Modern Vespa

Hi Everyone,

I've been lurking on this forum, trying to learn as much as I could before asking anything, before asking...

On a modern water-cooled Vespa, how long would one expect an engine last before a teardown and rebuild, given good care, oil changes?

How much would a water-cooled four-stroke rebuild cost?
--Is it true that the crank and bearings are a unit?

If buying your new Vespa again, what would you do differently to make it last longer?

[I saw one article about a 250 teardown, but the links are dead now.
I asked about the 250s too, because the 300s appear still to be pretty new.]

(Thanks for making this great site, and making this site great.)

If you maintain it properly, a GTS/GTV 300-Super should go 50k plus miles with no engine problems.

The truth is that we don't know yet. So few have seen any major core-engine failures that it's hard to tell yet. I know that many members here have 20,000+ miles without major incident of the engine itself.

As I understand it, the crank is essentially matched to the case, so when the crank goes, you likely have to replace the cases as well. I think there might only be two variants of each, though, so maybe this is not as hard and fast of a rule as we've been told.

This is not to say that nothing else wears out -- you'll go through a lot of consumables in 20,000 miles. Tires, belts, variators, rollers, brake pads, and so on.

Here's a thread that has several high mileage 250 engines:
https://modernvespa.com/forum/topic46542

*one at 68k miles in an MP3-250
*one at 36.5k miiles on a GTS
*Dealer in that thread says he's seeing them with 30k-40k miles and running like champs

*And a link in that thread to this site that has a list of some high mileage Piaggio products: http://www.scootertrap.com/