Autobloggreen reports the New York Police Department will test Vectrix electric scooters in January. The NYPD has been using Piaggio BV200 scooters for several years, most famously in an undercover attack on protesting bicyclists at the 2004 Republican convention. This election, protesters won’t even hear them coming, and the hippies can rest assured that their captors are riding environmentally-friendly vehicles. (Thanks, Lalo!)
3 thoughts on “NYPD Vectrix Test”
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at first glance I thought it said “One Douce Plaza” on the sign behind the cop.
I’d sure like to see Piaggio license that obviously well-developed technology licensed, and put it into a Vespa GTS or something.
Hasn’t Piaggio repeatedly shown electric concepts? Why is some newcomer upstart first to the market with this?
Vectrix has been working on this scooter for years, and is apparently very well-funded. The corporate officers have backgrounds with Ducati and military contractors. They have factories in Poland and the US and seem to really be geared up for a huge operation, so they’re not fly-by-night chinese importers or anything, but it does seem strange that they’ve spent all this money on R&D and production and PR but there hasn’t been much of a commercial push. I suspect they had some big contracts (military/police?) lined up for some time and they’re focusing on those and working out the bugs and building a dealer network before focusing on commercial sales, although they are apparently commercially available already.
As you mentioned, they’re probably looking for licensing deals too, it’d be a lot more cost-effective for them to sell engines to other makers and stay out of the retail business, and there were rumors of Vectrix-powered MP3s a while back.