GoPed Announces that its Up for Sale

Battling intense foreign competition, GoPed run by Patmont Motorworks decides to put itself up for Sale

GoPed is one of the most popular scooter brand in the market since 1985. They basically created the market for scooters and have hundreds of thousands of followers worldwide.

However, the last 5 years has been quite tumultuous for the company. Today we received notice that GoPed USA is putting itself up for sale after an exciting 32 year journey as the pioneering global scooter brand. Steve Patmont, GoPed’s founder, put out a message to say:

After a long and exciting 32 year run creating the global GoPed brand phenomenon, the Patmont family is now considering other creative challenges.

Parties interested to acquire all GoPed’s assets, including the famous GoPed trademark, all related patents, website, global dealer network, machining and fabrication equipment, welding fixtures, production molds etc are to contact Steve directly at patmonts@goped.com.

This is truly the end of an era and it is what happens when small businesses find themselves unable to keep up with low cost competition from overseas and not being able to reinvent themselves quickly enough. GoPed’s principles lay in being MADE in the USA, which really appealed to a small group of enthusiasts but not the masses. And they stuck to those principles till the end.

GoPed and Razor are 2 brands that broke into the market during the 1990s with GoPed blazing ahead with its incredibly fun GSR gas scooters and subsequent ESR electric scooters.

Unlike Razor, GoPed stuck with its Nevada based production facility while Razor went low cost and made their scooters in China. Razor is still innovating on toys today whereas GoPed’s founding team will not continue this journey any further.

GoPed still made their scooters the same way they did 20 years ago. Their high quality scooters are built tough and extremely reliable. Nothing has changed and that was the problem. Razor went the opposite direction. Their scooter were built to be disposable and cheap but parents who bought for their kids snapped them up by the thousands as presents. GoPed kept to what worked for them and found the growing competition from China-made scooters untenable.

Nevertheless, the GoPed culture is kept alive via many enthusiast groups that are still modifying and racing their GoPeds.

Thank you for the memories, Steve Patmont and family! Here’s a video during better times when the GoPed production floor was abuzz with excitement and they were churning out the GSRs by the thousands and shipping them internationally.