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Sales of retro 2-wheelers scoot
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Top level
Scoot Culture
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Author: N/A
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Publishing date: 03.03.2003 23:07
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By James R. Healey, USA TODAY
Laugh at $3 gasoline. Motor topless. Be unbearably hip. Impossible? Nope. Just ride a motor scooter. Not a motorcycle, a scooter. Led by Italian brands Vespa and Aprilia, European two-wheelers are rebounding in the USA and have been adopted by taste-makers as the Latest Thing. Serendipity on their side, scooter sellers are rolling out 60- to 120-mile-per-gallon two-wheelers just as the USA frets over energy prices. And the styling resonates. Vespas resemble classics of the 1950s at a time when U.S. consumers are into retro-everything. Aprilias are jazzy copies of racy motorcycles, Euro-inspired and evocative of the youthful image sought by seemingly every baby boomer.
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The scooter rage
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As well, scooter companies are forging a new image. Attempting to avoid a stigma as greasy, noisy, second-rate transportation and to acquire the patina of high style and very tomorrow, they are emphasizing glossy boutique shops instead of the afterthought rows at motorcycle dealerships and power-equipment stores.
"Our products have a certain amount of snob appeal," says Tom McDonald, head of Aprilia's North American sales.
"People buying our bikes are buying a toy. Most of them, their watches are worth about four of these scooters. They just slap it on a credit card," says Urkia Hernandez, who sells Italjet and Aprilia scooters in Miami's trendy South Beach area.
Vespa, aggressively retro-styled, seems to have the charisma. Tonight Show host Jay Leno has three. Ford Motor CEO Jacques Nasser has two. Actress Sandra Bullock just bought one at Vespa of California in star-marbled Sherman Oaks. "It's a lot of nostalgia," Nasser says. "They're easy to park. They're interesting machines. Whenever I'm in Europe and have time, I rent one."
Today's U.S.-market Italian scooters typically run $2,500 to $4,000, go up to either 40 or 70 miles an hour, depending on the model, and have automatic transmissions that make them a snap to operate. State laws vary, but generally, the smaller, slower scooters don't require a motorcycle-operator's license. The bigger, faster ones usually do.
"If you can ride a bicycle, you can pretty much ride a Vespa," says actor Francesco Quinn of Sherman Oaks, son of the late movie star Anthony Quinn and a scooter enthusiast, as his father was. Since getting his Vespa, he looks for errands instead of avoiding them: "I love it when people ask, 'Will you pick up something for me?' " Quinn says.
"When I go to Whole Foods down the street, I don't like to take the car and look for parking. I ride the Vespa, park right by the door, don't even take off my helmet when I go in. I've got the groceries and am back home faster than my wife can get in the car and fasten her safety belt. And I've had fun getting there and back," says Quinn. He's such an enthusiast that Vespa has adopted him as celebrity spokesman, paid not in cash but in free use of several Vespas.
Riding a scooter "is fun. It just makes you smile. People see you on it and they laugh, they smile, they beep and wave," Leno says. "Is it a fashion accessory? Sure. Is there some practicality to it? Yes."
And social lubrication, he notes: "Women come up and go, 'What's that?' You explain it; then you have to explain that you're married."
A question of safety
In addition to marquee names, ordinary parents are drawn to scooters as cheap alternatives to cars for their teenagers. And scooters are easy to pitch to the teens as hip wheels. "Parents see they don't have to spend the whole summer driving the kids everywhere," yet don't have to spend much to buy, insure and fuel a scooter, says McDonald.
The tradeoff is safety.
"They're not as safe as a car," McDonald acknowledges. "A young person driving a Crown Vic, somebody bumps into him and it's just a dented car. The same bump into your kid on a scooter, and he goes down and gets scraped up."
"Some people think they're safer than motorcycles, which is silly. Anything on two wheels is unsafe," says Casey Earls of San Francisco, co-founder and managing editor of Scoot! Quarterly magazine, and longtime scooter rider. "You see these girls riding around on their scooters with their little hat helmets and their skirts and I want to say, 'So, you don't care about your brains or your skin,' " she says.
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Late-night fun
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"If you have a head-on with a Navigator, you're in trouble," says Leno. But he thinks scooterists are safe because they're focused: "You're not on the cellphone. You're not listening to the radio. You're paying attention. You're fine."
The interest in scooters is an enormous change.
In 1998, before Vespa and Aprilia came to the USA, motor scooters were mainly plain-looking Japanese models used in urban delivery fleets and ridden by down-at-the-heels college students. In fact, one in four scooterists were students, according to the Motorcycle Industry Council (MIC).
Today's surge is too new to have a picture of typical scooter buyers, MIC says. It's pretty obviously skewing toward richer, older people, though. And they are buying a fair number of scooters. Sales last year were about 42,000, MIC reports — up 68% from 1999's 25,000. And sales this year are running 47% ahead of last year. That could pick up even more in warm weather, and as Vespa and Aprilia open more stores. The pace is far short, though, of the modern record for scooter sales — 153,000 in 1987, MIC reports, before stringent anti-pollution regulations drove most scooters out of the USA.
"We had to stop selling in this market, and only provided assistance with spare parts from Italy, so what you would expect is diminished demand for the product," says Giancarlo Fantappie, president of Piaggio USA. Piaggio is the Italian manufacturer of Vespa, among other brands, and Piaggio USA is this country's sales unit.
Triumphant return
Instead of vanishing interest, he says, "We experienced this strange phenomenon. In the '90s, there were Vespa restoration shops opening around the country. And the requests by fax and e-mail grew every 6 months at a rate double the previous 6 months: 'When are you going to have a new Vespa? Why don't you have Vespa here?' "
Emboldened by the interest, and having developed models that meet U.S. anti-pollution regulations, Piaggio announced that Vespa would return to the USA. That, in turn, prompted other brands to act, Fantappie believes. Aprilia opened U.S. headquarters in Atlanta and started selling scooters in July 1999, beating Vespa by 17 months.
Aprilia is signing up dozens of dealers — 105 so far, another 20 by year's end, McDonald says. Just six are scooter-only shops, but those do the best business, suggesting that the boutique approach is correct.
Vespa is going slower and fancier. A dozen urban boutiques are open so far; no more than 40 will be running by year's end, says Fantappie, who is emphatic: "Not dealers. Boutiques. We are opening boutiques."
Hernandez is a pioneer. She rode a scooter the first time on a trip to Italy in 1997, and says, "I couldn't get it out of my mind."
She came home, set up a scooter store in South Beach and in 1998 began selling Italjet scooters, the only Italian brand she could find in the USA.
"We're used to seeing scooters tucked in the back of a motorcycle shop. But we opened a really beautiful boutique, more like an art gallery, and showed off these beautiful Italian bikes as functional art. We were scooter-only and did well. People caught on," she recounts.
When Aprilia launched in the USA, "I acquired the line. We were their No. 1 dealer last year," Hernandez says. She sold about 130 Aprilias last year. She is eyeing 150 Italjets this year and has been allocated 300 Aprilias after she and partner Alison Filippazzo set up an Aprilia-only boutique, called Ride, also in South Beach.
Aprilia "sent me designers from Italy who helped design the interior — stainless steel floors, all kinds of nice things," Hernandez says.
Looking on bemused are the true-blue vintage scooter enthusiasts, the shade-tree mechanics, the stores that have restored and sold old Vespas, Lambrettas and others during the 15-year hiatus.
"There was tension prior to the actual opening of the (Vespa) boutiques. Now that several have opened, I think the faithful have grown to accept the new machines and their owners," says Michael McWilliams of Colorado Springs, president of the Vespa Club of America.
Piaggio tried a compromise when it re-entered the USA. It certified 25 of the top longtime restoration shops as official, vintage Vespa facilities, giving them the factory stamp of approval. But neither they, nor other Vespa store-front restoration operations, get to sell the new models. Only the new boutiques get that privilege.
"We wanted to sell not motor scooters, but, in fact, a lifestyle; present Vespa to the American public as a lifestyle," Fantappie says.
"A lot of the vintage people feel shunned," says Earls, the Scoot! editor. "They've been working really hard to keep the old Vespas on the road, so how come they aren't allowed to sell the new ones?" But, she says, "They got over that pretty fast. It was a fight not worth having." Sponsors of scooter rallies "encourage the new bikes, as well as the old ones, to come."
But don't bring a Japanese-brand scooter, with its mainly plastic bodywork, to an event dominated by steel Vespas. "You're scorned," Earls says. "They call them 'Tupperware.' "
And don't try to tell Hernandez that the old scooterists have anything in common with her customers.
She calls vintage-scooter enthusiasts "the spike-hair/skinhead group. ... And the mods, the ones who look like they just stepped out of the '60s. They're a completely different crowd from the new buyers. They never brush shoulders. Different worlds."
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Source Name:
USA TODAY
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http://www.usatoday.com/money/covers/2001-07-03-bcovtue.htm
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