Kymco at EICMA 2006

Kymco Super8 125cc, Photo courtesy Kymco

In all our rambling about the Piaggio Group’s EICMA offerings, we forgot to mention that there were 600 or so other manufacturers there. For instance, Kymco had several new bikes on display, including the Xciting 500 they’ve been teasing us with for a year (still not shipping). The new Super 8 (above), is a 50 or 125cc, 4-stroke, 14″-wheeled update of the handsome-but-underpowered Super9. The Grand Dink 125 (Grand Vista in the U.S.) somehow sired a family of “New Dinks” with 50, 125, and 200cc engines. Also on display was the new MovieXL125 scooter and some new motorcycles, including the Quannon 125 entry-level sportbike. Two bikes listed as motorcycles may be of interest to scooterists, the 5-speed Straight 125 looks rather like a modernized Honda Passport, while the 4-Speed ActivSR (50 or 125cc) appears to be the offspring of a Gilera Runner and a moped from the eighties. Neither is terribly attractive, but don’t let it be said there are no manual-transmission scooters out there. No word from KymcoUSA if any of these beasts will come to our shores, other than the Xciting500, which they’re already advertising.

6 thoughts on “Kymco at EICMA 2006”

  1. Yeah! I actually saw the Xciting 500 in San Antonio. Looked rather nice and the owner, who had it for 1 day, was all aglow about it. See some shots here:
    http://wapurl.co.uk/?0U4LMXP

    I’ve also got some shots of the MP3 there. I had bugged the shop to let me do some video coverage of her but they said they needed permission from Piaggio, who was obviously too good for that and said “no”.

  3. I imagine since they renamed the Grand Dink the Grand Vista for the US, they’d rename the Regular Dink, too.

    The Xciting 500 is out? Even Kymco’s press release from last month implied it wouldn’t be out for a while, but dealers and KymcoUSA seem to be advertising it as if it is.

  4. Something about the super 8 geometry doesn’t look so super to me. Hopefully we’d see something like that but a 4 stroke 50 is pretty useless outside of roads posted anything much higher than 25 mph. The old super 9 wasn’t underpowered. It just would have been so much better with a 125cc two stroke. But wouldn’t anything fit that description. Where have you been Beeb? I’ve even ridden the demo xciting 500!

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