Word: piaggio
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...Challenge. Some months ago, the Embassy awarded a $7,528,000 contract to the Piaggio yards in Palermo for a NATO destroyer escort. Later, when a new plantwide election was held, the Reds argued that "the bosses think the workers are such imbeciles that they can be blackmailed. They don't know that the workers have sufficient intelligence to understand that orders must be assigned to plants and yards which have necessary equipment and qualified personnel ... in spite of American millionaires." Result: the Reds increased the number of Communist shop stewards at Piaggio from four to seven...
Menace to Reds. The family-owned Piaggio Co., run by Enrico Piaggio, 47, was Italy's biggest wartime producer of aircraft engines. At war's end, with most of its main plant destroyed and a ban on plane-making, Piaggio started building scooters patterned after the collapsible motor scooters used by U.S. and German paratroopers. Only 65 in. long and weighing 185 lbs., the Vespa had a 4½ horsepower engine in the rear one-tenth the size of those in standard American motorcycles. Yet it did 43 m.p.h. (a souped-up model has been timed...
...money to expand, Piaggio borrowed $1,080,000 from the Export-Import Bank and ECA. Piaggio organized Vespa clubs, races and contests, thinks that "the best way to fight Communism in this country is to give each worker a scooter, so he will have his own transportation, have something valuable of his own, and have a stake in the principle of private property." Taking their cue from this, many industrialists have bought Vespas on a reduced-price fleet plan, sold them to employees by paycheck deductions. In Piaggio's own plant, 60% of the 3,500 workers who once...
...countries, either through exports or local manufacturers licensed to make them. (The newest plant, in Spain, went into production this year.) Plenty of competitors have also sprung up in Italy. In fact, the cheaper Lambrettas made by the Innocenti Co. now outstrip the Vespa in sales. But this week Piaggio cut the Vespa's price in Italy to $240, enough to undersell the comparable Lambretta model. (Piaggio also is making railroad cars under license from Budd Co., aircraft engines, propellers, light planes...
...whether the U.S. will take to Vespas, no one knows. But Piaggio sees a big market as a substitute for a "second car," college student's runabout, low-cost rival of the motorcycle, or as an exciting new toy for hot-rodders...