Few people know but Piaggio’s famous Vespa has a four-wheel version. More or less. The auction for this specimen becomes interesting and the question is only who will be able to take it home. Let’s find out together!
The Piaggio brand is famous for scooters and mopeds, and the few multi-wheeled vehicles it has produced are small vans. Right? Not even for a dream: the brand’s first car is up for auction.
A history of motorcycles
Getting out of your comfort zone – according to many psychologists – is a good thing: if you fixate on doing the same things over and over again, you end up getting bored. Perhaps, already in the early 1950s, the engineers and designers of the Piaggiothe most famous Italian manufacturer of scooters, they were aware of this thing because they decided to get out of their field a lot.
Piaggio has been in business for over half a century. His most famous product it is certainly the Vespa, still the most popular Italian scooter of all but it is not the only creation of the house that produced the three-wheeled Ape, the very famous vehicle for transporting light goods so loved by Italian traders, and also other scooters very much as popular as the Beverly.
It obviously exists too a four-wheeled vehicle in the range of the brand: this is the Porter, a rather recent creation designed to enter the light commercial vehicle sector in a more modern way after years of producing three-wheeled vehicles. Surprisingly, this pickup truck is not the only vehicle with all the wheels in the right place produced by the Italian house.
The little French girl
The project of the first and only small car of the Piaggio brand was born in 1952 in collaboration with a small French company, the ACMA who agreed to participate in the project by helping the brand to face the transition from two to four wheels. The car that came out of this collaboration at first glance is very reminiscent of the Autobianchi and Innocenti of the period.
The small and nice ACMA Piaggio 400 it was absolutely incredible in size: just think that it was just under three meters long. Powered by a two-stroke engine, the car weighed 380 kilograms, could carry driver and passenger and was produced until the early 1960s. Overall, over 30,000 were built in the house’s factories.
Putting it in these figures, the car is not so rare even if you see one around you could mistake it for another car: surely before reading this article you would not have even thought that Piaggio could build cars! The example in the photo costs more or less the same as a new Fiat 500: we are talking about 25,000 euros, not a lot but not a little.
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