Archive for August, 2009

Our first dealer, Top Dog Scooters, was featured in a write up in the Athens Banner Herald. The story also includes a little bit of the back story of Owl Scooters.

Top Dog Scooters

Everyone talks about how much fun it is to ride these little 50cc scoots but only the Vietnamese have learned what little workhorses they are.    Imagine the possibilities?  Moving across country or across town? We’ve got you covered-Owl Moving and Storage….

Even goldfish are at risk!  Ride the Owl…the only safe haven!

I just returned from a trip to our scooter factory in Zhejiang province China with a stop along the way in Ho Chi Mihn city–formerly Saigon–Vietnam. In Ho Chi Minh, scooters rule! There are approximately 9 million residents and roughly 5 million scooters and motorcycles on the road. Rules of the road are rather lax and never enforced so riding on the back of one of these scooters–as I did on a couple of occasions–is not for the faint of heart. Scooters fill the streets and the sound of small engines reving creates a constant hum–almost soothing. I am attaching a photo taken at one small intersection during the morning commute. Note the cluster of power cables above the street. It ain’t pretty but it’s one more sign of Vietnam’s robust economic growth.

Fuelly is where nerdiness and MPG collide. They provide a great, free service that allows users to track fuel efficiency on multiple vehicles with a dead simple web app.

Using the service is as simple as recording the miles on your odometer & the amount of fuel pumped whenever you fill up your vehicle.  Fuelly does all of the math and presents the data in an easy to read format. Since you can view your MPG over time you can tell when it may be time to change the oil, inflate the tires, etc. to get your MPG back up.

Now, you’re probably thinking that’s great, but not really very nerdy.  The nerdy part is that you can add notes that correspond to your odometer readings. So, if you are really obsessed(i.e. nerdy) with getting the most MPG’s out of your vehicle, you can add a note when you made a change to your vehicle and see how it has affected the efficiency.

For example:

As you can see removing the 32 Ska Band stickers from my 1985 Chrysler New Yorker increased my fuel efficiency by .1 MPG, while replacing my fuzzy dice/ w carbon fiber dice had no effect on efficiency.

Of course scooters already get incredible gas mileage, but there is always room for improvement. Scooter fuel efficiency also tends to be more easily affected by maintenance & engine issues so the savings from using Fuelly could be significant and make you more aware of upcoming maintenance issues. They’ve added Owl to their list of scooter brands and most everyone here at Owl HQ is now using the service.