The Hartford Courant reports that Chinese/Greek company Eugro (“The leader in Telecommunications, Transportation & Home Confort Airconditioning”) has plans to manufacture Eurospeed scooters in Connecticut. The novelty and excitement of a Chinese company manufacturing in the U.S. is tempered a bit by the fact that up until today, the nominal “scooter experts” at 2SB had never heard of Eugro, or Eurospeed scooters, and the US division is run by a suburban Ford dealer. But we’ll keep an eye out for them at Dealer Expo.
3 thoughts on “Chinese scooters: made in Connecticut!”
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I remember when CMSI (TnG Scooters) was doing their “Made in the USA” thing. It failed miserably. For some reason I can’t imagine this going any smoother. The key advantage to asian manufacture is labor cost. Even if you’re only ASSEMBLING the thing in the U.S. your labor costs are still 10 times what they are in Asia.
TNG’s plan made SOME sense, it was a somewhat (if poorly) established American-based brand making an attempt to save their reputation by improving their product, and most important, they were on the leading edge of the scooter boom, not to mention the Chinese import boom.
At this point, with millions of no-name Chinese scooters available at dollar stores, auto parts stores, and from 50¢ gumball machines at the grocery store, the market is totally oversaturated, the public is wising up (slowly), and investing that much money in a production facility in America seems utterly ridiculous. If Schwinn or some other huge, well-known brand name was behind it, with pre-established connections to retail stores and/or big-box stores, and millions of dollars for marketing, it could work, (at least for a year until the quality became apparent,) but a local Ford dealer’s backing does not sound promising.
Phil, you’re right, what we should do is build the parts here and have them assembled in China. Even then, quality is just frightening. China may improve quality and follow responsible business practices in the next few years, but not yet.
It looked like there was more to this story, so I did some digging, mostly in SEC quarterly reports and found this effort (EuroSpeed brand to be introduced in US for Northa American distribution) since at least late 2003, I published a short synopsis, leaving out a lot of boring details, of what I found out on my scooter page. letsgoscootin (dot com). I will be interested to see if they can bring anything new to the table, but I doubt it. Theres a link to the EuroSpeed page there so you can get a (partial) view of each of their propsed new moedels and judge for yourselves.