Category: Manufacturers

Bastianelli vs. Pontedera

Ryan’s honeymoon photos from the Vespa factory and museum. The Massimiliano Fuksas’ new museum appears to be dead in the water, a museum employee told Ryan there was a new museum expected to open in late 2008 “near the factory.” Fuksas’ site doesn’t mention the project, either, so it looks like those floating red clouds were just more pre-IPO public relations hype. Bummer.

“La Lambretta Cinese”

Motoblog is calling this thing the “chinese Lambretta.” I can’t read italian, so I’m not sure if it was meant as a joke. Aside from there already being a (at-least-half-)chinese Lambretta, they can call it whatever they want, it’ll always be a Zhejiang Zhongneng Gas Scooter ZN151T-F to me. It’s not the most hideous-looking thing out there (once you strip off the corkboard paint job), and it might even look more like a Lambretta than the rebadged Adlys, but I’m not buying one.

Piaggio’s “growth”

PiaggioUSA’s announcement at their recent dealer meeting to add more dealers and reduce dealer territories obviously has current dealers in a huff. The long-term damage of a growth plan based entirely on unloading quotas of bikes to a rapidly-expanding dealer network is not only bad news for dealers, it’s also troubling for consumers, and especially for Piaggio themselves. There’s a great thread on Modern Vespa with some good insight into how Piaggio works, and how this trend may affect dealer inventory, parts supply, and service.

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.

SOS: Where’s Stella?

Orin at Scootin’ Old Skool actually retracted his story about the “return of the Stella” (at the time rumored to be around Labor Day). “Giving up” seems to me to be a pretty sure way of making sure the new Stellas are announced any day now. A watched Stella never boils, as they say.

As Orin points out, there have been plenty of obstacles, and no shortage of people who’d like to see the first containerload rolling off a freighter ship. If LML is making scooters that are worth bringing over, Genuine is surely working hard getting them here.

“Spec Racing” = “Test Ride”

Brooke points out that Kymco’s press release announcing their participation in this years’ International Motorcycle Shows features a pretty misleading headline (even with a “satire” disclaimer that was tacked on later). Still, it got us to post about Kymco’s participation in this years’ International Motorcycle Shows, which is pretty un-news-worthy otherwise. Kymco, you cunning bastards.

News chunks 10/8/07

  • Like many economy-minded Americans, a rural-Illinois journalist buys a $2000 Honda Metropolitan to save (by my calculations) $50 a year on gas.
  • The Moped Army gets a story in their hometown paper, with a shout-out to the Jedi Knights SC.
  • As the entire Bajaj family continues to feud, merge, and demerge, Bajaj Auto is still closing their historic Akurdi plant. Or maybe not. But probably. Whatever happens, it will take eons to sort it out with the unions. Of course, motorcycle sales are down and scooter sales are up, even Suzuki Motors India, one of the smaller players, is hoping to sell 125,000 scooters this year (and a 500cc Hayabusa, which in India might as well be two million crore cubic lakh-o-meters). So as soon as the dust settles and the plant closes at the peak of the scooter boom, look for our long-predicted announcement of the retro “new” Chetak, and the reopening of Akurdi, just as the scooter market tanks again.
  • Did you know: They have scooters in Arkansas now. (For the uninitiated, Arkansas is a southern American unincorporated rural province where newspaper editors use “apostrophe-s” to pluralize word’s.) It is, however, always great to see a club doing charity work. In other Arkansas scooter news, 20 University of Arkansas football players are riding scooters, which seems to be a trend among college football players lately, though I can’t find any more info right now to back that up.
  • Speaking of charity, a bunch of pub regulars in Birmingham, England are raffling a Lambretta painted in Aston Villa colors to raise money for a local childrens’ home. Meanwhile, the childrens’ home is selling candy to raise money for football lessons for Gareth Barry. (That was a little soccer joke there.)
  • Scooters India, Ltd., the most recent manufacturers of the metal-bodied 4-speed 2-stroke Lambretta GP, is investing 186 million rupees ($US 8.79) to upgrade facilities. Don’t get excited, they’ve produced only three-wheelers since 1997.
  • This thing has been garnering schloads of press in the last week, even though it’s basically an enclosed mobility scooter that would fall over if it got hit by a tennis ball.
  • Scooter parking is getting harder in Taiwan, just like everywhere else.
  • Only the Cincinnati Enquirer would publish a photo of a scooter thief in retro prisonwear with a smashed up face, then offer to sell you the photo.

TGB Xmotion

TGB’s newly-announced Xmotion is a pretty handsome scooter, a cross between the very similar-looking Yamaha T-Max and the sportier Peugeot Jetforce (or PGO G-Max/Genuine Blur). Check out the trick front suspension. It’s due out in Europe next year. TGB has a reasonably good reputation here in the U.S., but their current lineup isn’t very exciting, could this be the bike to set them apart?

Disc bragging rights: Laverda 1, Lambretta 0

It has been claimed that the Lambretta motorscooter was a pioneering machine by having been the first production two-wheeled vehicle to have a disc brake. While I believe the Lambretta model C to be the distilled essence of what a scooter is all about, the typical Lambrettista has very high smugness-to-running-scooter ratio. It is possible that Lambretta’s reputation for pushing boundaries lends some fuel to this imbalanced view of the vintage small displacement world. So to help bring balance to the world, we present evidence to refute this oft-repeated claim to a technological first. Continue reading “Disc bragging rights: Laverda 1, Lambretta 0”