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Now, take a look at the nine bikes below. I took all nine pictures in my condo parking lot. Each of the bikes has a lot of very busy looking decals and two toned paint schemes. Aside from their cosmetics that vary from a mild state of ugliness to outrageous what the bikes below share with one another is that they are all small motorbikes in the 125 c.c. class that are earmarked for the Thailand market. Truth is automobile manufacturers can't get away with making such ugly bikes. People just won't buy them, and that's why you see all the decals relegated to racing cars bearing the decals of their sponsors, companies such as Good Year Tires, Pennzoil Oil, STP and even Target Stores. Such decals look cheap and tawdry, and although racing cars might get away with sporting them, the kind of man or woman who shells out the big bucks for a new car or large relatively expensive motorcycle wouldn't be caught dead driving such decal clutterd vehicles. And while the PCX selling here in Thailand for just 80,000 baht isn't exactly the most expensive motorbike being built today, it still represents the upper tier of buyers looking for a premium ride to get around town on.
It is true that not everyone likes the looks of the PCX. Many potential buyers are put off by its relatively high weight to power ratio. But to me, the PCX is by far the most attractive looking automatic out there. My only real quibble with it is its front cowling appears to be too wide and massive when you view it headon. Yet it's the only machine of its kind that doesn't cater to people with the most childish tastes. And as if all those unsightly decals and two toned paint jobs weren't bad enough just look at all the cheap looking Mickey Mouse style gauges that are being put on all those small motorbikes these days.
I don't think that even the Thais like all that ugly stick that's being applied so haphazardly to the bikes they want to buy. I know my young Thai girlfriend was really put off by too much gaudy work on a Yamaha Filano she was interested in getting. It is my feeling that most Thais are simply not given a lot of choice in the matter. I even would go so far as to suggest that whoever is coming up with all of that unattractive cosmetic rendering to bikes being sold on the Thai market might even be the sons and daughters of very rich Asians whose parents wind up essentially buying them their job positions. If these people were working for U.S. companies, I believe they'd be out of their jobs pronto for failing to produce a saleable cosmetics scheme for bikes entering the U.S. market.
Perhaps I am wrong in this. Perhaps most Thais really have terrible tastes when it comes to choosing attractive paint schemes and colors for the motorbikes that they drive. But I know that my girlfriend doesn't, and from what I've seen so far is that there seems to be a lot of really dim people who are inheriting far too many management positions in this neck of the woods. As for myself, when it comes to buying my next bike, I really don't want to be part of a group of people with terrible childish tastes if my theory is incorrect. And if my theory turns out to be spot on, I don't want to be forced into catering to choices imposed on me by a group of inept designers who owe their jobs to their well born family connections. I would then choose something like a PCX over a competing model from another company even if I didn't like the PCX quite as much. |
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