Moto blog

2018 Kymco Like 150i ABS Review

Get your scoot on for less Scooters are big in European and other markets – around here, not so much. “Scooters and soccer,” Kymco PR rep Peter Jones tells us, “they’re just not a part of our culture.” Still, Kymco doggedly sticks to its guns, offering a full line of scooters where many OEMs have reduced or eliminated their scooter offerings. “The coolest person you know, that’s a scooter rider,” Jones goes on to say, and 54-year-old Taiwanese firm Kymco’s latest offering caters to the coolest of them.

2018 Kymco Xtown 300i ABS Review – First Ride

Cross town for less Credit: Photos by Michael Spain-Smith With a scooter market of less than 30,000 units from major manufacturers a year*, the USA isn’t much of a thing for scooters, and medium-displacement scoots like Kymco’s new $3,999 Xtown are even less of a thing since Honda dropped its PCX 300 and Suzuki fired its Burgman 400. I got to ride the new Kymco Xtown 300i ABS last week, a scooter that replaces two similar-sized models in the Taiwanese company’s line and offers solid value to the scooter rider that wants comfort, convenience and freeway-friendly power. For 2018, Kymco also offers the bigger, faster – and $2,000 pricier – Xciting 400i, but has also dropped the Downtown 300i and People 300i from the line.

2018 Kymco Xciting 400i Review - First Ride

My fling with a thing Credit: Photos by Michael Spain-Smith We were snuggled into a conference room in the upscale Aloft hotel in Asheville, North Carolina, when PR man Peter Jones kicked off Kymco’s 2018 new-product launch by telling us that scooters in the U.S. market are “such a small thing, they’re not even really a thing… scooters and soccer, they’re just not a part of our culture.” But the lack of scooter culture has made Taiwanese manufacturer Kymco itself a thing. After staying doggedly in the American scooter market for the better part of two decades, Kymco has a coast-to-coast dealer network, a good reputation for reliability and value, and is basically the only purveyor of value-priced, high-performance maxi-scooters.