Scooter update

Losing our Liberty
It wasn't exactly a tearful event, but we were decidedly miffed when we recently had to hand back our long-term Piaggio Liberty 150.

A quick recap here: The Liberty uses Piaggio's stock-in-trade air-cooled four-stroke powerplant, allied to a stepless transmission. No rocket science, there, no is there in the chassis. The latter runs big (for a scoot) 16-inch wheels - which gives it lots of around-town stability, along with conventional suspension, a mini disc brake up front and drum rear.

Okay, so it's not the sort of thing to get the blood-pressure on the rev-limiter, but it turned out to be a super-useful companion over the near four months that we had it.

Performance was typical for a four-stroke 150 - the Liberty held its own in traffic and was okay on the freeway.

It was cheap to run - sipping fuel at around 22km/lt from the 5.9 litre tank - and reliable for the 3000-plus km we clocked up. That was all city work, varying from a daily 10km commute through peak-hour in Melbourne, to weekly cross-city hops of about 40km each way.

Ms M did most of the riding and ended up loving it. The only glitch was the rear brake started binding at one stage, though backing off the adjustment a little solved it. We suspect this was a one-off.

There's little underseat storage, though there's allowance for a factory topbox and the shopping bag hook between the knees turned out to be particularly useful, particularly when it came to steadying heavy loads.

Big-wheel scooters have struggled to find an audience in the local market, maybe because they lack underseat storage and don't look like a traditional scoot. However you get a significant trade-off with a better ride quality and vastly superior stability. Recommended retail is $4990, which is potentially cheaper than public transport.

Scarabeo Dreaming
If you see a pair of rather odd-looking bikes painted in vaguely eathy colours belting along some outback highway, don't be alarmed. More than likely it will be Italian riders Emerson Gattafoni and Valeria Cagnoni, who are piloting a pair of Aprilia Scarabeo 500s from Perth to Darwin.

Where not sure why, except perhaps for being some rite of passage. However Aprilia is making a fuss of the exercise on its main corporate website at www.aprilia.com, where it promises you can follow the pair's adventures.

The big Scarabeo, by the way, is powered by a swingarm-mounted liquid-cooled, 460cc, single-cylinder four-stroke and is not a local model at this stage.

Chinese Vespas?
Vespa's parent company, Piaggio, has recently signed a major joint-venture deal with Chinese maker Zongshen, which is the Asian nation's largest privately-owned motorcycle company.

The deal aims to produce 300,000 per year in China, all of which will be absorbed by the local market. This is equivalent to two-thirds of Piaggio's current total production.

Believe it or not, there's an Australian connection in all of this. Zongshen has large-capacity motorcycle ambitions and is currently sponsoring Aussie rider Warwick Nowland, who is contesting the world superbike championship on a Suzuki GSX-R1000. The company has also developed a 750cc V-twin racer (pictured above in slideshow).

China is becoming an increasingly significant market in world terms. According to Forbes online, "Although China's motorcycle market is huge, price competition has been brutal. China accounted for 42 per cent of the 32 million two-wheelers sold worldwide last year, but only 15% of industry revenue of $44.9 billion because of relatively low average prices. Profit also has been squeezed by overcapacity and restrictions on new license plates in major cities already clogged with passenger cars. Rural areas are promising because the government is moving to boost rural income and development."

Zongshen sells scooters and bikes from 4000 locations and its total revenue bikes, boats and other machinery last year was just shy of US$1 billion, compared to Piaggio's turn-over of $1.2 billion.