LIFESTYLE CHANGES HAVE FIRMS' SALES SCOOTING ALONG.

Byline: John Tagliabue The New York Times

Jean-Baptiste Gaube du Gers says he's found a foolproof antidote to stress, and it is built in a factory a short drive from this central Italian city.

Gaube du Gers, 48, is the general manager of Odiot, a Parisian gold and silversmith, and when a transport strike shut down the French capital in 1990, he got so tied up in traffic that his doctor warned him about getting an ulcer.

``He was the one who told me I should switch to a two-wheel vehicle,'' Gaube du Gers said. Instead of 90 minutes, he now needs about half an hour to get to work on a perky little scooter built by Piaggio Veicoli Europei SpA, the Italian company best known for the classic Vespa.

``It's ideal,'' he said, still giddy after five years of scootering. ``You can slip in between cars, you can even drive up and down stairs

''

Gaube du Gers' choice lifts the spirits of executives at Piaggio, based just east of here, who still recall the bitter days not too many years back when Europe's scooter manufacturers, who invented the sputtering two-wheelers after World War II, almost went out of business.

Now, sales are booming in many parts of Europe and beyond, making the scooter the unlikely subject of an upbeat case study of the push and pull of global competition.

When the market revived, in the 1980s, it was largely thanks to the Japanese, who used a combination of low-cost manufacturing skills and high-tech innovation to make the scooter once again the object of Europeans' desire.

Yet now, European companies like Piaggio, whose $1.4 billion in annual sales makes it the market leader, are faring better than ever. For once, the chastened Europeans learned their lesson, and with a flutter of sexy new scooter models wrested back control of their home turf, and are even carrying the battle back to Japan, shipping scooters to Asian markets and winning customers in Japan itself.

In India, Piaggio already turns out 250,000 scooters a year in a joint venture with local partners, nearly half the volume of its production in Europe, where it makes roughly 30 percent of the continent's annual output of 1.6 million machines.

Last year, it began production in China, by far the biggest scooter market in the world.

The new generation of scooters, equipped with clean-burning engines and some with catalytic converters, is also on its way to the United States, where the Europeans failed to find a home once before.

In the decades after World War II, scooters such as the Vespa captured the American imagination, until the tough new emissions laws of the 1980s drove them from the roads. Though few in the industry expect scooter sales to take off in the United States in a big way, both Piaggio and Aprilia SpA, another Italian manufacturer, are planning to introduce models there.

While motorized two-wheeled vehicles, like motorcycles, have been around since early in this century, it was not until 1946 that the scooter was born.

Engineers at Piaggio, a former manufacturer of aircraft engines, cast around for an economical means of transport for Italians just emerging from wartime destruction and came up with the Vespa, or ``wasp'' in Italian, because of its pinched shape.

Sales of scooters fell in the late 1950s, as cheap small cars like the Volkswagen Beetle and Fiat 500 became available. But demand revived in the 1970s, when the youth of Europe's rebellious generation of 1968 rediscovered them. By the early 1980s, that boom had fizzled too, until the arrival in the middle of that decade of the Japanese.

Learning from European leaders like Piaggio, which by the early 1980s was shipping about 17,000 scooters a year to Japan, Japanese manufacturers such as Honda grasped the market's potential and began turning out high-tech copies.

Lavishing them with new features like disc brakes, automatic transmissions and light but strong plastic bodies, the Japanese launched a European offensive.

To accelerate the invasion, they bought into European competitors. Thus, Honda acquired 25 percent of the scooter division of the French automaker, Peugeot, the market leader there, while Yamaha took over France's No. 2, MBK.

Pressed to the wall, the Europeans fought back. Adopting the Japanese innovations, like plastic bodies, the Europeans, particularly in Italy, flooded the market with snappy new models and competitive prices.

For many, the scooter's European revival recalls the golden age of the 1950s, when Gregory Peck tooled around Rome on a Vespa in the 1953 film classic ``Roman Holiday'' with Audrey Hepburn clutching his waist.

Indeed, some of the industry's best sellers are clearly inspired by the lines of early classics, like Aprilia's Scarabeo, which is based on a 1950s model called the Galletto.

Captivated by the new models, and faced with higher car costs and ever-more congested city streets, more and more Europeans are making the switch.

In France, scooter sales climbed to 219,000 last year, from 157,000 five years earlier, and continue to rise. In Germany, sales were 120,000, against only 52,000 in 1990. Even in rainy Britain, where sales plummeted in the early 1990s, they are catching on again. Spain, similarly, has seen recent dramatic increases after a drop in sales early in the decade.

Beginning in 1998, Aprilia plans a drive to increase sales of motorcycles in the United States. ``When we start with motorcycles, we'll insert our scooters, too,'' said Ivano Beggio, 51, Aprilia's owner and president.

Piaggio, for its part, is negotiating with a Chicago-based company called Scooterworks USA to promote its models, including a revival of the classic Vespa, which will be introduced in September to commemorate its 50th anniversary. The Vespa will sell in the United States for about $3,500 to $4,500.

Yet industry experts caution that the scooter probably will remain a rare bird in America - where the faster and brawnier motorcycle remains the two-wheel vehicle of choice and where few of the pressures, like high gasoline prices, exist that drive the European market.

``They're not transport in the United States,'' said Philip McCaleb, the 41-year-old president of Scooterworks, who paid $100 for his first scooter - a 1962 Vespa 150 - while living in Athens in the 1980s. ``They're very cool toys.''

Scooter freaks flood the Internet with lore, and Piaggio's World Wide Web site (http://www.piaggio.com) has drawn a huge response from Americans since opening last year. Collectors plunk down as much as $5,000 for mint-condition classics, like the 1950s Vespa Grand Sport.

Still, Piaggio's disappointing history in America is fairly typical. Beginning in the 1950s, the company sold Vespas in the United States both directly and through Sears, Roebuck under the Allstate Cruisaire brand. After mixed success, Piaggio bailed out in 1982.

``America is not really a two-wheel market,'' said Matteo Righero, Piaggio's senior vice president for Europe.. ``Nevertheless, there's a growing attention, linked also with the Italian style of life, and we want to cultivate it.''

CAPTION(S):

2 Photos

Photo: (1) Bajaj Auto Ltd. touts scooters as the familymode of transportation in South Asia advertising.

(2) In the 1950s, European Vespa ads targeted families. Now the market is widening.

The New York Times