Italian Scooters

Bangkok – Vespas, the longstanding Italian motor scooters, are a standard sight and sound in Bangkok’s Chinatown as the favoured delivery car.

Across the day there’s a continuous stream of them moving out of and into the labyrinth of little lanes and carrying textiles and other products to all points of enormous larger Bangkok. Their low putt-putt-putt identifies them a block away, if it can be heard over the dissonance of other street noises. Their distinct shape is a fave of many, with Bangkok home to one or two Vespa clubs.

The majority of the Vespas plying Bangkok’s streets and hotels in thailand are old two-stroke models, many going back to the 1960s, some further than that. New Vespas have not hit the streets in fifteen years. But that is preparing to change with 4 partners opening the 1st Thai Vespa dealer in over 10 years. Vespiario is having a look at a targeted market made up typically of young executives living in the towns. Their target is to bump the brand as worldwide hip and trendy like in Europe. They are saying they like the soundness the old two-stroke Chinatown Vespas represent, but the new quieter four-stroke models will be marketed toward the cosmopolitan folks. We are just looking at a tiny part of that, ” Vespiario Handling Director Pornada “Mai ” Nivatvongs said to the German Press Agency dpa. There are Vespa clubs in Bangkok, ” she revealed.

The key bike is the LX150, which is made near Hanoi in Vietnam, and due to AFTA ( the ASEAN Free Trade Area ), the opening price is 99,000 baht ( about three thousand greenbacks ). However related Mai, that’s a “get things started ” price and will need to go up. The other 3 models are made in Italy with the least expensive selling for B285,000 ( 8,800 greenbacks ), the higher price much thanks to a sixty percent import duty on all imported bikes. Honda, which commands just about seventy % of the Thai bike market, faces no such problem because their bikes are made in Thailand. The overwhelming majority of their sales are the more cost-effective bikes beginning in the mid-40,000 baht ( 1,240 bucks ) range, recounted Jutamart Inpringkanan, press with A.P. “they’re made here with 95-plus % local parts. They have bikes as small as fifty cc but it is the 110 cc Honda Wave which has just about flooded into market. The massive bikes like Harley Davidson, Victory , BMW, and the bigger Hondas and Kawasakis sell in the hundreds every year, not thousands. Honda has no intentions to desert their top selling small bikes, but with the 125 cc PCX that sells for roughly 75,000 baht ( 2,320 bucks ), they’re crawling into the medium market, too.