[amarcheschi]

Piaggio also designed a car (well, more than one including bad prototypes), which unfortunately wasn't sold in italy due to a gentleman's agreement with fiat (fiat being much bigger basically went if you start selling cars, we'll build motorcycles). The English Wikipedia doesn't include this snippet of history, the Italian page does though https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACMA_Vespa_400

[pmontra]

Piaggio also designed the Ape (bee) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piaggio_Ape a 3 wheel tiny pickup. It was hugely popular, but of course not as much as the Vespa because of the smaller market. I still see some of them especially in country areas.

[amarcheschi]

Well in italy I definitely see a lot of them although they're not assembled here anymore

The funniest version is the presidential one gifted to the president of the republic in 2008 https://www.museopiaggio.it/it/collezioni/2-piaggio/57-ape-c...

[2dvisio]

Still remember driving one with my dad (I was 6) back from a vendemmia (grape harvest) with the back fully loaded of at least 18 100-litre harvest buckets, on a 7-10% slope, which the ape did effortlessly.

[rldjbpin]

i lived in an interesting time and place combo where i'd see more apes around than vespas. primarily because we have local alternatives for vespas, which were also levied a lot of import duties to begin with.

while vespas came earlier and had the advantage of interchangeably calling scooters "vespas". however, did not figure out that they both shared the same parent company.