Country on Wheels

Not since the Roman chariot, have the Italians made a vehicle so peculiarly and proudly their own. Throughout the country, Italians ride swiftly to work & play on streamlined little two-wheeled scooters that do more than 100 miles on a gallon of gas. The motor scooter, invented in the U.S. but never a big seller, has become the model T of Italy, putting the country on wheels, breaking down regional barriers, and filling the air with its sputtering roar. Whole families ride a scooter. While the father drives, and one or two children stand on the tiny floorboard between his seat and the handlebars, the mother sits behind, often with a baby in her lap. Scooters have also spawned Italy's biggest new postwar industry. The 517,456 scooters turned out since war's end already outnumber Italy's autos. This year the industry will turn out another 300,000 for a gross of around $75 million.

Last week Genoa's Piaggio & Co., makers of Italy's first scooter, the Vespa (wasp), invaded the U.S. market with a roar. Sears, Roebuck & Co., which had ordered 1,000 Vespas as an experiment, sent a rush order for 5,000 more by September, and Piaggio prepared to supply Sears with up to 2,000 a month thereafter. Price in the U.S.: $279.95.

Menace to Reds. The family-owned Piaggio Co., run by Enrico Piaggio, 47, was Italy's biggest wartime producer of aircraft engines. At war's end, with most of its main plant destroyed and a ban on plane-making, Piaggio started building scooters patterned after the collapsible motor scooters used by U.S. and German paratroopers. Only 65 in. long and weighing 185 lbs., the Vespa had a 4 1/2 horsepower engine in the rear one-tenth the size of those in standard American motorcycles. Yet it did 43 m.p.h. (a souped-up model has been timed at 125 m.p.h.). The Vespa caught on at once.

To get money to expand, Piaggio borrowed $1,080,000 from the Export-Import Bank and ECA. Piaggio organized Vespa clubs, races and contests, thinks that "the best way to fight Communism in this country is to give each worker a scooter, so he will have his own transportation, have something valuable of his own, and have a stake in the principle of private property." Taking their cue from this, many industrialists have bought Vespas on a reduced-price fleet plan, sold them to employees by paycheck deductions. In Piaggio's own plant, 60% of the 3,500 workers who once depended on bicycles or their feet for their transportation now own scooters.

Second Car? Vespas have spread into 45 other countries, either through exports or local manufacturers licensed to make them. (The newest plant, in Spain, went into production this year.) Plenty of competitors have also sprung up in Italy. In fact, the cheaper Lambrettas made by the Innocenti Co. now outstrip the Vespa in sales. But this week Piaggio cut the Vespa's price in Italy to $240, enough to undersell the comparable Lambretta model. (Piaggio also is making railroad cars under license from Budd Co., aircraft engines, propellers, light planes.)

As to whether the U.S. will take to Vespas, no one knows. But Piaggio sees a big market as a substitute for a "second car," college student's runabout, low-cost rival of the motorcycle, or as an exciting new toy for hot-rodders.

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