MOTORCYCLE
APR 4, 2022
The Glorious History Of Vespa Scooter
Let’s get to know deeper into one of the most popular motorcycles in the history.
Vespa is a scooter type motorcycle brand originating from Italy with Piaggio as the parent company of Vespa. Its history begins in 1884, when Rinaldo Piaggio, an Italian, opened a trading company that produces ship equipment, railroads, train cars, body trucks, and train engines. He was just 22 years old at the time.
Then in 1917 Piaggio bought a new factory located in the city of Pisa, in the Tuscany region of Italy. Four years later, Piaggio took over a small factory in the town of Pontedera which is an Industrial town in the Tuscany region.
During World War I the company focused on aircraft production while in World War II the company produced bombers. However, the company later withdrew from the war effort because its factory was bombed by Allied troops.
The Piaggio company was later taken over by his own son, Enrico Piaggio. At a time when the Italian economy was deteriorating, Enrico decided to leave the aeronautics business and then began to design inexpensive means of transportation.
The difficult economic situation in Italy due to the war made Piaggio decide to produce a cheap and popular means of transportation. Piaggio invited Corradino D’Ascanio, an aircraft design expert, to design the proper vehicle for post war era.
Ascanio feels challenged to design a motorbike that is comfortable but still elegant. As a result, the first motorcycle scooter product appeared with the MP5 series (Moto Piaggio 5) in 1943 or better known as Paperino. This vehicle is technologically simple but has a very attractive shape. The design is what makes the product named as ‘Vespa’ meaning a wasp in Italian.
In April 1946, Vespa 98, a new functional and innovative transportation model was first publicly announced at the Golf Club, Rome. At that time, the first sales of the Vespa started from small dealers at a price of 55,000 Lira for the standard model, while the deluxe model was priced at 66,000 Lira.
Initially this bike was used by the Foreign Legion corps and the French military Parachute Corps. Within ten years more than 1 million units had been produced. With strong cash flow from the success of the Vespa, Piaggio developed other products, including the 1957 Vespa 400, a small passenger car.
At the beginning of its arrival, Vespa had a big rival from the Lambretta scooter, but now the Vespa automatic as a conventional motor scooter has no competition anymore.
In 1959, Piaggio became a subsidiary of Fiat SpA controlled by the Agnelli family. In 1964, the two divisions, aeronautics and motorcycles, were separated into two independent companies as a result of Fiat’s wide ownership of Italian industry.
During the 1960s and 1970s, the Vespa became a symbol of the revolution at that time. Not only in Italy, but the idea and philosophy of the Vespa spread to other European countries and even to the continents of Asia and Africa.
Today, Piaggio is a public company that became an Italian motorcycle manufacturer. Piaggio & C. SpA is headquartered in Pontedera, Italy and employs a total of 6,700 employees producing 653,300 vehicles in 2011.
More than seventy-three years since 23 April 1946, Vespa has sold over 18 million vehicles on five continents. The company operates in 50 countries with five research centers making it the 4th largest scooter motorcycle manufacturer in the world.
In the last decade, more than 1,6 million new Vespa vehicles have been sold worldwide. Vespa has three important factories such as the Pontedera which manufactures Vespa for the European and American markets. The Vinh Phuc Plant in Vietnam serves the Southeast Asian market including the East market, as well as the Baramati Plant in India for the Indian market.
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