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Back in December, we told you Moto Morini apparently plans to return to the US. Now, a few weeks later, we see Moto Morini is on the exhibitor list at the AIMExpo powersports trade show, and we also see they’re hiring staff for the US market!
Wait, who’s Moto Morini?
Moto Morini is one of the ultimate zombie brands. It checks all the boxes: Founded in pre-World War II Italy, with financial highs and lows over the decades. Eventually sold to a Chinese mega-conglomerate (Zhongneng). Now pushing hard for a strong re-entry in the European market, but not available in the US until now.
For an overview of the company’s history, there’s a basic run-down on Moto Morini’s official website. Be warned—the site is a bit of a jumble.
What do they sell?
Currently, Moto Morini sells bikes based on a parallel twin 650 that’s purchased from CFMoto. This likely means it’s a derivation of the Kawasaki engine from the Ninja 650, etc. CFMoto has been building this engine forever (presumably under a licensing deal), and given its partner status with Euro OEMs, it’s likely fairly trustworthy. Moto Morini uses this engine to power the STR naked bike and the SCR neo-retro scrambler. Consider them rough equivalents to Yamaha’s MT-07 and XSR700, respectively.
More interestingly, Moto Morini also uses this engine in the X-Cape series of adventure bikes. Back in November, we told you about the Moto Morini X-CAPE ADV-R, which was on display at EICMA this year.
And they’re in the US?
Like we told you in the opening paragraph: All signs point to Moto Morini entering our market. Who knows if they’ll get a foothold, but they are setting up an HQ in Irvine, California, and hiring sales managers and technical support staff and presumably a list of other help. That’s all we really know; there isn’t even a US-facing website at this point. More news is probably going to come out around the AIMExpo show.
The post Hey America! Want To Work For… Moto Morini? appeared first on Adventure Rider.
