Aprilia Lama

Part child’s toy, part cartoon dog and part kettle, Aprilia’s glorious non-step-thru’ scooter makes a compelling comedy case for the benefits of ignoring convention

What’s the best way to come up with a truly interesting and ground-breaking two-wheeled design? Focus groups are all well and good, but as a breed us bikers are a conservative bunch – we’ll only talk about what we know. Time-served motorcycle designers often aren’t much better. Just peek at the last fifteen years of Suzuki’s endless lookalike models for evidence.

No, what you need to do every now and then is inject excitement by giving complete freedom to a designer who doesn’t know one end of a bike from the other. That way you get brilliance like the Aprilia Lama. At the start of the 1990s, Aprilia employed Philippe Starck. The avant-garde French designer was quite handy at penning lights and furniture and industrial gubbins, but something with two wheels and an engine was completely fresh ground. In 1992 he spent three months in his flashy seaside gaff, working on eight different concept models. Aprilia’s designer Alberto Cappella (later responsible for the Shiver and RSV4) moved in to help, and presumably to make sure Starck didn’t do anything completely whacky. But the pair had an utterly free hand to come up with scooters, tourers, sportsbikes, whatever. Of the mock-ups and clay models created and stashed in Starck’s fishing house, only the single-cylinder Moto 6.5 made it through into production. The rest were a bit too out there, though this really shouldn’t have been a surprise; Cappella later said the ‘creative process’ involved the pair consuming a lot of beer and champagne, while Starck once described what he does as, ‘subversive, ecological, political, humorous… this is how I see my duty as a designer.’

The humorous element certainly rings true when you see the Lama scooter. Aprilia must have taken it fairly seriously as two prototypes were made, though we suspect one person too many walked into the factory and burst out laughing, and the project was dropped. What a shame. Motorcycling can take itself too seriously. Imagine how wonderful it would have been to see swarms of these bobbing through the traffic on a morning commute.