Piaggio & C. SpA

Pontedera Italy

Piaggio & Co. is an Italian manufacturer of motorized 2,3 and 4-wheeler cars and bikes along with small commercial vehicles. 

History

Established in 1884 as a business, and later the industrial holding IMMSI SpA, which is traded on the Italian Stock Exchange.  Using the Piaggio, Aprilia, and Moto Guzzi brands, Piaggio & C. works in the scooter, motorcycle, and moped sectors. It also engages in light three and four-wheeled transportation. The Vespa scooter and the Ape three-wheeler, two of the most well-known Italian designs,were made by Piaggio .

The Piaggio Company is linked to woodworking Cavalier Enrico Piaggio, entrepreneur who owned a sawmill for lumber, bought land in Sestri Ponente to set up a lumber yard which in a few years would become in a workshop of cabinet-makers and inlayers. from the beginning of the century, also of railway carriages, initially dealing with naval furniture, and later with metalworking and railway production. In 1915, the company acquired the Francesco Oneto Aeronautical Workshops of Pisa, formerly Società Aviazione Fratelli Antoni.

In 1917, in the midst of World War I, Rinaldo converted the company to aeronautical and military production. Piaggio engages in the production of MAS anti-submarine motorboats, and above all of airplanes and seaplanes, initially built under license from Ansaldo, Macchi, Caproni and Dornier, and subsequently on designs by Piaggio itself; in 1924 the first Jupiter engines and Dornier Wal aircraft, built under license, began to be produced.

The company's factories were used in the period between the two world wars for the production of railway rolling stock, but in the same period the production of the airplane sector had also started, a sector which today is developed through Piaggio Aero Industries. After the First World War, there was a transformation from a war economy to a peace economy. In the early 1920s, Piaggio built the royal train and some revolutionary household appliances both in terms of design and use. To ensure workers also in the aeronautical sector, the entire Bonmartini plant was purchased in those years of Rome, for the production of the Piaggio P.2 fighter monoplane and the four -engine Piaggio P.108, the only four-engine bomber to be used by the Regia Aeronautica during the Second World War.

In 1924, the factory of CMN, Costruzioni Meccaniche Nazionali , was purchased in Pontedera ; in 1926 Rinaldo founded SANA, Società Anonima Navigazione Aerea , the first Italian company for the air transport of passengers. The share capital went from 15 to 30 million lire in 1930 and then decreased to 10 in 1932: the initial growth immediately slowed down due to the explosion of the Great Depression. Giovanni Gabrieli, Giovanni Casiraghi, Corradino D'Ascanio are some of the names who worked for the company at the time: the latter designed the DAT 3, the first helicopter in history actually operated by man and with propellers mounted on gimbals.

Rinaldo Piaggio died in 1938 In the years that followed, trucks, buses, cableways, trailers, funiculars, aluminium windows were built along with repairs and aeronautical constructions in the Officine Meccaniche Africa Orientale (OMAO). During the Second World War many factories are destroyed. Armando Piaggio takes over the ranks of the aeronautical sector and the restoration of naval and railway furnishing systems. The Piaggio P.148 and Piaggio P.149 are developed. When the war was over, in 1945, reconstruction operations began on the Pontedera plants and Vespa prototypes were developed.

The history of Piaggio therefore took a turning point after the war, when, on 23 April 1946 , based on a project by D'Ascanio himself, a scooter was patented whose name would almost become a synonym for "Piaggio": the Vespa (it should be remembered that the model it had been preceded by a prototype, then not commercialized, called " Peperino ", designed in 1944 in Biella .The first project for this motorcycle was produced in Pontedera in 1946:The birth of the Vespa marks the end of aeronautical projects and productions. 

In the following years, Enrico Piaggio continuously expanded the model range. In 1948, the company presented a three-wheeled van the Piaggio Ape was born, the three-wheeled vehicle that entered daily use, finding various practical applications: the Ape rickshaw, the Ape cassone, the Ape taxi, the Ape Calessino. It was built with freight transport needs in post-war Italy in mind., In 1957 she presented at the Paris Motor Show the small car Vespa 400. Later, four-wheeled vans were added. In 1967 followed the model Ciao, a new generation moped, which was particularly popular with young people.

In 1973 Piaggio began studying an electric moped called the "Eco Electron", and two years later the first electric Ape prototype was built. Furthermore, the seventies saw the creation of new products in the scooter and three-wheeler segment. In 1993 the Gilera factory in Arcore was closed and part of the production moved to Pontedera, where the design and assembly of the new products of the Milanese brand continued. In 1999 control passed to the financial group Morgan Grenfell Private Equity, and in the same year the factory for the production of the three-wheeler in India opened in Baramati Bee _; in 2001 control of Derbi was acquired ; in 2003 the company passed under the control of the industrial holding Immsi SpA of Roberto Colaninno , listed on the Milan Stock Exchange .In 2006 it acquired the Venetian company Aprilia which, among other things, owned other historic brands such as Moto Laverda and Moto Guzzi .It also owns other historic brands that are no longer used such as Laverda , Gilera and Derbi .

Three- Four wheeled vehicles

• Piaggio Hi Porter
• Vespa 400
• Piaggio MP3
• Piaggio Ape (vespacar)
• Piaggio MyMoover
• Piaggio Porter
• Piaggio Quargo

The Ape is built since 1947, and has between 50 and 422 cc displacement. An electric drive was also installed.

• Ape A
• Ape B
• Ape C
• Ape MP
• Ape 50
• Ape car
• Ape TM
• Ape Car Max
• Ape Porter
• Ape 50 Cross Country
• Ape 50 TL5T
• Ape 50 ZAPC
• Ape Classic
• Ape Classic 400
• Ape Calessino