Category: Europe

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.

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.

German Scooter-Weekend just one month away

There is still time to call the travel agent, pack your bags and get to Germany for their annual Scooter-Weekend celebration, sponsored by Scooter-Attack.  On September 29th the Hockenheimring will host hordes of scooterists from across the world in what has become one of Europe’s premier modern scooter events.  The schedule includes drag racing, custom scooter shows and dyno shoot-outs.  The event is for scooters and mopeds only.  Quads, motorcycles and scooters with motorcycle engines are not allowed! 2strokebuzz.com reporters are still open to any offers of sponsorship to attend the event.  In the case of no live coverage from this correspondent, check back in about two months and there should be a nice link to a gallery of photos detailing the weekends festivities.

Click here for computer friendly flier in German.

Lessons from Italy

Sure, Italy and the U.S. are two very different markets, but you’d think this data would mean something to American motorcycle marketers. 15 of the top 20 selling motorcycles in Italy (Jan-June 2007) are scooters. The top five are ALL scooters. The top-seller is a 150cc. The top three are all Honda SH-series scooters. (Why aren’t those here, come ON, Honda!) The best part? There’s not a single bike on there over 750cc. If Italy can sustain that kind of sales/growth with such restrictive displacement and emissions guidelines, U.S. sellers need to abandon the “But 1600cc cruisers are what people WANT!” mentality. Motorcycles are a niche market here, it’s time to focus on the other 99% of Americans who are so repulsed by overpowered and unpleasant-to-ride cruisers and sportbikes (and the people that ride them). Teach them that a responsible, polite motorcycle or scooter can change their lifes.

Swearing, drink-driving and smoking in public

A stereotyped-but-funny quote from a Times real estate story last week:

Ask the average Briton what he considers the most socially unacceptable forms of behaviour and he will probably answer: swearing, drink-driving and smoking in public. Ask the average Italian man driving home from the bar on his Vespa why neither he nor the eight-year-old on the handlebars are wearing a helmet, and he’ll tell you to mind your own business before stubbing out his Kent Light on your shorts.

Return of the Fiat 500

Fiat 500
Manufacturers and marketers have sucked the efficiency and economy out of the Vespa, Beetle, and Mini, by repositioning them as upscale nostalgia items, so you just knew the Fiat Cinquecento would be next. It’s weird that you have to dig around the site to find actual photos of the car itself. The interior is handsome, but the body is not mind-blowing, nor does it evoke the original as successfully as the other retro-vehicles on the market.

Update In the five minutes since I posted this I learned that the car will be built in Poland and will be fairly inexpensive compared to the Beetle and Mini. Plus, the design is growing on me, I didn’t notice the rolltop at first. I just think the appeal of the Mini and 500 was in the paint and chrome and that’s all gone.

Chinese scooters: made in Connecticut!

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.

Kyle visits SIP

That's a mighty load of cylinder kits

If you’re reading this site, you’re probably the type of person that happily gives up a day of your European vacation to hunt down the local scooter shops. Chicago scooterist Kyle Hart is too, but he was lucky enough to visit Augsburg, Germany, where the “local shop” is S.I.P.. Instead of the usual modern Piaggio dealer who hasn’t seen a GS in twenty years, or repairman’s shed full of rotting scooter corpses, S.I.P. is a huge, modern shop catering to an international crowd of vintage and modern scooter racers and customizers, and judging by Kyle’s great photos, it’s an exciting place to visit.