For decades, motorcycle manufacturers have tried to solve the problem of getting people who don’t like bikes onto a life of two wheels. Honda’s brilliant marketing with the world-beating Super Cub shows it’s possible, but not everyone is nearly as good at it. Back in the 1990s, Aprilia sought to make a motorcycle for people who didn’t ride. To design a motorcycle for this demographic, the Italian brand hired French designer Philippe Starck, known back then for his home goods, to make an appealing bike. The Aprilia Motò 6.5 looked like nothing else, but as a motorcycle it was a mess – a mess that Aprilia killed, brought back, and then killed again.
How do you attract a non-rider to a motorcycle? Perhaps the best example is when Honda teamed up with Grey Advertising in the United States to market the Super Cub. Back then, motorcycles had a dirty, unsavory image. Honda countered it with an ad depicting a diverse set of people all having fun scooting along on their Super Cubs. Next to the imagery was an iconic slogan: You Meet The Nicest People On A Honda.
Other brands have tried their own ways to get people on two wheels. Harley-Davidson once thought it would get people onto its big cruisers by putting young people on Buells first. Harley even once considered starting ’em young by putting kids on push scooters, hoping they’d stay with the Bar and Shield into adulthood. Suzuki also made a motorcycle for people who didn’t care too much about motorcycles, as did Ariel.
In the 1990s, Aprilia, the Italian marque of championship-winning racing motorcycles, decided to get into slower transportation for the masses. The Aprilia Motò 6.5, the motorcycle for people who couldn’t tell you how valves work, would be designed by someone better known for home goods like chairs, mirrors, televisions, and television remotes.
The Designer
Philippe Starck is a designer with a frankly stunning portfolio. When we talk about designers at The Autopian, we’re usually speaking about fellas with perhaps a handful of cars to their name. Starck’s biography, which was written by Jonathan Wingfield and is hosted on Starck’s website, claims he’s had his hands on 10,000 creations. Starck’s site shows he’s designed a little bit of everything from a building with the world’s largest toilet to the home goods you might have bought at Target and even a custom Kawasaki W800.
Starck was born in 1949 to aircraft engineer André Starck. According to his biography, Starck spent his childhood under his father’s drafting desk making doodles of his own. It was here where Starck learned a valuable lesson, from the biography: “Everything should be organized elegantly and rigorously, in human relationships as much as in the concluding vision that presides over every creative gesture.”
Today, Starck’s slogan is: “Subversive, ethical, ecological, political, humorous … this is how I see my duty as a designer.” He believes in what he calls democratic design. Starck designs items that he believes the masses should be able to enjoy, ideally for an affordable cost and ideally, made sustainably.
In Starck’s early years, he was interested in applying his philosophy to living spaces. This started with the construction of an inflatable structure in 1969. Starck’s work led him to Pierre Cardin, who took Starck on as the artistic director at a publishing house. By the mid-1970s, Starck would go on to create quirky home goods such as a floating lamp and a portable neon sign. He would also get to design the interior of Parisian nightclubs. Later, he would found his design firm, Starck Product. There, Starck would partner up with interior design firms around the world. Yep, some of those Italian Kartell designer goods weren’t designed in Italy, but by Starck in France.
Starck’s biography says he became famous in 1983 when French President François Mitterrand chose Starck to decorate the residence at Elysée Palace. Starck also designed the famous Café Costes. He would also spend much of his time afterward designing hotels. Starck’s hotel portfolio includes New York City’s Royalton Hotel, Hudson Hotel, and the Paramount Hotel, the renovations to Miami Beach’s Delano, and more. Starck also designed a plethora of buildings in Japan as well as a pavilion for the Groninger Museum in the Netherlands.
His portfolio is frankly impressive and has a little bit of everything from children’s toys and bathroom fittings to appliances and a space station habitat module. Really, it seems Starck will apply his childlike curiosity and attention to detail to anything you hire him to pen.
In 1988, Starck designed his first vehicle with the Bénéteau First 35S5. Then, Aprilia dragged him into the motorcycle world beginning in 1992.
The Motorcycle For People Who Don’t Like Bikes
Aprilia was founded in the rubble of World War II. The company started by putting people on bicycles before advancing to motorcycles. Over time, Aprilia would grow into a powerhouse with racing wins under its belt and desirable fast motorcycles. What it didn’t have was truly mass-market appeal. Aprilia would mend that in 1990 by entering into the scooter market, from Aprilia owner Piaggio:
In the nineties, Aprilia boldly entered the sector of vehicles intended for use in urban mobility. In fact, the scooter market experienced a long period of growth. In this case, creativity and nonconformity once again proved to be the keys to success. Beginning from the first entirely plastic scooter, the 1990 Amico, Aprilia confirmed its ability to stay ahead of the times, set trends and offer products that are always innovative, both aesthetically and technologically in terms of performance, reliability and low environmental impact. On this front, the manufacturer from Veneto has always placed particular emphasis, staying at the head of the line in searching for the most cutting-edge solutions.
To clarify what Piaggio is saying up there, the Amico has a plastic body, something that was unusual for an Italian scooter back then. Japan was already making plastic-bodied scooters long before then. At any rate, Aprilia wasn’t content with just making a plastic scooter. In 1992, it continued by creating a two-stroke scooter with a catalytic converter, the Amico LK, as well as a motorcycle with the same layout, the Pegaso 125. The brand turned to four-stroke scooters a year later.
In 1992, Aprilia hired Starck for a scooter concept. The result was the Aprilia Lama, a concept scooter that was meant to be the ultimate in personal mobility. Thankfully, Starck wouldn’t be stuck making concepts and in 1995, he penned the Aprilia Motò 6.5, the bike for people who weren’t bikers.
The Aprilia Motò 6.5 started off as a dream from Aprilia founder Ivano Beggio, who wanted his brand to have a design as iconic as the Fiat 500 or the Vespa scooter. To him, Starck was the man who was going to make it happen. As reported by Auto & Design magazine, Aprilia’s marketers saw the motorcycling’s future as being filled with Dakar-inspired motorcycles, motorcycles for Hell’s Angels types, and racing replicas.
Starck wanted to bring motorcycles back to a simpler time when it was just a machine between your legs and the open road. He wanted to design a motorcycle without the gimmicks and without the macho imagery. From the sounds of things, he wanted to design a bike that was supposed to be Aprilia’s Super Cub. To Starck, motorcycles just needed a pair of wheels, an engine, a fuel tank, and a seat, nothing else.
What he created reflects that. The Aprilia Motò 6.5 looks like a standard, basic motorcycle, only with the rounded design Starck is known for. I’m not an Adrian Clarke type, so I can’t break every bit down for you, but the Motò 6.5 is elegant in its use of circles. And, to Starck’s promise, the motorcycle has only what you need and nothing else. The motorcycle is not burdened with speakers, loads of storage, or even a particularly sporty riding position. Honestly, I’m surprised you even got a passenger seat. Aprilia did sell accessories such as an appropriately round windscreen and soft bags, but they made the bike look a tad goofy. You can tell that Starck didn’t really design the bike to have those bits.
Reportedly, Aprilia’s engineers weren’t happy working with all of the round stuff, especially with the motorcycle’s exhaust, but they made it work. Wait, check out the exhaust on this bad boy!
Look closely and you’ll notice that the Starck design isn’t just limited to the tank and exhaust. Everything on the motorcycle is rounded from the radiator to the frame itself. I’m surprised the engineers didn’t figure out how to apply the circular design to the forks.
And The Crowd Goes Mild
While the design of the motorcycle was new, reportedly, the experience of riding it wasn’t. To make the motorcycle friendly for new riders and city riders, the Motò 6.5 was given an upright standard riding style. The engine? Its Rotax 650 single-cylinder was used in the Aprilia Pegaso 650. In the Motò 6.5, the Rotax was good for 42 HP and 38.4 lb-ft of torque. That’s more than enough power for a commute, but not particularly exciting. Its 399-pound curb weight also wasn’t amazing, but fine. The motorcycle rode on 17-inch wheels, 41mm telescopic forks, and an adjustable monoshock in the back. No part of its spec sheet will make you say “Wow.”
It seems as if the motorcycle press was divided, too. The UK’s MotorCycle News felt that the Aprilia Motò 6.5 was compact, light, and agile in the city. However, the publication admits in an update that traditional motorcyclists wanted a bit more excitement.
On the other hand, the folks of Visor Down weren’t as kind. I haven’t been able to find the publication’s period review, but it was still throwing punches at the Motò 6.5 in 2008. Just read this savage takedown:
Aprilia commissioned French avant-garde designer of the ’90s, Philippe Starck to design a motorcycle. What they got was a crime against motorcycling. While quite adept at styling lemon squeezers and kettles for people more interested in making statements than sandwiches in their kitchens, Phil was clearly not the man for the job when it came to designing motorcycles for actual motorcyclists.
Although he actually rides himself, it is hard to imagine exactly what was going through Phil’s mind as he twiddled his magic marker. The tank looks like a tea-cosy for one of his famous kettles, the wilfully quaint grey-sleeved cables like something off a John Major replica lawnmower and the queer oval frame putting form well in front of function to contrive an apostrophe shape for no reason whatsoever.
Round it all off with a convex radiator blending into what looks like a colander run over by a bus and then the masterstroke – an exhaust collector box doubling as a bash-plate, and you’ve got a dinner a dog would die for.
Stop, stop! He’s already dead! If that wasn’t bad enough, multiple publications cite less than stellar quality and reliability, which only added to the division.
Sales of the Aprilia Motò 6.5 started in 1995 before the brand killed the bikes off in 1997. They were brought back in 1999 just to be killed off again by 2002. Aprilia never sold the motorcycle in America and they didn’t sell that well, either. When all was said and done, just 6,200 examples were produced. It would appear that Visor Down was right. Most riders didn’t want one and there weren’t many people willing to cough up €4,795, or €8,863 ($9,697) today, for an amazing design wrapped in an average riding experience. Some sites today go as far as to call the poor Aprilia one of the “worst” motorcycles.
Now that we’re nearly 30 years past the launch of these bikes, I think Starck was perhaps just too early. After years of overwrought motorcycle design, simple is sexy once again. I bet if you packaged this design up into something inexpensive that tried to ride as cool as it looks, I bet a company could have a winner on its hands. Maybe the Motò 6.5’s reliability wasn’t great, but that design was fantastic.
Otherwise, if you’re looking for an inexpensive motorcycle to import for commuting duty, an Aprilia Motò 6.5 could be a compelling choice. Last year, one sold for just €1,900 ($2,079) in France. That’s a bike so cheap that shipping it here would probably cost more than the motorcycle. It also seems to mean that while there are people who love these bikes, they haven’t quite reached the status where people want to pay a crazy amount of money for them.
Starck is still designing things today. While the bulk of his work is in home goods, you’ll still find his work on yachts, bicycles, and the occasional motorcycle. Some may want to call his early work with the Apilia Motò 6.5 a worst motorcycle, but I don’t think that’s fair. Give us more motorcycles with weird designs!
That thing looks fantastic.
I think it’s cute!
It’s not putting on airs and being all aggro, just rounded and approachable. Had it been made by one of Japan’s big four, with the expected improvement in QC, it might have been more of a sales success. Also, 42hp from a thumper is nothing to sneeze at (mine’s got just 16hp, and ought to be plenty for most people’s around-town riding) though of course, everyone wants more (hp, capability, etc…) even if they’ll rarely need or use any of that more.
The ovoid frame around the motor and the exhaust pipes remind me a bit of a French horn, which isn’t a bad thing IMO. 😉
I love everything about this bike except the instrument cluster and turn signals, which look tacked on and janky.
slap a nice little digital gauge package on there and modern LED turn signals and this bike would look right rolling out today.
This design just cries out to be an electric bike.
Could someone photoshop a first generation iMac bungied to the rack?
A seat height of 31.9″ is not friendly to a bunch of people, especially for something intended as a casual city commuter or introductory first motorcycle.
With the tucked exhaust and front bash guard, this thing looks like a trials bike, not a street bike.
I ride. I favor classic Japanese and British bike designs myself. This bike is NOT attractive to me. It’s different for sure and might cause me to do a double take for clarity but I would just “meh” and leave.
eh, it gives off older Guzzi California styling vibes with a small engine to me.
It looks like it’s pregnant.
I never wanted one, but I appreciated that these existed. I was around 15 and reading everything I could get my hands on, and most of the content salivated over race reps. This was so different from those or the cruisers and I liked that.
Now these remind me of a rounder (over designed?) and softer/overweight supermoto.
I don’t ride but I think the design is brilliant.
“Harley even once considered starting ’em young by putting kids on push scooters, hoping they’d stay with the Bar and Shield into adulthood.” Harley also had the child-size X-90 in the 70s. https://bringatrailer.com/listing/1974-harley-davidson-x-90/
went over about as well as the thumper Buell Blasts.
Well, I am not a motorcycle guy, nor do I have any design sense, but it looks quite sleek in a round sort of way to me. The first thing that caught my eye was the rounded radiator—that had to be more expensive to produce. I wish we had more contemporary actual riding reviews of it rather than it just being dismissed out of hand for looking different
If you think this is weird you should take a look at the Bimota Mantra. I loved both but couldn’t afford them.
The thing that Mr Starck didn’t understand, or just ignored, is that things should work properly. From whimsical bathroom sinks that spray water into your crotch to sassy telephones that are nearly impossible to hold on to, his designs had an unpleasant Magic Christian vibe. Terrible designer.
Oops. I guess you pressed a button.
I’ve owned exactly one Starck-designed product (well, a couple of the same thing) — a computer mouse sold by Microsoft in the early 2000s. It was a simple sleek oval/teardrop shaped thing, which was more ergonomic in the hand than most clunky computer mice of the time. And it added scroll-wheel and two-button functionality to the Macintoshes we had, looked better and felt better in the hand than the single-button pretty but un-ergonomic ones Apple sold with their machines.
It lasted a good long while (probably a decade or so) until, like pretty much all computer mice, the cable started to fray and the scroll wheel’s rubber coating got sticky while the wheel and button switches started to get worn-out. But it held up as long as any decent typical mouse and did what it was supposed to, while not inducing hand cramps — so all in all that one was probably one of Starck’s better designs.
I have always loved the look of that one, and being a designer myself I have considered it several times.
But even as very used it was still three times the price of my very good BMW “Gummi Kuh” police cruiser, a bike with a more engineer’y look, which has it’s own beauty
https://instagram.com/p/CmwbL-bIEM3/
Also, it would just be very cool to own a motorcycle with a Rotax engine!
Look for any 2000’s Aprilia. The Rotax V60 twin powers everything. Short of connectors they’re bulletproof. I have a 2004 Caponord, and had a 2004 Futura, which was probably one of the most under-rated sports tourers around. Great, great bikes.
If you painted it light blue, you could be riding the (old) Twitter bird.
I’d like to hear Adrian Clarks thoughts about this, as I’ve always felt that Starck completely misunderstood or intentionally ignored the larger context of what a motorcycle represent for most people. Seems like quite often a product designers take on transportation design is a failure, and I’m curious about why.
That said, I think a Moto 6.5 just painted matt black and with some of the unnecessary stuff removed, could look quite cool.
As a former product designer (there was a time when most of the homes in the UK contained one or more of my products, but I’m neither famous or successful) I’d say about 80% of everything they do gets immediately rejected, a tiny fraction of what’s left gets made in the projected numbers and almost nothing gets recognised as a successful design.
Starck claims 10,000 designs, so his hit rate isn’t good, and he’s successful and famous.
Also the whole point of getting a product designer in to work on transport is to come up with something weird. If they just turned up and stuck bigger wheels and more expensive lights on last year’s shape the designs would sell but be instantly forgettable, like most automotive designs. They only have to design one feature that makes it expensive or impractical and the whole thing won’t sell.
I’m also a product designer, with friends within the automotive industry, and there seems to be very different rules, guidelines and context within the automotive industry, than for example exists for consumer electronics. I see few examples of automotive designers succeeding at product design and the other way around (there’s notable exceptions like Pio Manzù, Giugiario, Pininfarina and so on) which makes me curious why there’s such a big difference between the disciplines. Or am I wrong?
When I was a product designer I had freedom to design anything that would work and that we could make, just so long as the client liked it. Sometimes the client was just one guy, sometimes there would be a handful of people who would approve it. You show them half a dozen concepts, they pick one, or not.
When I moved to automotive it was as a design engineer, not a designer/stylist (I don’t have the skills or the qualifications), but I’ve worked with a few of them. Everything is very highly regulated, you don’t have freedom to put the wheels or lights or mirrors or anything where you like, and every tiny detail has to be approved by loads of departments at a number of levels. Then anything expensive gets vetoed. You won’t get any of this feedback until weeks or months (or even years) later. It’s more of a team sport, and quite a lot of the team aren’t really on your side.
It’s a marvel any car even vaguely resembles one of the initial sketches.
Yet another product designer here! Autopian seems to be collecting us!
I started out with automotive but mostly Ive designed consumer goods with multiple millions of my designs out there. I completely agree about the rarity of crossover between automotive and product design. Automotive always seemed like an insular little world with its own way of working. A lot of it may be because it takes years to develop a vehicle compared to months for anything else, but there is also a lot of snobbery involved too. (Like if you designed the reversing light bracket for a Jag you are just too important for a toaster.)
Another industrial designer here. Starck’s 10,000 product claim isn’t hard to believe when you factor in licensing and stuff designed by his larger team. Definitely a polarizing but prolific guy. Check out his short-lived line of toys for Target, including the coolest ride-on car that my then-5 year old loved.
https://www.starck.com/00DATA/cms/design/vignettes/729db007c19284585479178e9a0a370b.jpeg
The English bike mags don’t get it, because it is not designed for them. The French and people in warmer climates drive supermoto style bikes in cities, because the upright driving position just works in the city traffic, the longer suspension is comfortable and makes it possible to drive over the curbs, and there is enough power to beat cars in traffic lights. And small and nimble to park anywhere, unlike a car, or a Harley. The Aprilia is just a stylish urban version of a supermoto or its cousin BMW F650. But probably bit too expensive or not styled aggressive enough for the likely male target audience. It was still the 90’s.
The english then.. when motorcycling, they probably prefer to bomb around the countryside, annoying the locals, in the rain, until slipping on the sheep poo covered tarmac and stuffing their pocket rocket into a hedge or a stone wall. Then into pub. And did I mention that it rains? So they don’t understand what to do with an Aprilia style bike.
I’m English, and I got in to bikes by reading 90’s English bike magazines. There were two types, the ones with pictures of girls on the front which weren’t really about motorcycles, and the ones I bought, which were all about riding like a maniac on the fastest possible thing. As a result all of my bikes have been race reps.
To be fair: our county isn’t big enough to require touring bikes, and if you want to get to the coast and back before the rain rolls in you’ll be needing to ride like a maniac.
People who actually need bikes as transport weren’t reading any of the magazines, they were just out there on normal motorcycles, weaving through traffic and getting to work on time, but often wet.
Yes, stereotyping quite a bit. The bike/car culture varies a lot in different countries due to circumstances. When visiting Wales for the first time, it became obvious why there is a market for sports cars/bikes in the UK. But it is not the whole story regarding Europe, something the US writers sometimes forget, since they are stuck to reading just English language sources.
Before even reading this, the F650CS came to mind – far less stylish, but seems like it came from a similar ethos, to try and do a new take on a standard.
There’s one of those parked right on the street, below a subway overpass, where I live. It’s in a very sorrow state, dirty, but gets its inspection renewed regularly.
When I first saw it, I liked the design a lot – apart from the rear light/slopy rear fender. Then I learned it’s one of the most hated modern bikes.
When it comes to industrial design I prefer Richard Sapper and Massimo Vignelli, although neither did motor vehicles.
I remember the Moto 6.5 from the 90s but wasn’t very interested. The Moto 6 5’s German sibling the BMW F650 was more successful and more interesting once David Robb stuck the fuel filler on the seat base in 2000 as part of his takeover of BMW motorcycle design.
I think it’s quite pretty, but I’ve learned all my opinions are unpopular.
That was genuinely the first piece that caught my eye, and I think it’s beautiful.
Oddly enough it ties in to something that has been rattling around my brain for a while. If we think back to the Universal Japanese Motorcycle (UJM) era – bikes which I think are the spiritual forbears of the Aprilia – different manufacturers shaped their exhausts different ways. Kawasaki, for example, tended to have a roughly 90-degree turn-down of the header pipes (just off the head itself) and another roughly 90-degree bend at the bottom of the engine to route the exhaust to the rear. In contrast, Honda – especially on the late 1970s CB750s – used more of an arc on the headers instead of the two ~90s.
I think we could count on one hand the number of manufacturers who tried the Aprilia gentle curve approach for the whole exhaust, but I’m here for it.
I love how that exhaust looks, and these days a clamshell exhaust is quite common as it lets you hide a catalyst and a muffler in one lump, but back then it would have been very weird, and expensive.
Wow are my interests converging on this site in ways I didn’t quite expect! It’s such a Starck design, especially from that time period. I wouldn’t say his work from the 90s is necessarily timeless, it does speak to its design period, but it ages very nicely. It is really fun to look at those gauges and you can just tell how they tie into his Fossil Watches from the early 2000s, that Mette finish silver, the punches of orange accents, and the overall nicely rounded and filleted shapes.
Also, for what it’s worth, the Alessi Juicy Salif that he designed juices a lemon just fine!
Now all of you, google Aprilia Lama, designed by that same gentleman, and do realize how un-ugly this one is in comparison.
BTW the only design from this guy that I find interesting is the Philips portable TV that could be tilted 45 degrees left or right for people who lay down on their side watching TV. T’was interesting.
Having seen one in person it is a gorgeous motorcycle. I am a big fan of circles, spheres, rounded edges, etc. so I am a bit biased in that regard.
I still have one, as a motorcycle it motorcycles.
As a sort of cyborg pregnancy scan evil horrid machine which epitomizes the sort of thinking that underlies the male hegemony and will bring society to an end, that my friends, you will have to discuss with my sister.
I think I would love to have a good-natured late-night alcohol-infused argument slap-fight with your sister. Are you available as a referee?
It looks like it’d have been sold at ’90s Target, right next to the Michael Graves kitchen appliances. Just needs some blonde wood accents.
Still, love that gauge cluster. The big temp gauge is an interesting choice.
The gauges are gorgeous. I really like the simplicity and the big temp gauge IMO makes sense: that’s an important piece of info. 🙂
What’s messing with me is the green indicator light for the turn signals in the pod – seems like that should be amber.