver and preventing either road-rage or panic attacks if they get lost.
A voice, like the robotic droners inside GPS units, will assure the driver all is well and there is no need to get agitated.
Spare me.
All it'll do is become another distractive toy for drivers to play with.
They'll pull silly faces just to see what the computer will say.
Technology, it's a laugh isn't it?
Roger Moroney is an award-winning journalist for Hawke's Bay Today and observer of the slightly off-centre.
