Month: March 2006

Chicco Scooter Club

Milena's Chicco VespaBeen meaning to post this for a while… Becky put Milena’s photos up on the Chicco Scooter Club site. In other Chicco news, Milena backed it into the living room door and busted out a turn signal. Her (Indiana!) license plate fell off a week before that. I keep telling her to fix it, but she keeps riding it, when she gets a ticket, I’m totally not paying it.

Scott Smallwood 2SB interview (from 2003)

Scott Smallwood

In honor of Scott Smallwood’s retirement from SuperSonicScooters, we present an interview with Scott, written by David Lucash, that originally ran in 2strokeBuzz on September 19, 2003:

Three weeks or so ago I was killing layover time in the Duty Free shop of the Montreal-Dorval International Airport. While balancing two cartons of Export A’s and giant bars of Toblerone, I spotted a familiar face checking out the bottles of fine liquor. Sure enough, it was Scott Smallwood of Supersonic Scooters of Columbus, Ohio.

He had some time to kill as well, so we made our way to an airport bar for some coffee. Within an hour the coffee turned into vodka tonics and our conversation turned into a question and answer session regarding Scott’s endeavors.
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Smallwood leaves SuperSonicScooters

Smallwood wheelie, WKRP 2003Scott Smallwood announced today that he will leave SuperSonicScooters next week. Smallwood established the Columbus, OH scooter shop in the mid-90s and made it famous on the strength of his Vespa smallframe tuning expertise. Smallwood dominated the MASS scooter racing league on a specials-class Vespa smallframe, before moving on to GP125 motorcycle racing, and is one of scooterdom’s best-loved and most colorful personalities. Scott leaves SSS to work for Trek Bicycles, he was a successful bicycle racer before a knee injury ended his career and started his interest in motorcycles and scooters.

His open letter to scooterists and friends follows:
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The Annoying Thing

annoyingthing1.jpg Imagine hearing a song you’ve never heard before, and falling in love with it, then finding out it’s the very song that you’d been reading hateful internet posts about for more than a year. Oh, how it hurts to be tricked into digging Kelly Clarkson…

In the toy department in the BHV department store in Paris, I came across a goofy little plush gremlin wearing an old-school motorcycle helmet. I picked him up and squeezed him, and was rewarded with a Sean-Stevens-style onomatopædic two-stroke engine sound. I almost died laughing, and listened another dozen times, but I was too cheap to pay €30 for the thing. When I got home, I looked it up on the internet and found it was the “Annoying Thing”, the basis of the “Crazy Frog” Axel-F-ringtone CD that topped the British charts last year. Cy will never let me live this down, but if you remove it from it’s pop-culture context, it’s pretty damn funny.

LML locks out workers at “Stella” factory.

DNA India reports that LML has locked out workers at their Kanpur plant, where Genuine’s Stella scooter, among other scooters and motorcycles, is manufactured. LML declared the lockout this morning in response to “external rowdy elements…disrupting the peaceful atmosphere and working of the factory.” LML management failed to pay employees full wages and has suspended production in response to financial losses and restructuring.

Paris

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We got back from Paris yesterday, here are our photos of Paris in general (or just check out the scooter-related photos)

Things I noticed:

  • Scooters and motorcycles are everywhere, even as the temperature hovered around the freezing point. (Lap aprons are very common on motorcycles and scooters.) Basically, the whole town sounds like you’re at a scooter rally, all day and all night.
  • Scooters easily outnumber motorcycles 3-1. Most motorcycles we saw were small-displacement and Asian, the few bigger ones we saw were usually Ducatis or BMWs.
  • It’s impossible to walk a block on any street in Paris without seeing several scooters parked on the sidewalk. Nirvana for American scooterists, but probably no fun for most pedestrians.
  • Piaggio definitely dominates the market, even over Peugeot. Modern Vespas (ETs and GTs) and Piaggios (X9s and Libertys) are everywhere, and P-series scooters were far more common than i expected, maybe 1 out of 20 scooters was a P or PK-series. There were a good number of Peugeots, but mostly older beaters, I saw only a couple Speedfights. In Ireland a couple years ago, Gilera Runners dominated the market, but we only saw one in Paris. Kymco and Aprilia also had a decent share of the market. Chinese and Taiwanese scooters were common, but I saw few Hondas or Yamahas, and no “retro” Asian scooters other than one Honda Joker (called the “Shadow” there?).
  • Most scooters, even the relatively expensive Vespas, were healthily thrashed, parked against walls and each other with stickers and dents galore. They’re transportation there, not fetish objects.
  • We did see several nicely-maintained vintage Vespas that were clearly owned by lifestyle scooterists, mostly smallframes like the one above.
  • As far as 4-wheeled vehicles, I couldn’t believe the number of Smart Cars, they’re cleaning up there. Minis (both old and new) were common, and all manner of tiny Citröens, Peugeots, and Renaults were everywhere. VW and Audi were probably the biggest importers. All the cars were tiny: the streets are narrow, traffic and parking is a nightmare, and gas is expensive. One of the biggest popular cars was a 2-door version of the Toyota Rav-4. Like the scooters, the cars mostly looked like they’d had a hard life.

I’ll post more later about the two scooter shops we visited.

Scooter Press features “Vespa 60” customs and Kymco 2007 models

The new edition of Rubbermag‘s spinoff site Scooter Press features a vague-ish story (with photos) on Piaggio’s Vespa GT60 and LX60 custom scooters, on display at the Milan motorcycle show. Also featured is a handy rundown of Kymco’s 2007 (already?) product line, featuring 8 new scooters. We’re jetlagged and phoning it in tonight, re-writing re-written press releases. Can you tell? Kymco does have some neat new stuff, though, check it out.

Piaggio, Arctic Cat form dealer alliance

In an announcement that brings to mind the Piaggio/Cushman agreement of the early 60s, Piaggio and Arctic Cat announced today a plan to “…expand and strengthen their respective distribution in Europe and North America, and potentially lead to other areas of future collaboration….” It appears that Piaggio Group scooters and motorcycles will soon be sold at selected North American Arctic Cat snowmobile/ATV dealers, a market almost as lowbrow as Piaggio’s “boutique” targets were highbrow. At least it appears Piaggio has moved on to marketing their vehicles as transportation rather than status symbols, and that makes us happy. That said, we’re fairly unfamiliar with the snowmobile market, Arctic Cats could be overpriced eye candy sold only in the ritziest districts of Minnesota…