Who here feels that the Lambretta was an all around better scooter design than the Vespa.On the Lambretta the bady parts are replacable, it's easier to get at the pieces ,and work on the engine parts.I own both ,and feel that Innocenti should have been around long after Piaggio.Whats your thoughts???
Suicide Mission on this side of the Pond
All I can say is that here in the states even the thought of a scooter is a suicide mission, what with a fair number of my countrymen determined to drive 5 ton, 8 mile to the gallon SUV's. A few years back in LA I saw a woman on a cell phone driving a near 5 ton Ford Excursion or as it is also known; the "Ford Valdez", 'It can pass anything on the road, except a gas station.' mindlessly blow through a red light at perhaps no more then 40 miles an hour and T-Bone some poor kid on a Honda Scooter, no helmet, not that it would have mattered, the kid was toast, in fact it was the first time I saw someone get killed right before my eyes. Scooters while cool in overall design and great to look at, you wouldn't catch me even sitting on one. A friend kept one (a vespa from the, I think 50's) fully restored, real Cary Grant "Roman Holiday" stuff as an objet de art in his huge living room as a piece of sculpture. He rode it once. As to Innocenti, he did wonderous things with the Mini back in the 60's.
It is often the case in dominant products in a market that...
one emphasizes stylish design and the other practical design. Vespa represents the former, and Lambretta the latter in Italian post WWII scooter design, I suppose.
One sees a similar pair of adaptive strategies in GM and Ford in post WWII American car manufacturing. GM cars were routinely more stylish (setting styling trends and pushing them farther and more frequently) the 50s and 60s than were Fords, but were often less rugged and harder to work on. GM prided itself on leaps in engineering of engines and chassis (GM's small block, ohv 283ci V-8, unibody construction (elimination of separate frame and body) and Hydramatic trannies, which were touted as superior engineering (and they were in some respects), but were first and foremost cost saving moves by GM meant to exploit economies of scale in GM's much larger sales volume, rather than being efforts aimed first and foremost at quality and durability and ease of repair. In turn, GM tended to stick with its innovations under the skin longer without incremental improvements than Ford did. Ford, on the other hand, prided itself on continually improving the engineering of their drivetrains and chassises and relied more on that and less on styling leaps and tweaks to sell their cars. Case in point: the distributor in GM cars was long at the back of the engine, because it was cheaper to put it there. Ford moved it to the front of the engine to make it easier to install and keep in tune. GM looked to leaps like unibodies. Ford kept trying to improve what it already had (muffler mounts for one example).
A somewhat similar phenomenon seems to have existed between Volvo and Saab in Sweden, but someone like Koen, because of having worked at Volvo, might authoritatively know differently. Volvo sold reliability of engineering and practicality of styling and later safety of both. Saab sold the styling sizzle of cars designed by aircraft engineers with aerodynamic styling. Volvo took the Ford route. They even copied the already dated design of old Ford two door coupes to create the 544. Saab, starting from scratch, adopted unibody/monocoque and a FWD layout with teeny V-4--originally a two-stroke--to cut weight and materials costs, and allow a cheap new engine design to do more with less. Saab never ran an ad about Saabs running 300,000 miles. Volvo did. You bought a Saab 92/94, because it expressed a belief in advanced aircraft styling and rational, unconventional engineering.
pt 2
Saab then rested on its advanced laurels, or at least appears to have in my modestly knowledgeable recollections, and sold the sizzle of aircraft aerodynamics (why anyone would prefer a car designed like an airplane, rather than like a car always escaped me, but they did in the 50s and some do to this day) and FWD traction in snow. I suspect a Volvo was more rugged, durable and easier to repair. A Saab was more efficient, pound per pound, slicker looking (many said just plain weird, but I liked them), but harder to repair, less rugged and less durable.
You see a similar divide in Wintel PCs vs. Apples. One was a rugged, practical work horse that gained its virtue mainly from huge market share and so more practicality of use in every day computing. Apples were better looking, more sophisticated with a GUI, easier to use because of the sophistication of the GUI, and better at non work horse computing activities.
What I am getting at with all of this is just this: there seem to be two types of users of products. One is more practical and work a day in how he views products. He views products more as tools for getting specific kinds of jobs done. Another type seems to view a technological good as a creative and expressive collaboration between themselves and the good or service being used. In turn, products tend to differentiate along those lines to minimize head on competition between each other and maximize control of their own consumer/user market segment. And these two types can reach an equilibrium strategy, if the initial competition doesn't lead one to kill the other, in which they each perpetuate themselves and strengthen the others monopoly by not encroaching on each other.
I suspect Vespa and Lambretta were in such an equilibrium strategy for quite some time and then outside competition and internal changes in costs wih asymmetric effects lead to one surviving and one perishing.
In short, Vespa sold style and then function, while Lambretta sold function and then style, and the way things played out (probably based on lots of parameters and variables related to sunk costs and external competitors and friends in high political places making favorable subsidies we cannot know) lead Vespa to survive and Lambretta to die, with relatively little of the outcome being determined by Vespa's and Lambretta's approaches to scooter design and engineering.
pt 3
Unforeseen, or inaccurately understood and anticipated outside influences beyond the control of limited player games are often the greatest determinants of survival in either competitive, or collaborative, equilibrium strategies.
I am probably partly wrong about the specifics of how each of these two player games mentioned above were actually engaged in, but that two player games tend to differentiate and settle into equilibrium strategies of competition and cooperation is pretty indisputable. And it is also pretty reasonable that unforeseen, or poorly understood outside forces, asymmetrically affect the two players and drastically alter their relationships, sometimes to elimination of one or the other.
That's life, as Frank Sinatra sang.
Hi DC...
Nobody that worked at Volvo or Saab will contradict you in any of your statements or...assumptions. Saab engineering might be slightly offended by your "rested on its advanced laurels", and they would be right because it's not their attitude and has never been. There was always a link between the succes of the aeronautical (and largest) part of the company and the possibilities given to the engineers to do research and innovate.
As you describe so well their is some wisdom in the so often sung adagio that it is better to be a good second. But, yes both first and second have always reflected a corresponding reality in the marketplace. I always thought of it as a nice balance because nobody can be both neither by ability and character, nor by perception and image.
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