An electric scooter with a V-belt continuously variable transmission (CVT) driven by a permanent magnet synchronous motor (PMSM) has a lot of nonlinear and time-varying characteristics, and accurate dynamic models are difficult to establish for linear controller designs. A PMSM servo-drive electric scooter controlled by a novel hybrid modified recurrent Legendre neural network (NN) control system is proposed to solve difficulties of linear controllers under the occurrence of nonlinear load disturbances and parameters variations. Firstly, the system structure of a V-belt CVT driven electric scooter using a PMSM servo drive is established. Secondly, the novel hybrid modified recurrent Legendre NN control system, which consists of an inspector control, a modified recurrent Legendre NN control with an adaptation law, and a recouped control with an estimation law, is proposed to improve its performance. Moreover, the on-line parameter tuning method of the modified recurrent Legendre NN is derived according to the Lyapunov stability theorem and the gradient descent method. Furthermore, two optimal learning rates for the modified recurrent Legendre NN are derived to speed up the parameter convergence. Finally, comparative studies are carried out to show the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme through experimental results.