2016 Genuine Scooter Line Up
Genuine Scooters, a great little
company, tends to be less than upfront about what they actually do as
“America’s Favorite Scooter Company”. As opposed to most scooter companies that
actually make scooters, Genuine imports batches of scooters from other
manufacturers that otherwise don’t sell in the USA.
These machines are then
marketed under the Genuine brand. It’s not a bad strategy since building
scooters is expensive and there are already nice machines built and sold
overseas that aren’t offered in the USA. It’s similar to the business model of
most distributers except Genuine goes a step further by trying to improve upon
the often poor branding and support.
However Genuine has never been very
upfront with their status as an importer/distributer, leaving people to assume
they are a manufacturer. Genuine generally
imports pretty good scooters but readers still need to know this.
The first overseas maker Genuine struck
a deal with was LML, who for years had manufactured the PX series for Vespa and
thus was capable of making perfect clones for Genuine when Vespa’s patents ran
out. These machines are imported as the Stella and are generally great scooters
considering they’re a 30 year old design.
Since LML is limited in what scooters
they make, Genuine next struck a deal with PGO Scooters of Taiwan, who make
reasonably good scooters in the same vein as Kymco and SYM. Starting in 2006
and continuing today, Genuine imports most of their line from PGO such as the
Buddy, Roughhouse and the new for 2016 Buddy Kick (left in silver), whereas PGO
sells these scooters under the PGO name up in Canada (but still through a
distributer) and elsewhere.
The big news for 2016 is the addition of
a new, undisclosed Chinese manufacturer for their new Venture 50 scooter (top).
The Venture 50 is impressively low priced (US$ 1599) for a machine with pretty
good specs (3-valve motor, front and rear disc brakes) other than top speed
(30 mph) and slightly better than average looks for a Chinese machine. Whether
it’s any good or not remains to be seen but most likely it’s okay commuter
material.
The 50 cc market segment is really price
sensitive, so it’s not surprising that Genuine decided to market a lower cost
scooter, especially after the 2013 boardroom shakeup where founder, CEO and
enthusiast Philip McCaleb was pushed out. The interesting question is whether
Genuine can do this without hurting the rest of their brand, or maybe they plan
to slowly switch to a mostly Chinese line? Hopefully Genuine has good quality
control they can avoid a situation that hurts their reputation.