Category: Lifestyle

News Bits, Jan 8, 2007

We’re still catching up on news reports from our holiday break. This should bring us up to date:

  • Authorities have banned the Segway from public streets and sidewalks in the Netherlands, citing their lack of a mechanical brake as a safety hazard. It’s easy to make jokes, and we should, because Segways are ridiculously stupid, but this does pose an interesting question about how governments will react to the many alternate-fuel vehicles coming to market, especially those that don’t conform to standard vehicle categories. Few companies can afford the luxury of developing and marketing a product that may likely be banned on streets, just one more reason why huge companies already armed with lobbyists and lawyers will probably continue to dominate the market. In other words, good luck getting licence plates for your new Vectrix electric motorscooter (what’s the displacement, sonny?), and welcome to 2007.
  • New Honda Metropolitan rider tells the Arizona Daily Star how much she loves her scooter.
  • “At one point I was going to lease a BMW to try to meet women,” Jeff Schultz tells the Louisville Courier-Journal. Luckily, he came to his senses and bought a Kymco People 250. We assert that scooters’ environmental impact is notable, yet generally overstated, so we found both comments pretty funny.
  • Kymco has expanded its relationship with ARI to improve customer relations by streamlining warranty claims and product registration.
  • Following up the results of an earlier report, the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries confirms that scooter sales are kicking ass in Australia. While several Australian companies, notably Bolwell, have been importing rebadged scooters from Asian makers, Vmoto has gone a step farther and bought their Chinese supplier, Freedmoto, outright. (That’s ONE way to ensure decent quality control from a Chinese company.)
  • Motorcyclenews.com reports on a 112-horsepower Italian racing scooter built by Team Cristofolini Racing. The custom-made aluminium 4-cylinder 350cc engine is mounted in what used to be a Malaguti F12 frame.

MBI Awards Nominations open

MBI70.gifYou might have noticed the “Motorcycle Bloggers International” logo on my site. MBI is mainly a forum for motorsports bloggers, but the public face of MBI is the annual “MBI Awards,” awarded to people, organizations, websites, and manufacturers related to motorcycling (and scootering, of course.) This year, the nominations have been opened to the public so if you want to give someone props, or rip someone’s head off, please do. You can also sign up for an automatic reminder when it’s time for voting, I’ll post reminders here, too.

CDOT contacts Chicago scooterists

This week, I was approached by a Chicago Department of Transportation consultant looking for input for a report about scootering in Chicago. If you’re interested in participating, and you’re a scooterist and a Chicagoan, please contact me at illnoise(at)2strokebuzz(dot)com and I’ll email you the relevant information. This is a fantastic opportunity to have our voices heard, so please drop me a line.

VespaUSA, the internets, and missed opportunities

Ex-Vespa-blogger Crystal Waters points out at Girlbike that even the marketing community has picked up on Piaggio’s failure to support the official Vespa blogs. ClickZ’s headline, (“Two Years After Launching Brand Blogs, Vespa Forgets Them,”) is misleading, they were forgotten about ten minutes after CooperKatz patted themselves on the back for inventing the idea. Still, even though both blogs were frozen in time with a depressing lead post about Vespa’s lack of enthusiasm, the VespaUSA site linked to them until yesterday (presumably the links were removed as a result of the ClickZ story).

Another punchline comes from a VespaUSA visitor who requested a catalog online and waited three months for it to arrive. As of today (January 3, 2007), the VespaUSA site launches a pre-Christmas promotion popup page. The front page features four “news” stories, two dating from June 2006 and at least one (possibly two, it’s unclear) featuring an expired promotion. Neither PiaggioUSA nor VespaUSA’s site mention a 2007 lineup, or the most-anticipated scooter of 2007, the MP3 (which amazingly remains without a name for the American market). One has to imagine that the majority of hits to a motorcycle manufacturer website in January are going to be people looking for new model info.

Canadian Scooter Corp. announced their 2007 Vespa/Piaggio lineup in mid-December (featuring the MP3, but no Vespa S!), but their site is also woefully out of date, featuring “news” from May 2006 and nothing about the new models.

If Piaggio as a corporation doesn’t have the reaction time or resources to keep their own sites up to date, (simply a fact of life for some bureaucratic corporations), the two Vespa blogs were a perfect way to spread information –on their terms–in a more timely manner. That’s why it’s even more depressing to see that they couldn’t muster the little effort required to communicate with their own (volunteer!) bloggers. With so many scooter bloggers, “official” and otherwise, doing their work for them, you’d think PiaggioUSA would be able to capitalize on their own hype, rather than abandoning every initiative they start. Once again, I ask, what the hell do Vespa’s marketing people (in-house and at CooperKatz) do all day? There’s very little evidence of marketing at the national level, in the past year they mustered nothing but an occasional PR-fluff newspaper story, the “Open Letter to Mayors,” the Vespetition (their master opus, maybe a week’s worth of work) and a handful of ads in national scooter magazines. Meanwhile, they’re awarding dealerships to anyone who asks, so they can say their “sales” are up. Perhaps their “marketing” is all at the dealer level?

Free “Scooter Babe” pattern from Crafty Planet

Crafty Planet scooter fabrics

Our good friends Matt and Trish at Crafty Planet are offering a special holiday deal for 2strokebuzz readers. Order any fabric (including, but not limited to, the 1 2 3 4 scooter-themed fabrics shown above) and get a free Sublime Stitching “Scooter Babe” Pattern now through the end of 2006. Just put ‘2SB ROCKS’ in the comments field when checking out and the pattern will be yours. Even if you’re not crafty, or not buying for a crafter, the Planet offers loads of great handmade gifts.

Tuk Talk in London

Jo and Ants of Tuk to the Road fame will appear Tuesday (December 12, 2006) at the Royal Geographical Society in London at 7:30pm to talk about their travels and show a short film. The pair traveled 12, 500 miles across Asia and Europe this summer, raising nearly £33,000 to date for Mind, and are currently working on a book.

Bringing Back Those Memories

Surprised I’ve never seen this, it’s from 2004… Elvis just hepped us to Mark Joseph’s “Bringing Back Those Memories” video. It’s a fantastic clip with lots of vintage scooters and a great retro mod feel, but the song isn’t really my thing. The opening riff sounds like Bettie Serveert, but it quickly descends into teen-idol neoOasisness. Sure, I’m the only person in the world who doesn’t like Oasis, and Mark apparently made quite a stir in the UK when it came out, and Cy probably has a Mark Joseph tattoo on his arse, so maybe I’m crazy, you might love it.

Peg Perego Red?

The green Peg Perego Vespa GT seems to be everywhere these days, at wildy different prices, but The Conran Shop in the UK is the only place we’ve seen it offered in red. It appears to be the Peg Perego Vespa, anyway, minus the mirrors and the topbox, and with two small extra wheels.

Portanje’s Nostalgia Collection

Kees Portanje’s famous Vespa museum has expanded their website since we last checked in (it’s been a few years!). The site now features hundreds of photos of Portanje’s scooters, album covers, posters, toys, and more. Good to know that the first three issues of 2strokebuzz are tucked away in a folder in a cabinet somewhere on the premises, waiting for a wave of mid-90s scooter-scene nostalgia.

Sunday: Chicagoland Toys for Tots

Don’t forget this Sunday, December 3th [sic] is the Chicagoland Toys for Tots Motorcycle Parade. The parade starts in Dan Ryan Woods, but despite the best intentions of the organizers, it’s entirely impossible to cope with the freezing mess of twenty thousand or more Harley riders at the starting point, so local scooterists have decided to meet at the cozy Water Hole Lounge at 1400 S. Western Ave, and join the ride around 9:30am. Bring a new, boxed toy (no stuffed animals). The weather doesn’t look too promising, but it’s not a long ride… especially since we’re blowing off about half the distance and the cold wait in the park.