Tokyo: Sleek scooters for the slouch generation
Apr 30th, 2005 | by Neil Barton | Posted in scooters | Comments Off
A great article on the growing scooter population in Japan:
It may not seem like it, but fewer and fewer motorcycles are bought in Japan every year.
Some 700,000 two-wheel vehicles were sold last year, a 7.9 percent drop from the previous year. Sales of large scooters, however, have been on a steady rise.
About 97,000 scooters with engines in the 126cc to 250cc class, were bought last year, a rise of 10.5 percent compared with the year before. It may seem a small figure, but profit-wise the sale of one big scooter equals the sale of five to ten smaller ones, according to industry experts.
The new scooters have much to recommend them. They can purr along at faster than 100 kilometers per hour, keeping up with traffic even on the freeway.
They don’t demand fiddly foot and wrist coordination-the scooters are automatic and come with anti-lock braking systems and even satellite navigation screens as options. Their displacement is small enough to exempt them from expensive inspection checks required every two years. (There are supersize scooters though that require them).
