Scooters

Big week here at Owl HQ! Thursday, September 17th – Saturday, September 19th we are celebrating the launch of Owl Scooters and the grand opening of the Top Dog Scooter shop with the Kindercore / Owl Hootenanny: 3 days of music and scooters!

We just confirmed that the infamous Athens dance party duo I Am The World Trade Center will be reuniting during the Ruby Isle set at the 40 Watt show on Saturday! For info on the lineup and links to all of the performers check out this previous post.

Don’t forget, we are also giving away 2 Owl scooters to 2 lucky Hootenanny goers!

See you at the shows! Scoot or die!

Ryan

Two Owl Scooters making eyes at each other.

To promote the upcoming Kindercore / Owl Hootenanny we rounded up a crew from the bands playing and did an old school scooter gang picture. I haven’t seen the finished shots yet but we all had a blast and I did manage to get a hold of these 2 iPhone pictures taken by Allison Weiss (who is playing the Hoot on 9/19):

Aside from my job as head of Creative for Owl Scooters I also dabble in the music business with my record label Kindercore Records and my bands The Agenda and Grape Soda. To celebrate the launch of Owl and the opening of our flagship dealer Top Dog Scooters, Owl and Kindercore have teamed up to present 3 days of music, scooters and mayhem in Athens, GA on September 17th, 18th and 19th!

Advance tickets are available HERE. Here’s all the info straight from Kindercore.com:

To celebrate the coming of the Fall and the birth of Athens’ own Owl Scooters, Kindercore is throwing a 3 day party! From Thursday September 17th – Saturday September 19 come party in Athens for 3 days of music, scooters and mayhem – plus you are entered to win 1 of 2 Owl scooters being given away just for attending (see bottom of this post for the deets).

Thursday: The Caledonia Lounge – $7

Je Suis France

The Agenda

The Matt Kurz One

GG King

Turf War

Friday: The Caledonia Lounge Presented by Excalibrah – $7

Masters of the Hemisphere (REUNION!)

Grape Soda

The Gold Party

Mark Mallman

Werewolves

Saturday Afternoon Cookout & Scooter Rally: Top Dog Scooters (730 Baxter st) FREE – FOOD! MUSIC! SCOOTERS!

Saturday: The 40 Watt Club – $10 – Get Tickets: HERE

Maserati

Still Flyin’

The Young Sinclairs

Ruby Isle

Venice is Sinking

Allison Weiss

CHECK THIS OUT: Owl is giving away 2 scooters during the Hootenanny! 1 during the scooter rally & cookout at Top Dog Scooters and 1 at the 40 Watt show on Saturday September 19. YOU MUST BE PRESENT TO WIN. You get 1 entry for each event you attend. If you arrive during the first hour that doors are open to any of the three rock shows you get an additional entry. Go to all 3 shows and the rally/cookout during the first hour and get 8 chances to win!

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

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.

Today is a very exciting day for the Owl team. We are assembling our own scooters! We have all been very anxious for the scooters to arrive so we can finally drive our own.

Everyone will be assembling their own scooter, which will help us all become more familiar with the product and give us insights to put the finishing touches on our assembly instruction package for our dealers. When you purchase an Owl Scooter your dealer will assemble and set up the scooter prior to you receiving it.

It’s difficult to explain how exciting it is for the scooters to have finally arrived. Seeing all of our hard work and hours debating over colors, styles, etc. finally come to fruition in the final product is an incredible feeling. We’ve got a lot more work to do, but I think I can safely say that we are all looking forward to the challenges ahead.

Be sure to follow us on Twitter to follow our progress later today.