Scooters, motorcycles moving fast amid steep fuel prices
bakersfield.com
[Thursday, Jul 3 2008 3:31 PM]
On her lunch break from the salon, Cathelene Chavez and her co-worker took a drive to the motorcycle shop Wednesday and climbed onto a pair of motor scooters they’d researched on the Internet.
“Vroom vroom!” the 30-year-old hairstylist and mother of two said from atop a bright red Piaggio with a sticker price of $1,899 and a sign that read, “More than 72 MPG.”
She’d already done the math: Driving 10 miles a day to work and back means Chavez would have to fill up only once every two months or so. That’s a lot better than the small blue car she left parked outside — or almost any car.
“Hybrids are nice and all, but they still use a lot more gas than these things,” she said.
Such thinking has led to a surge in demand for scooters and small motorcycles around Bakersfield and across the country.
Spurred by high gasoline prices, commuters are leaving their cars at home and instead motoring to work on vehicles they wouldn’t have considered even a few months ago.
In the first three months of this year, the most recent period for which data are available, U.S. scooter sales were up 24 percent over the same period in 2007, while small motorcycle sales increased 7.5 percent, according to the Motorcycle Industry Council, a not-for-profit trade group.
Although recent sales figures were not available for the Bakersfield area, the council reports that area scooter sales rose 69 percent over the last five years. On-highway motorcycle sales grew 23 percent over the same period.
Bakersfield’s Pit Stop Motor Sports has done brisk business in scooters since gas prices took off in the past six months, and now sales manager Sean Amble said he can’t keep some models in stock, adding that pink and black scooters are going particularly fast.
His customers are nearly unanimous in their reason for the purchase: save cash on gas.
“That’s the main reason they’re buying these things, is to get to work and back cheap,” Amble said.
At Fred Cummings Motorsports scooter sales between Jan. 1 and June 30 are up 54 percent over the same period a year before, promotions manager Christine Torreyson said.
Their cuteness and fun factor help, she said.
“It’s cost-effective,” she said, “and it’s a blast to get around town.”
Small, highly fuel-efficient motorcycles — those with engines displacing 250 cubic centimeters or less — also do well lately, which still surprises the sales manager at Kawasaki of Bakersfield, Donny Brucker.
“It’s just an entry-level” motorcycle, he said. “Most men, well, don’t want to ride a (250-cc motorcycle) because they look like a sissy.”
That’s apparently not as big a drawback these days, in part because the Kawasaki 250 has been redesigned to look larger, like a 600 — and because the 250 gets between 55 and 70 miles per gallon, as compared with the 600’s 40 to 50 mpg. (A 150-cc engine is the smallest permitted on California freeways.)
Brucker now regrets ordering light on the 250 (he ordered only nine 2008 models because he thought he was going to be stuck with a dozen 2007s that previously were moving slowly). Now he has a waiting list of 15 people who want a 250, and still gets five to seven calls a day from people statewide trying to get their hands on one.
New interest in scooters and motorcycles has translated to more applications for riding school at Nelson Motorcycle Training Center, which offers motorcycle safety courses at sites including one near Shafter’s Minter Field Airport.
Owner Ken Nelson said about half of his recent clients are driven to take the course because of steep fuel prices. Many of them, he said, are people who wouldn’t have been riding a year ago: women and men whose spouses previously would have forbidden them from buying a motorcycle for safety reasons.
That’s not the case with Manuel Villarreal, a math teacher at Golden Valley High School. He recently spent about $2,500 on a new 257-cc black Tank scooter that does 80 miles an hour and gets 80 mpg — nearly four times more than his Mitsubishi.
Not being especially mechanically inclined, however, Villarreal hadn’t managed to get the scooter running by Thursday afternoon, and couldn’t yet say whether his economically based decision was also a pleasurable one.
But he hopes riding it will be as much fun as it looks.
“I’m looking forward to it,” he said. |
