The maxi scooter thread

Life Cars & Motorcycles
21

I kind of overlooked the significance on bobepine’s OP… That “slightly odd and angular, but okay looking” orange monstrosity is in fact Kymco’s first attempt at a big capacity scooter to “competitioning in the world’s scooters market”(SIC) :laughing:

Anyway I wonder what their first attempt at a 500cc engine will be like… I heard though that it was developed in close co-operation with (read: copied from) Piaggio Italy, with whom Kymco apparently now has some kind of market sharing and R&D agreement… I suppose based on specs and looks it’s alright for what it is, although IMHO the screen/headlight area/front panel styling is clumsy, poorly integrated and not well executed, but then again what do I know… so on to burning question of whether Kymco plans to screw the local big scooter buying populace by cranking the price up super high, or will they opt for plan-B and crank the price up extra, mack daddy, crazy high?.. Apparently the 250cc and 500cc versions will go on sale in Taiwan soon, so I suppose we’ll all find out soon enough…

http://www.kymco.com/event/xciting_2005/

22

Both Kymco and SYM have farmed out powertrain design work to Europe since their divorces from Honda. So far so good really.

As to pricing, both of them seem to fix pricing on the basis of (competing import product price + shipping + taxes) x 0.9

…or something very close to that. So far it seems to work. Even when imported scooters aren’t very much more expensive than local products, they still dominate the market.