The idea for Carolina Fun Machines started back in 2007 when Linda, a high school French teacher, told Tim that she wanted a scooter to drive back and forth to school. So they visited a number of local scooter dealers and checked out what was available on the internet.
They found that the local dealers that actually serviced and had parts for the scooters they sold were charging large fees for documentation, freight and delivery on their new scooters. They also visited hardware stores and tire dealers that were selling scooters but found they didn't stock parts or have qualified service people to work on them when something went wrong.
In researching the internet sellers they read about too many horror stories regarding the quality of the scooters they were selling and when something went wrong there was no support to help the people figure out what was wrong and when they did it would take weeks to get the parts they needed.
So they started to do their research and found that not all Chinese scooters were of the same quality even though many of them, from the different manufacturers, looked very much the same.
When they spoke with the Chinese factories they would be asked what quality scooters they were interested in. When they asked the factory what they meant they were told that most of the companies that purchased scooters from them wanted the absolute cheapest scooter they could buy. As a result the factory would build the scooters with the cheapest, lowest quality, parts that they could. This made sense being that the internet scooters were all based on who could sell the same looking scooter for the cheapest price.
After some 500 hours of research they decided to go with only the best quality manufacturers. One of their brands Znen, along with manufacturing scooters also manufactures motorcycles and automobiles. They actually build most of the parts that they use in the scooters they make. This allows them to have more control over the quality of the scooters unlike the assembly plants making the cheap scooters for the internet that do nothing more than purchase all the parts from other suppliers and assemble the scooters for export to the US.
They also liked the fact that they could specify the quality level of specific components that were used for the carburetor, drive belt and battery.
Although they are not perfect they are a much better scooter then the ones being sold under the Sunny, Velocity, Peace, VIP, Eagle, Roketa and a number of other cheap importer names.
Carolina Fun Machines has serviced over 1,500 scooters over the last three years and we have found that these cheaper scooters tend to start having problems within the first 30 to 90 days and the cost of parts and labor to keep them on the road during the first year far exceeds the cost of buying a quality scooter in the first place.
When you purchase a scooter you need to not only look at the initial scooter purchase price but also the cost of keeping the scooter running during the life of the scooter. This is called "Total Cost of Ownership". The cheap scooters end up costing you more in labor and parts cost to keep them running to where they end up being more costly over the first year or two of ownership then buying a good scooter to begin with.