Author: illnoise

Last Saturday night in Kansas City, two teenagers on a Vespa snatched the key from another teenager’s black Vespa at a stoplight, but were then unable to start the scooter because the battery was dead. Too bad the kid’s still gotta pay a few hundred bucks to get his electronic locks and keys replaced.

An article from San Diego CityBEAT stood out from the other thousand “Scooters are booming” stories this week. Despite mentioning Audrey Hepburn (DRINK!), author Kelly Davis talked to multiple dealers, riders, and industry sources, and her research (unheard-of in scooter coverage in the media) gives some interesting hard facts we’d never seen elsewhere:

• “The average scooter buyer is about 46 years old and makes roughly $50,000 a year, according to MIC numbers.”
• “In 2004, when U.S. scooter sales approached 100,000, by comparison, Ford that year sold roughly 130,000 Mustangs alone.”

So while scooter sales (happily) continue to grow, they’re not necessarily “through the roof” as many of these articles would imply. Furthermore, this boom isn’t a young urban professional movement (as Vespa has insisted since their return), buyers are more likely to be middle-class, suburban baby boomers or retirees. That’s good news– perhaps this is sustainable growth, and a sign that scooters are being accepted by a wider range of riders.

It’s interesting that while most of these “scooter boom” stories focus on the Vespa (many are a direct result of Vespa’s public relations efforts), Vespa likely sold less than a tenth of the 100,000 scooters sold in 2004, and Vespa’s sales actually dropped between 2004 and 2005:

January-August 2005: 7200 units sold
January-August 2004: 7900 units sold
January-August 2003: 6500 units sold
January-August 2002: 4900 units sold
(from Powersports Business, October 17, 2005)

The same source reported Aprilia and Moto Guzzi sales were down 50% in 2004, which may be attributable to financial woes prior to their acquisition by Piaggio.)

The 2004-2005 slide is probably at least partially attributable to the introduction of Piaggio scooters in the US market (it’s unclear whether the numbers include Piaggio, so we’ll give them the benefit of the doubt), and it further seems unlikely sales haven’t picked up, perhaps exponentially, this year. These are semi-respectable numbers, on par with Vespa sales in the Fifties and Sixties “boom years.” But they’re certainly not great, considering the growing number of US Vespa dealers and the amount of money spent on marketing. One source estimates a big-city dealer is likely spending $100,000 a year on advertising, half of which is reimbursed by PiaggioUSA. That $100,000 figure also ignores Piaggio USA’s requirement (now increasingly being ignored) that dealers present their scooters in an exclusive (expensive) customized boutique. Considering dealer expense vs. profit per vehicle sold, it seems unlikely that even doubling sales in 2006 could cover the expense of a boutique. Piaggio’s move (in many markets) to traditional motorcycle/scooter shops (and less-pretentious marketing) seems to reinforce this theory, and may turn out to save them. 2006’s sales numbers will shed a good deal more light on the matter, if Vespa (and all scooter) sales aren’t notably higher, this may be a short-lived “boom.”