Modern Vespa

Has anyone fitted Heated Grips to their Vespa? My dealer is quoting me £199 ($273) fitted whilst they are £50 to buy.

My main question I suppose is how difficult are they to fit for a unskilled pen pusher like myself?

Please tell us what year and model your Vespa is? Some others will chime in and let you know if yours has a electric block just inside the left knee pad. If yours is older, you would need to run a wire directly to the battery. This will take longer but certainly not worth the price the dealer is quoting you. I have koso apollo grips. These are very subtle and not as obvious as some others.
Tony IN Tennessee 07 GTS 250 with 22,000 miles and a car tire

There's 2 pages of this subject in search. Type in Heated Grips and select message title only. After you read whats there, I'm sure you can get plenty of answers to your well informed questions.

Hello Coddy, looks like you just joined, Welcome!

While possibly not specific to your model Scooterwest has posted a video on their youtube channel that covers this. Chances are your install would be similar and this video gives a pretty good overview of what is likely involved.

Thank you, my bike is a brand new GTS 300.

I tend to not use the search option in forums as the posts are out of date and negates the approach of fresh ideas and consequently slows down the forums activity.

Oh. This is why FB groups never progress beyond a bunch of people asking each other the same basic questions over and over. Low effort begets low effort. High effort begets high effort. This tends to be a high effort venue when it comes to maintenance tasks.

You're hoping for fresh ideas on heated grip installation without knowing the tried-and-true methods? What is inadequate about the tried-and-true methods? Isn't it presumptive to expect someone else to spend time responding to your query that wasn't important enough to merit initial research?

A couple of points:

1) The search function on MV is terrible. I don't think we should fault people too much for not using it. Ideally, new posters would make a good-faith effort to do some basic searches, but I don't want anyone to scold newbies for not doing an exhaustive search when we haven't really given them very good tools to do so. In other words, "do a search" is almost never a good answer. If you know where the content lives, point them at that content instead. In this thread, fafnir did exactly that, kudos to fafnir.

2) Heated grips are quite possible on a GTS, and I've installed them on several bikes. It's a nontrivial amount of work -- lots of wiring, lots of plastic removal. None of it is rocket science, you can do it with basic tools (mostly). But the labor cost at a dealer is justified.

3) The biggest problem is getting the grips on and off. This is helped greatly by having an air compressor handy. You can essentially briefly inflate the grips for a fraction of a second with compressed air, and they can be moved during that fraction of a second.

I installed heated grips on my 2006 Vespa GTS. They work flawlessly and have made winter riding more comfortable, especially with Tucano Urbano muffs in place. I can ride down to about 20F with my three season leather gloves.

As Jess indicated already, the installation is nontrivial. That means for someone like me who doesn't like doing things like that it was a pain in the ass.

I would not blink at having the dealer install them. I am considering having a dealer install heated grips on my BMW K75 once I figure out if I actually will ride the motorcycle in cold weather.

I also considered fitting heated grips. But I checked things out and decided not to fit heated grips on the Beverly.
Instead I have bought battery powered heated gloves. No fuss, no wiring, no effort.
The battery pack deliveres heating for some 4hrs which is more than enough for my scooter trips in winter.

After reading this thread Peter I have come to same conclusion, heated gloves are the way forward.

problem with gloves is when you forget them. heated grips are ALWAYS available when installed on the scoot. they are great when raining in the summer and using lighter weight gloves.

I installed heated grips on my 2009 gts and they were better than nothing. I do miss them when riding my 2019 supertech in winter. but were they enough? not for snow

I found them not hard to install. think I may stick a pair on my supertech before next winter.

Installing them isn't difficult. wiring them isn't either. Only thing you need to identify is which of the wires is going to give power only when the key is turned on, identify it for your year and model then get posi-tap connectors https://www.posi-products.com/posiplug.html or something like Scotchlock either of these tap into an existing wire without cutting it.and it should be a relatively easy process to accomplish.
As others have chimed in, you have more resources to guide you through it.

The risk on forgetting my gloves is very low. I always keep my gloves stored in the compartment below the seat.

I bought the heated gloves quite recently in preparation for winter but thusfar temperatures here have not been that low to be able to really test them.