The Micro Maxi Deluxe Scooter is More Than a Toy. It’s Smooth, Efficient Transportation for Kids.

Over the years, I’ve had ample opportunity to observe the Maxi Deluxe in the wild, and the result is always the same. When there are half a dozen kids at the playground, all with different scooters, the Maxi Deluxe rider always has the smoothest, fastest, most satisfying ride.

That’s in part because of the Maxi Deluxe’s large, bump-mellowing polyurethane wheels. The plastic deck is also forgiving, stable, and wide—my kid likes to turn his feet sideways on it, skateboard-style. Underneath, a layer of fiberglass in the chassis offers added strength and durability. The comfy hand grips are made of rubber, not brittle plastic as on cheaper models.

The handlebars are adjustable, expanding to fit riders up to about 5 feet tall—so this scooter has a long life for most kids. We also love that the scooter is made with parts that are easily replaced if they wear out, which contributes to the Maxi Deluxe’s potential longevity. It has a two-year warranty, the longest coverage for any scooter we’ve tested.

For our original scooter testing, we had six kids run eight scooters through an obstacle course in a city park, and the Maxi Deluxe was crowned as the smoothest, fastest, and quietest. It costs significantly more than many competitors, but after seeing it hold up through many years of use for multiple Wirecutter families, we’re confident the Maxi Deluxe is an excellent value. Micro offers the scooter in an array of colors, as well as in a foldable version or tricked out with LED lights (or both), allowing a kid to choose a personalized ride.

I’d count this Micro scooter among the top toys we recommend at Wirecutter. But it’s really not just a toy—scooters are a functional means of transportation that have gotten a ton of extra use in recent years. My then-Kindergarten-aged son easily put 100 miles on his Maxi Deluxe in the first year of the pandemic, while one New York City colleague of mine replaced the daily subway ride to her kid’s school with a 5-mile scooter commute each day.

It turns out that the scooter’s Swiss inventor, Wim Ouboter, also saw it less as a toy than as a means of transportation. Ouboter was looking for a better way to commute to his local sausage shop, a distance he judged too long to walk but too short to drive, when he came up with the idea for a stepped-up scooter in the late 1990s. He named his company Micro-Mobility. His ultra-smooth scooters caught on in Europe and were introduced to the US in 2007.

Micro’s scooter line has expanded in recent years, and the company has opened a showroom in Playa Vista, California. There’s a newer “eco” version of the Maxi made of plastic recycled from recovered ocean garbage, and multiple two-wheeled scooters for kids ages 6 and up, which we’re currently testing for an update to our guide to the best kids scooters. But the classic Maxi Deluxe is still its most popular scooter, helping kids get wherever they’re headed a little faster and smoother, and, often, with a lot more joy.

A version of this post was originally published as part of our 2020 “52 Things We Love” series, an ode to Wirecutter picks that have withstood the test of time. Read the entire series. This version was edited by Rachelle Bergstein.