Seeing as I need to get a scooter after my Forza 750 was half-inched, I'm vaguely thinking about a Kymco AK550. There's one on Autotrader for reasonable money but I want to know what people's experience of living with a Kymco is like.

What's servicing like? Dealer support? Spares availability?

Cheers

The first problem is finding a dealer! Go on to the Kymco website and it will come up with a few dealerships (not many) - but if you look into the names it gives, I find that most of them appear to have no dealings with Kymco at all! eg For years, it came up with York Suzuki as a dealer, but there's a clue to which brand that company deal with in their name! Ditto near me, they suggest a dealer in Barrow as my closest, but they appear to be Yamaha dealer with no mention of Kymco anywhere. OK I could ring them to check....Frankly, Kymco UK look like a bunch a amateurs, which is rather offputting, as I'm pretty sure the scooters are very good.

Sadly I have to agree with MrG. Some years ago I bought one of the first batch of AK550s and I was lucky enough to find a dealer who, although not by any measure a scooter specialist, was "old school" and did give me some support when needed (Trevor Pope - Gosport). Kymco importers at the time spread their interests very thinly over a variety of products from mobility scooters to quads. Most of the necessary work was done by myself. Fitting a new battery, servicing, belt drive tension adjustment etc. Having said that the scooter suffered nothing worse than a tendency for the ( very inaccessible ) battery to drain rather too quickly but I think that may have been improved in later variants. I didn't need any spares apart from oil filters which were readily available.

Benefits are a scooter with sports motorcycle handling and performance and plenty of underseat storage.