Taken from the Industrial & Product Design blog Yanko Design, and suggested by my old mate Luke, This is a bit of an unusual post for the blog. The renders answer the question – What will classical Italian automotive design be in a hundred years? The designer, Artem Smirnov has distilled the classic Italian curves of yesterdays Vespa’s and created something radically different, yet still, somehow recognisable. Personally, I think that’s a design that’s maybe ten or twenty years away – not a hundred! What do you think? Like it? Loathe it? What would a Lambretta look like?
Original post, here.
Oh, and don’t forget about my Father’s Day Giveaway!
Originally based on the Indian version of a Vespa Ape, the three-wheeler rickshaw is ubiquitous throughout the Indian sub-continent, and indeed Asia. Ikea is using a solar-powered of these as at least 20% of their delivery fleet for their new Hyderabad flagship store. The Ikea version will be charged at the store, running off of solar power harvested from 4,000 panels on the roof. Any excess energy gathered will be used for lighting and inside the store.
What’s the Buzz? The Buzz is the future. It’s electric. And it’s Vespa shaped. Aiming to do for the scooter market what Tesla have done for cars, Buzz is recreating yesterdays scooter style with tomorrows technology.
The images shown are prototypes – the final design promising to morph into a ‘more modern take on this classic shop’ – well, I for one hope they don’t change too much. You know what side of the fence I sit on in the Vespa vs. Lambretta debate… but Vespas are the second most beautiful scooters ever made – so this retro styling looks pretty good!
The two big ‘pain points’ with electric vehicles are range and charging. The Buzz scooters have a range of 240km – nearly 150 miles in old money. Pretty impressive. And improvements in battery tech could boost that to 400km. If your riding any more than that between charges, your doing some serious level scootering.
There’s even an option with a removable roof system – featuring built in solar panels – the goal being you ‘ride for free’ and never have to plug your scoot into the grid. To be honest, I’d rather plug my scooter in once a day than ride around with a roof, but I think this would work well for delivery vehicles. Delivery vehicles in sunny places!
I got sent a link from Olivier in Toulouse about these fabulous aluminium and resin models based on scooters from “the golden age”. The models are going to be produced in a limited series soon, through Ulele, a European crowdfunding site.
Found this over on the Italian version of eBay… a racing Lambretta prepared for the classic Milano Taranto stage race – a classic that ranks alongside the Paris-Dakar, Bol d’Or and Isle of Man TT. Based, by the look of it on a cutdown LD (or it could be a LC… any shaft drive experts out there care to enlighten me) rather than the more usually seen race prepped D’s it’s got a bunch of race ‘goodies’ including a double tank and a trumpet carb. Certainly looks the business.
Sandro from Malta got in touch, initially interested in doing a deal on the 
Happy New Year everybody! 2017 is a BIG year for Lambrettisti, with, amongst many other things, the 70th Anniversary celebrations taking place. More about that later, in a dedicated post. In the meantime, before I kick off with new posts, I just wanted to wish all my contributors, commenters, supporters and readers a slightly belated happy, healthy and prosperous new year!
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