{"id":19944,"date":"2011-04-26T12:29:04","date_gmt":"2011-04-26T11:29:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.influx.co.uk\/wordpress\/?p=19944"},"modified":"2022-06-21T12:57:27","modified_gmt":"2022-06-21T11:57:27","slug":"vespa-400","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.adrianflux.co.uk\/influx\/blog\/vespa-400\/","title":{"rendered":"Rare as Hen’s Teeth #3"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This is news to us. We thought that the only vehicles to carry the Vespa moniker were the skirted step-throughs that gave them their global fame.<\/p>\n

But, it seems that at the end of the 1950s and into the early sixties a French licensee built a microcar carryng the Vespa badge based on Piaggio’s original designs.<\/p>\n

It’s a cute kind of design that manages to steer clear of the pitfalls of the washing machine style of budget microcars like the Trabant<\/a> – and the contemporary city car lite that is the Tata Nano<\/a>.<\/p>\n

There can’t be many of these fifty year old pocket rockets left. But one man in America’s Pacific Northwest <\/a>certainly seemed to be having fun in a VW engined version.<\/p>\n

Give us one of these little classics over Smart any day.<\/p>\n

Images via Classic Rallies …<\/p>\n\n\t\t