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Scooters' Popularity Rises with Gas Prices
By NAOMI SNYDER
Saturday, 08/19/06
Staff Writer
Forget a hybrid. Nashville medical equipment saleswoman Kristi Webb is saving on gasoline by hopping on her mint-green Vespa scooter and tooling around town, getting 60 to 70 miles per gallon.She's traveled 1,500 miles — generally traveling to the grocery store and to visit friends. The cost: a total of about $70 for gasoline, even with prices at the pump averaging about $2.87 a gallon in recent days. If she had used her Volvo SUV, Webb would have spent three times that amount to travel the same number of miles.
"This is the bomb,'' said the 37-year-old, who occasionally travels via Vespa while talking to business clients on a cell phone headset. She explains: "I've got the windows down" when they question the noise."I can go anywhere on this," she said.
But at the $5,900 price she paid for the Italian-made Vespa Granturismo, known to hit speeds of 90 miles an hour, Webb really was indulging in a love of what's fast and fun rather than what's economical. Not all scooters can scoot at such top speeds. Many models top out at about 35 miles an hour.
Webb said she keeps her SUV because she needs a car to take business clients to lunch, some of whom might shy away from sailing down the road atop a zippy two-wheeler.
Sales of motorized scooters, which can cost anywhere from under $2,000 to more than $8,000, climbed 17 percent last year to 113,000 nationwide, according to an industry association, the Motorcycle Industry Council.
Sales of scooters rose an additional 19 percent during the first half of 2006, the group said.
Their popularity, muted by a decade or more of cheap gas prices, is gaining once again in an era of nearly $3-a-gallon gasoline.
"These things absolutely sip fuel," said David Bloodworth, president of Bloodworth Motorcycles in Nashville, which sells Vespas.
The streets of Europe and Asia have long been filled with scooters, but many Americans continue to prefer SUVs, trucks or sedans. Total car and light truck sales totaled 9.8 million vehicles in the first seven months of the year.
Scooters are still a rarity; motorcycles outsell them nine or 10 to one, dealers say, not to mention the sales of bigger vehicles with four wheels.
America's Motor Sports sold more than 1,000 motorcycles last year, but fewer than 100 scooters, according to owner Chris Watts. Still, he saw sales of scooters jump between 10 percent and 30 percent last year.
Bloodworth sees the start of a trend in sales of the long-marginalized scooter, which saw its last heyday during the energy crisis of the 1970s.
"We are going to see an abandonment of buying the large Escalade, the huge SUV vehicle,'' he said. "Even if people have the money to buy the fuel, they don't feel good about wasting natural resources."
Carmakers — many of them introducing smaller, fuel-efficient cars — also anticipate a brighter future for fuel economy and are working it into their sales spreadsheets. The Honda Fit and the Toyota Yaris subcompacts are doing so well that dealers say they're selling them at or above the sticker price before they arrive in showrooms.
Sales of subcompacts climbed 43 percent in the first seven months of the year compared with the same time last year, industry statistics show.
The uptick in scooter sales doesn't mean motorists are ditching their cars. Many scooter buyers are holding onto their cars.
Ed Chidester has a Pontiac Grand Prix but prefers to drive his Yamaha Majesty about 11 miles to his job as an engineer for a software company in Brentwood. That way he can enjoy the ride; he recently took note of a flock of wild turkeys in someone's yard.
Despite the $6,000 price tag, less than half the cost of most subcompact cars, Chidester said he wouldn't have considered buying one if gas prices hadn't soared.
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