Piaggio expanding into PWCs
The Italian company will be joining the likes of Kawasaki, Yamaha and BRP in the personal watercraft sceneMassive Italian motorcycle group Piaggio has announced plans to manufacture personal watercraft (PWCs), bringing reality to a long-held goal of chairman and CEO Roberto Colaninno.
Details are still sketchy, but it's believed the first PWC from Piaggio will be in the same mould as BRP's Spark, a 'back to basics' and affordable PWC that has been a ripping success for the Canadian company.
Piaggio owns a number of motorcycle brands, so the company's PWC team presumably won't have to look too far afield to find a suitable powerplant for the first PWC – and the future looks rosy as well with a number of high-performance engines from the group waiting in the wings. The updated Aprilia Tuono donk would be quite nice…
Styling, according to our sources, will have a wetbike 'vibe' about it – a reference to the PWC produced between 1978 and 1992 with its front turning ski. The ungainly wetbike (pictured) was a challenge to ride and required a good deal of balance, so it was really the domain of the highly skilled. With the resources at Piaggio's disposal, its PWCs should be far more user-friendly.
The Piaggio PWC family will be marketed under the 'Sun intelligente' banner, which literally means 'Sun Smart' in English. Sounds like a blatant take on our anti-skin cancer ads, but we'll let it go…
Colaninno first floated the idea of PWCs when he took over as Piaggio boss in 2006, but it was never going to happen overnight as he had more pressing matters to attend to like reducing crippling company debt, which once stood at nearly $A815m after a series of poor investment and portfolio decisions.
He has made a fair fist of that, as well as bringing Aprilia and Moto Guzzi into the Piaggio Group, so now Colaninno has the war chest to turn into his PWC decision into reality. And there's a personal element as well: Colaninno's daughter Agostina was Italian PWC champion in 2006-07 on a Kawasaki, which galvanised him even more that Piaggio would one day be a serious player on the water.
Colaninno has pledged that we should be seeing the first prototype by very early April, 2016.
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