Kymco's engine in the People 50 is Kymco's own design. It is not a Minarelli or GY6 or anything else. It's a Kymco horizontal 2-stroke. Kymco has a few different styles of 2-stroke though. There are a few different kits that will fit. Airsal, Malossi, and Metrakit all make 'em. You can also get cheap knock-off kits from Char-mo and some other Chinese / Taiwan companies, but I would stay well away from these as most of them are just overbored stock cylinders.
A good cylinder kit, put together the right way, will last you a long time.
Hope this helps!
~Josh
My experience and experience of my friends is that after market kits last typically less than 10.000 kms.
We can now discuss how the scooter is being used, what type of oil was used etc. but a lot of kits are of very poor quality. My mechanic told me that many times when using some Italian kits he had to use a file to downsize the piston because it had a lot of rough edges and could not fit into the cylinder!
Another issue people do not consider is that very often stock camshaft cannot sustain oversized kit or it can do it for a limited period of time. Also, people usually install kits after original cylinder and piston did 20-30.000 kms, so there is already a significant wear on the camshaft, so very often after installation of aftermarket kit the camshaft gets broken.
However, these things refer mostly to 2T scooters. I think that 4T scooters, having better "mechanical" part of how things are set up in and around the engine, should not show such signs, or at least not that much.
Personally, I am not that much into tuning of bikes and scooters because of all things mentioned above and I pretty much prefer buying more powerful bike immediately. However, I was told that people like to enhance things regardless of that, so, I guess, to each his own...
