Modern Vespa

Why Vietnam? What started them to sell badly restored Vespas? Where do they get their inventory of old Vespas to "restore"? Are they aware of the incredibly bad reputation their restored Vespas have earned?

Mate, Vietnam like most Asia, was Piaggio's biggest market in the 60's.

This maybe the biggest reason as to why.

It's a real shame that so many were trashed. And given the demand here in the US since the mid 90's that's why there are so many here.

I am sure they now know the reputation they have but sadly the $$ incentive is too great And some buyers are too late.


Cheers

yup. they've got a lot (india too) as it's been their primary mode of transport for decades. blame the u.s.'s penchant for shiny bright things for their crappy resto market. frankly, i don't blame them except for when they advertise "completely restored with new parts" etc...

people don't do their due diligence, look for the cheapest deal, and end up with bondoed turds. sad part is, by the time they include shipping and whatnot, they'd be close to a proper resto done domestically.

Once the dupe ends up replacing the entire motor and fork they could have built an incredible custom show winning bike. But instead they end up with a ridable bodge machine filled with bondo and possibly unseen major structural cracks in the frame, ill fitting cheaply chromed hand controls and a tacky spare tire cover and yellow stand boots. Oh, and the ire of everyone who told them all along not to buy it in the first place.

got to love it its OUR FAULT vietnam does shoddy restorations, I wouldn't have expected a different answer

Well, it's true! We've tried so hard to inspire capitalism and free market ideals into the eastern world... we really can't complain when they work!

They see a market : People in the USA and UK who want a scooter that's all painted up and chromed like a mod bike... they watch Quadrophenia and get inspired to buy something gaudy. They have the discretionary money

They have the resources: TONS of old shitty metal vespas that have been ridden for hundreds of thousands of miles and are falling apart in every sense of the word. After all, it's worked for them to just bondo / weld / duct tape it back together all these years. Also, manual labor there is dirt cheap, so they have the labor resources to make it happen cheaply

It's completely a buyer beware situation. The naive here expect that items come with some sort of quality control or something, even if they bought it on ebay from some overseas seller. It's ridiculous that people are willing to click "buy it now" on a $3500 and not have any fear they're getting ripped off. PARTICULARLY when googling "vietnamese vespa" "asian restoration" or any number of terms will yield nothing but bad things to say.

If i wanted to buy some electric guitar, and i was shopping for a USA-made stratocaster or something, why in the hell would i expect that one coming from asia via ebay would be legit? Why would i be buying such a large thing sight-unseen anyways, where playability and individuality is such a unique quality on a guitar. Vespas are the same deal.

After all you hear about counterfeit viagara, counterfeit purses and clothing, pirate DVDs and music CD's. How can ANYTHING coming from that area be assumed to be a legitimate thing at this point? Have people been asleep for 20 years?

"The Japanese?! Those sandal-wearing goldfish tenders?!?!" -Mr Burns

shoddy workmanship is not our fault, the consumer has a responsibility to be sure he/she is purchasing a good product, but to blame us for some con artist trying to make a buck is nonsense. Course were living that dream right now arent we.

My best freind in Seattle grew up in Vietnam. When he was a kid (like 20 years ago.) he worked for a guy who had a garage for Vespa repair and he worked on them. He told me that he would never buy one from Vietnam because:

1) they all have thousands and thousands of miles on them.
2) engines are pieced together from whatever seems to fit
3) They RUST very badly there. Vietnam is a hot damp wet place where iron loves to bond with oxygen in wedded bliss.
4) the guys who work on them are underpaid kids with little to no safety. He used to paint with acrylic urethanes without any PPE. His boss would beat up those who would screw up stuff.

you have to understand that their "shoddy workmanship" is completely acceptable in their terms...it's how they keep their bikes alive. no different than the farmer bodges that occurred here in the states, or the way some kids keep an old bicycle alive way past its prime.

it's not like they're hoarding all these pristine n.o.s. parts for their personal rides, and taking the crap of the crap and sending it here. people ride these same bikes minus the crappy paint, chrome, and bondo every day there. if there was a market for 20 year old chevy cavaliers, and you could rattle can it cherry red, and export it for 50 grand, wouldn't you?

like i said, when it's sold as "safe", "easy to title", or "restored with all new parts", it's just false advertising. but, they're just meeting a market demand that we produced, and a large portion of the people getting screwed are the ones that were just too lazy or naive to do 5 minutes research on a 4000.00 investment.

Well said, Stefan.

the sad part is, there is literally millions of usable parts over there, and if there was someone that could inspect or check tolerances, you could fill up a container with used parts and have a decent resale market.

and some of the hand workmanship that goes into some of the sheet metal parts is actually pretty impressive. i'd like to see someone try to duplicate some 12 year old kids hand hammered cowls here.

boy its irresistable when you live in that part of the world. I lived in malaysia for a number of years in the mid 90's and had a good friend who toured small towns in his spare time buying up parts for old hondas and picking up intersting 50's and 60's stuff from the back of old time dealers. he had a nice collection of japanese stuff including a sweet little tohatsu racer

in a country where its only as good as it looks they don't care if the inside is made up of a load of crap if it works - they just fix it with something else when it stops...

90% of the "con artists" you describe are people that live in the west. They know the standard of the bikes, yet they still buy them by the container load and ship them here, even in some cases selling them as "restored in Europe".

personally if i had the funds id ship loads of the old frames over here then sell them to people who want to do a decent resto

Gees ok I quit americans are evil bad people, kinda surprized no americans are helping me out here, apparently non at scooters originali

what are you talking about? If anything we're taking the bulk of the blame off the vietnamese restorers and putting it on 1) uneducated consumers with more money than brains 2) The shifty people HERE who are shipping these bikes in by the containerload to misrepresent them to people here and rip people off.

And those shifty folks are everywhere, btw... michigan, california, tennessee, florida ...

a cursory glance of national craigslist adverts will prove that.

Oooooh. Temper temper.

No, Andrea the American at S.O. will not help you out here, as she's English (and charming).

Look, I don't know what your hang up is, but the simple fact is that AMERICANS (or "westerners," as Andrea would have it), go over to Vietnam, commission locals to do what they do anyway, which is patch their vehicles together with bubble gum and baling wire, and then go out of their way to misrepresent these cobbled together atrocities as "restored," and reliable.

No foreigners are screwing us here. They sell these things to each other and everyone is wise to it over there. It's only when Americans bring them here and then lie about them (and then the American buyers who got screwed post them on eBay and lie about them again), that we get screwed, and all of that screwing is entirely home-grown.

Face it, from the old snake oil medicine shows to the Ginsu, Americans have been screwing each other for hundreds of years. This is no different.

There is no inherent virtue in being American. This country started as a bunch of shysters (Dutch traders bought Manhattan for a trunk full of beads). Of course, when it comes to shady beginnings, we've got nothing on the Aussies.
- Eric

pomansvespa


it's not really anybodys fault until the chicken hauler breaks and hurts someone physicaly or monetarily.(my spelling is bodgey)

Am I the only one who's aroused?

I mean, wasn't our country FOUNDED on a premise of screwing people out of something... beginning with the native inhabitants?

Get your mind out of the gutter!

We all know that this is about BUSINESS, and business and adverstising have NOTHING to do with sex!

- Eric

Is this thread really getting into the topic of ethics in the U.S.A, and your starting out in the colonial era....This should take a while.

You know what grinds my gears?

This Lindsay Lohan. Lindsay Lohan with all those little outfits, jumping around there on stage, half-naked with your little outfits. Ya know? You're a... You're out there jumping around and I'm just sitting here with my beer. So, what am I supposed to do? What you want? You know, are we gonna go out? Is that what you're trying to - why why are you leaping around there, throwing those things all up in my, over there in my face? What do you want, Lindsay? Tell me what you want? Well, I'll tell you what you want, you want nothing. You want nothing. All right? Because we all know that no woman anywhere wants to have sex with anyone, and to titillate us with any thoughts otherwise is - is just bogus.

Nice

Lindsay got some nice tig O'le bitties!

funny thing is happening on ebay uk lately

alot of 'recently restored' vespas are turning up for sale, ones which have been registered say 6months-1year ago

i suppose people have bought them and realised they are death traps so are trying to get their money back

Might have worked a decade ago, maybe even 5 years ago. But all the frames and parts from the non-runners have all been bought up and are being hoarded. By the few bigger operations so that they can be put onto the ones they "restore" for sale, now and for the future.

Any Tom, Dick and Harry who goes to Vietnam can buy one or a truckload of "restored" scoots to resell. Here's just one alley in HCMC, these are the so-called local bottom feeders who buy from a workshop and flip the scoots on the street to tourists. I managed to snap one pic before that guy turned his head and threatened to smash my camera.

The Viets are just catering to demand, as was mentioned. It's good money to them, but the real profit is being made by those that buy from them and resell in the western market. You won't believe the mark-ups being made just by flipping a viet bodge. I'm not surprised by the greed.

And those people are worse than the assholes who sold them to start with.

senkun

your post was good until your impersonation of some one from asia speaking english

lets try to keep it simple AND civil

He did say that's how they say "Vespa" over there...

but it is easy to forget we have a contingent of viet / indo posters here that we don't want to offend.

I kid you not, that is how they asked me when I was looking.

+1

thank you eric

but the whole looky looky i gib dicount i personally can do with out

just say they pronouce vespa funny and not make fun of someone

we alienate people when we make fun of people

don't get me started

I MAKE FUN OF ME AND CLOSE FRIENDS,PERIOD.

Huh? I said Westerners. I'm a Brit and the people that import the bodges into tje Uk and sell them as factory restos are as bad. the same thing is happening in Canada, South America, France, Italy, all over Europe. Australia has problems with it too.

I don't get what you are trying to imply.

Andrea

Andrea - I focused my response above on Americans because the previous poster had, and was just talking about the US. I agree that nationals of all of the other Western countries are doing the same thing to their own countrymen (women). There's a whole debate in the style books of the more reputable news organizations about this.

The question is: If you are interviewing a person, and that person speaks a certain way, are you misquoting him if you correct all of the "ain't not"'s and "I dun aksed him that"'s, or are you lampooning him by including them?

It's actually a good question, for which there is no easy answer, but modern style tends to come down on the side of transliterating what the interviewee MEANT to say, rather than precisely reproducing all of the errors, ummms and ahhs. "I'se dun gwine inta town ta fetch mamma an me sum butta!" is considered patently racially offensive these days, but 75 or even 50 years ago would have been completely unremarkable.

We could have that debate here, to, if everyone wants to, just as soon as we've figured out what a vintage scooter is

- Eric

An interesting perspective on things, MDchanic.

The title of my viet-scoot identification thread is "Me No Rikey" ..which, i meant to be partly offensive when i wrote it ( because i was pissed about all the asian bikes coming in, motivating me enough to write up that thread ).... but i always wondered if i should change that. Honestly, i thought people would find it more of a funny jab than me trying to be overtly racist.

Similarly, if i was trying to make fun of Australian imports, i'd call the thing "The Dingo ate my Deal : how to avoid scams with those dirty prisoner australians"

I wonder who's being offended by my pic tag transcription, I doubt my Vietnamese friends are. I picked up basic malay and chinese easily while in SE Asia, but viet is a whole different ball game. The closest I could get was speak english their way. Even the viet hawker in the street relates better when I speak 'their' kind of english. My 'caffe da' cost 4000 Dong and the other guy got fleeced for 5000. The locals pay 3000

it's all bondo you know?

haha...no my wife has bondo..her's are the real deal