Yamaha has chosen the inaugural Vietnam Motorcycle Show in Ho Chi Minh City this weekend as the place to unveil one of its most unusual scooter designs ever.
The 04GEN is a scooter concept, and if you were to read through the media releases on the machine (don’t bother – I’ve done it for you!) you’d possibly be left scratching your head and wondering.
Yamaha says the 04GEN was “designed based on the RUN-WAY concept, which evokes the image of women with an air of dignified elegance and grace in mind and body.”
Incidently, the “RUN” in the philosophy stands for “Revolutionary, Unique, Noble”.
The press release goes on to say “it’s a new scooter that wonderfully showcases the beautifully-engineered interior structure through its delicate exterior parts” and the exterior is “designed in the motif of a swan”.
Huh?
Now I’ve never been good at interpreting art, so I might struggle to see the swan, but I can see what Yamaha is talking about – to a point.
Yamaha has designed the scooter with translucent plastic panels to show the structure of the machine that is normally hidden under panel work.
In the concept vehicle the tinted panels lift to give access to the rear of the scooter, and the panels have been described as insect wings, or more elegantly as swan wings.
No mention is made of any technical specifications of the scooter, just its design philosophy.
But a close look at the photos of the concept show us two interesting things that hint at Yamaha’s future technical direction.
Firstly, the front brake is fully enclosed. Looking closely it’s possible to see what looks like a disc brake caliber, but the disc itself is fully enclosed.
The second is that Yamaha seems to be using a smartphone for the instrumentation.
The Asian market is very important to the Japanese manufacturers, and unveiling the scooter concept in Vietnam suggests Yamaha would target the Asian market first with any production model.
But it would be a fairly good guess that the concept has been produced to gain feedback from the market, and production may be well off, if at all.