Category: Concepts/Innovation

Quadricycles: Another Case Where Four Is Two Too Many?

The Geneva Motor Show has brought out a few new rides that further blur the lines between car and motorcycle. The Yamaha Tesseract made distinct impression when the concept ‘bike’ showed up in 2007. Four-wheel ATVs have been around for a while and distinguish themselves from cars by having the pilot centrally located, straddling the engine in a ‘horse-riding’ position while steering with a handlebars rather than a wheel. As on-road vehicles these have only started to catch on outside of the USA. The NHTSA would define these vehicles as automobiles and require them to pass the same safety standards as any other automobile, including requirements for restraints, airbags and collision tests. These requirements wouldn’t make any sense on something more akin to a motorcycle than an SUV, but one can appreciate where rules are rules and as defined it is an automobile with four wheels in contact with the ground at all times. Regardless of U.S. marketability, the world marches on. Enter the Lumeneo Smera and the Sbarro Pendolauto. The Smera is a proposed cabin-enclosed electric vehicle that has four wheels but tilts similar to the idea behind the Piaggio MP3 and the Sidam Xnovo. The Sbarro Pendolauto is a much more sporty quad concept with the rider in the open air in a very low position that shouts corner-speed. The saying ‘four is two too many’ regarding the four-stroke engine is often recognized by fans of two-stroke powered motorcycles and the same could be echoed in regard to these four-wheelers. So, why a pseudo-cage when a bike is so much fun? Obviously the stability of four corners would be an asset as well as the additional grip offered by two additional wheels. The drawbacks would include the increased size and weight of the extra wheels. Size is a big deal to many scooter and small displacement fans that are frequent readers of 2SB, where we typically get excited about smaller being better. But the quadricycle concept does retain several aspects of the motorcycle that many people enjoy such as nimble handling, better fuel efficiency, the open air rush, leaning into turns and a smaller footprint when it comes to traffic and parking. The quadricycle concept for personal transportation is intriguing. If the NHTSA would redefine the motorcycle as a vehicle where the rider is centrally located and any passenger would be required to sit in-line with the pilot (or if the quad was given a class unto itself) we could possibly see things like this on the road in the USA. Surely the auto industry would have something to say about it. But maybe it could be an asset to them if they were to join in by scooping up one of the several fine ATV makers in the US like Polaris or Articcat and kick start their entry into the field. BRP is already on the case and half way there.

Thanks to Jalopnik and Gizmodo for the links.

Obiboi Re-Invents The Honda EZ-Cub

Motorcycle and scooter designer Oberdan Bezzi has turned to applying the aesthetics of classic motorcycles to modern creations.  Some of his latest drawings posted on his blog, Scooter Design, include an enduro inspired series of scooters that draw from the Honda EZ-Cub in form and Honda z50 part info.  The scooters definitely have an off-road look with knobbie tires, a crash guard on the bottom and motocross style number plates.  The paint schemes are modeled after KTM and Penton dirt bikes of the 1970s.  These drawings follow on his most recent motorcycle designs transferring the look of 70s off road bikes to modern bikes.   What I like most about his designs is that he superimposes a rider on his creations.  I believe that many motorcycle and scooter designers forget to do this anytime before they hit the sales floor.

Adiva 250cc convertible launches in Japan

Remember the Adiva? The Adiva convertible scooter that Benelli’s old importer displayed at trade shows a few years ago has turned up in Japan, produced by a different company. While checking out the new “Andretti” Benellis (more on that soon), We asked U.S. importer Steve Rubakh about the Adiva, he said Benelli’s parent company Qianjiang sold the rights to the model and abandoned it because of safety problems. With the BMW C1 and the Diamo Velux also resigned to history, was the convertible scooter ahead of its time, or just a bad idea?

Death of a Dream: R.I.P. Amarcord Concept

The critical words used when Italjet products are discussed have their origin in the frustration felt when their excellent concepts often fail in the execution of delivering the legendary products we hope for.  The Velocifero, Dragster and Formula models made it far when reaching for iconic status but fell short in the end due to poor product support and the ultimate demise of the company’s incarnation at the time.  Some exciting designs have yet to make it from prototype to production.  Examples include the Scooop, Rollercraft and Amarcord.  While the Scooop may have been outdone by the Piaggio MP3 in arriving first and the Rollercraft may yet arrive, the motorcycle-with-a-scooter-engine work of art known as the Amarcord seems to have died and it’s name lifted onto a Chinese scooter.  Reported by Cyberscooter.it from the EICMA in 2007, the scooter with the Amarcord name appeared as one of Italjet’s new offerings.  The scooter doesn’t look all that horrible it is slightly reminiscent of the Velocifero’s retro design with some tell-tale accents of mainland-China construction.  Also note the yellow Rollercraft model in the background.  What moves me to feel sad and mourn the loss of the of a great design is that the name transfer of the Amarcord label from an incredibly eye-catching and novel design to an homogenized standard scooter signals the death of an idea that’s time is ripe and appears to be lost on most (but not all) manufacturers.  R.I.P. Amarcord concept.

MP3 HyS: late 2008

French site Scooter Station reports that Piaggio plans to offer the gas/electric hybrid MP3 125 by late 2008. A prototype hybrid MP3 was unveiled in August along with the release of the Ape Calessino and the Vespa S, but no date was set for its public release. The bike features the HyS hybrid engine that’s been on test by Milan municipal vehicles since April, 2006. No word yet on whether the other HyS-equipped Vespa and Piaggio scooters will be available sooner (or at all).

Suzuki Gemma 250 concept

The phallic Japanese concept maxiscooters just keep on coming, no pun intended. Suzuki’s Gemma 250 debuted at the Tokyo Motor Show this week. If I were the Scooter Scoop, I would probably further push my luck with some sort of Gemma Ward joke, but she’s not my type, and she was born the year I graduated from high school. (Update: Steve posted this story within seconds of 2sb, but didn’t make any supermodel jokes, heh.)

News chunks 10/23/07

  • A Korean student in England decided riding his scooter back to Korea would be less uncomfortable than a 13-hour flight.
  • The Times of London is digging the new Vespa S. Current rumor is 50cc and 150cc versions to the U.S. in the spring.
  • The Age of Melbourne, on the other hand, may be the first media outlet to see through the façade of Piaggio’s “green” marketing, after receiving a life-sized non-recyclable promotional piece featuring the MP3. Australia is hot for scooters this month. A University of Tasmania team has assembled the first Australian-made hybrid scooter, powered by Ethanol and batteries, and Sydney is apparently searching for its identity as a scooter city.
  • The Sun rides Aprilia’s new Mana 850cc automatic motorcycle.
  • Leonardo DiCaprio’s ex-girlfriend’s new boyfriend sideswiped a photographer’s scooter in Israel. Oh, sorry, that’s not even interesting to E! Online readers.
  • If you’ve always thought “Sure, Segways are great, but man, I hate standing up, and I wish they were uglier, lower-tech, and more expensive,” Toyota has a concept vehicle for you.
  • In London suburb Croydon, citizens are teaming up to document “antisocial” scootering and report it to police in the wake of the death of a local police officer.
  • D.C. police are on the other side of the fence, after a scooter cop was hit-and-run by a white van. (Fact: recklessly-driven white vans now outnumber all other vehicles on Chicago streets, 6-to-1.)
  • For some reason there were at least… let’s see… 1, 2, 3, 4, 5… five stories in the press last week about Piaggio’s new plant in Vietnam, without any new info beyond the announcement they made in February. Thanh Nien News had the decency to follow up their PR-wire story with a fairly interesting story on the vintage scooter scene in Vietnam.
  • A New Jersey yoga instructor and mother of six becomes the first woman in America to eat thousands of dollars of depreciation and trade in her SUV, replacing it with a $11,000 Vectrix electric scooter. The expense is totally justified by her reduced carbon footprint and the dozens of dollars she’ll save on gas between now and the first day it snows and she has to make six separate trips to drop her kids off at soccer practice, girl scouts, and karate. Yes, that’s pretty cynical. As Smarthouse points out, the Vectrix has many merits, and it’s a positive step for ecology, but as I’ve said many times, it seems that consumers aren’t considering all the factors when looking at the economic benefits of scooters, like this Wisconsin couple who seem to be ignoring the fact that riding a pair of 60mpg scooters isn’t really any better than driving one 30mpg car.
  • In that same story an Oshkosh, WI urgent-care clinic director estimates that scooter-related urgent-care visits will rise to 5,000 nationally this year, up from 1,300 in 2000. If the national urgent-care industry is actually keeping stats like that, we’d love to see them, but it seems a little unlikely that anyone would have been accurately tracking nationwide motorscooter injuries in 2000, or that any study of that sort would differentiate urgent-care visits from emergency-room visits.
  • A new SYM dealer has opened shop on the Incriminators’ turf. “You see them all over Hollywood,” store manager Tonya Stewart says, “[Scooters are] in movies and music videos, and stars are riding them as well.” Well, sure, Tonya, but those aren’t really SYMs now are they? God, I’m bitchy tonight. This is like 2strokeTMZ.

2007 Dealer Expo: POCphil’s review

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Since a week has passed and I still haven’t been able to collect my thoughts on the ginormous mindblowing extravaganza in Indianapolis, here’s POCphil‘s writeup. I’ll add my comments in italics where appropriate. -2SB

We were so excited to get to the Indianapolis Dealer Expo this year, we were running about 2 hours early. We took that time to go visit Speed City Cycles in Indianapolis, only a few minutes from the Show. Mike and Marybeth Tockey have created a fantastic shop with an ingenious use of space and rural/industrial feel that leaves room for a snack bar, lounge and a ton of scooters and accessories. Mike also builds award winning metric cruisers. Just hanging around his IWL Berliner is a treat. After a great tour and some bench racing we were back on our mission to deliver two scooters to the Scoot! Magazine/ Corazzo booth and still arrive early enough at the hotel for some hottubbing before showing up in time for the open bar at 4PM, whew!
Continue reading “2007 Dealer Expo: POCphil’s review”

News chunks: February 7, 2007

Here’s what Vina–and R. Kelly–missed while having their appendices removed:

Welcome home, Vina! Now if I could just remember where I put our daughter…