TheScooterScoop

Heres a little excerpt from the Mumbai Mirror. In an interview with Rahul Bajaj (above) the Chairman of Bajaj Auto. One question stood out to me and that’s this:

Mumbai Mirror: “Coming to the two-wheeler industry, considering the runaway popularity of motorcycles, do you think it is the end of the scooter?

One doesn’t know. But what is a scooter and what is a motorcycle… and what is a moped? They are only definitions. It is a question of what a customer wants. What he wants is low price, fuel economy, performance.

Having said that, we were a scooter company and India was a scooter country. But over the past eight years, scooters disappeared and we became a motorcycle country. So LML suffered, Kinetic suffered. Hero Honda benefited because it made only motorcycles. We suffered but we made up with motorcycles. We never made a loss.

While the world was a motorcycle market, only we and Taiwan and Italy were the only scooter markets. The question whether the scooter will come up or not will depend on what we give customers in a scooter.

Bajaj is going to come out in January 2007 with one or two models of variomatic scooters. Not geared ones. We are still making about 10,000 scooters a month. This year we’ll make 2.2 million vehicles, of which two lakh will be three-wheelers. Two million will be two-wheelers of which, 1.9 million will be motorcycles and the rest scooters of one kind or the other. Going ahead, a lot will depend on what Hero Honda and Honda do, mainly Honda.”