The Crush

Valentine’s Day is Saturday, and I’ll be spending it with POCphil, who wrote this love story:

Your concept drawings were phenomenal, pure sex. Your designer must have been hacking my dreams while I slept.

I saw your prototype pictures trickle in from Intermot and then EICMA. What you had in ink you hadn’t lost in composite. Somehow, within no time at all you were up on a turntable, with an impossibly-built woman in barely enough Lycra caressing your every edge and curve. I watched and waited as your promised features were extolled in every Euro-rag and press release. You teased me with well-placed shills on all the best forums posting grainy pictures of a row of scooters behind a nondescript test track or warehouse. I patiently waited as your promises turned into specifications which grew less lofty with each iteration. Then, one fateful day you were unleashed on the Asian market. I eagerly Babelfished obscure articles linked in Asian blogs. Google working overtime as I prayed they maintained your beauty under the accountants glare in production. You survived, soul intact. I even found a Japanese commercial for you on YouTube, they’d used an old Madness song and it was shot in pure 80’s opto-vision. Complete bliss, I wanted you more than ever. A few months later you were introduced in Europe, but something had changed, gone were your aggressive colors and your image had shifted… your edgy look had become somehow conservative, maybe even corporate. They started calling you a maxi-commuter and things were not looking good at all. Last month’s Asian ad with the two anime-hot 20-something girls has turned into a guy with salt n’ pepper hair placing his briefcase in the trunk. The trunk? You don’t put trunks in scooter ads… ever. The Brit magazines got hold of you and compared you to a scooter I can’t stand and worse yet, they called you a better value. Strangely enough your HP numbers seemed to be shrinking and more attention was being paid to your underseat area than the slick transmission you were supposed to have. Your fly-by-wire throttle was traded for what? Linked brakes!? It was OK though, they’re a different market, they’ve got to appeal to a different audience. I finally see you listed on the U.S. website, and to my horror they’ve yanked your fuel injection and cut you down to two colors, midnight blue and burgundy. The indignity is postponed because you get snagged in EPA hassles and when you finally show up in my dealer you’ve had to sacrifice half of your “ample” underseat storage area to a charcoal canister and evap system so now my full face won’t even fit. Your cutting-edge HID lights have been replaced by cheap halogens and your integrated turn signals have been blocked off by some DOT autocrat who fitted you with a quartet of plastic-chrome lollipops protruding like the vestigial appendages of a bygone era when co-mingling of safety and style was verboten. You’re here, finally here. and I have absolutely no desire to ride you. Which is fine, because according to Scoot! your smog devices cause you to stall out at nearly every red light and performance off the line is “adequate” at best.

I guess there’s always next year.

12 thoughts on “The Crush”

  1. I think the only thing he forgot to mention is that it cost US$3600 in Japan, US$4400 in Europe, and it sells here for US$5800.

  2. The fly-by-wire EFI was traded for a carb. Boo! Great story, Phil. Wish it were a work of fiction…

  3. Great story. I really, really, really want to identify with that much excitment. But I can’t say that I’ve been that excited about a new product. Though that may be a jaded view in retrospect.

  4. I think he’s generalizing too, but on the other hand, it sure sounds a lot like the Yamaha T-Max.

  5. Ah yes. That makes it a bit more clear. I may have preferred it as a generalized rant. Way to ruin it for me, Bb.

  6. I thought T-Max, too, but it comes in yellow and blue. Now I feel kind of dumb for googling a scooter named Crush.

  7. It is a generalized rant. All the majors have let me down in one way or the other in the past 15 years. And T-Max….seriously…? I’m insulted.

    You know I’m a Burger-man.

  8. I knew it wasn’t the T-Max, I’m just sayin’, just about everything there applies to the T-Max.

  9. Thanks, Phil. I’ll go back to reading it with unfocused eyes.

Comments are closed.