Diamo?

[madtolive]

Anyone know anything about the Diamo Retro? It's MSRP is lower - is it a badly-made machine? How about any other scooters that are comparable to the buddy?

[Corsair]

warning warning
Danger Will Robinson


stay away... POOR quality and very little support. The only other scooters in the Buddy's price range that I can recommend are probably Kymco scooters... but nothing beats a Buddy

[madtolive]

that's what i figured

[shark]

Anyone know anything about the Diamo Retro? It's MSRP is lower - is it a badly-made machine? How about any other scooters that are comparable to the buddy?

What did I tell you earlier about dem der china scooters?? No chinese scooters!!!

[illnoise]

They're not the *worst*. They're not the abysmal totally generic anonymous internet drop shippers or the junk you see at Pep Boys or the flea market. From what I can tell, Diamo is in that promising but disappointing class with Baron and some others where there's actually a face to the company, and they're TRYING, and they arguably care and want to put out a good product and grow and make people happy, but ultimately, they have a hard time with quality because they're dealing with Chinese manufacturers and they're not buying the volume where they can really get involved in quality control and such. There are just better scooters out there for not much more money, it's not worth the risk IMHO. Their dealers tend to be second-tier, the inexperienced guys that jumped on the bandwagon too late and missed out on Genuine and Kymco (of course, that's not always the case). They *do* have a dealer support and parts supply program, which is better than most chinese scooter importers.

I'm really disappointed with their promises about Italjet, Steve Guzman from the Scooter Scoop is taking over their marketing, and he's a good guy, so we'll see what influence he has and it'll be interesting to see how that plays out. Italjet has very exciting and possibly higher-quality products that would give them the potential to turn the company around, but as it is, I wouldn't bother with the Diamo-branded stuff.

If Genuine and Kymco are out of your range, consider buying a used scooter or maybe look at TGB and Sym, they're just a hair cheaper and pretty decent quality. But overall, aside from Vespa Piaggio which is probably a little overpriced (though the low-end Piaggios are more reasonable), you usually get what you pay for with scooters, and for something that's carrying you down a public road at 50+ MPH, it's not worth cutting corners or saving a few bucks to get something that's not rock-solid.

Bryan