CarBrandLogos archive · Vespa · 1956

Vespa150 TAP

A paratrooper's scooter with a recoilless rifle through the legshield.

Photo: C. Gallianik · CC BY 3.0

The story

A defining chapter in Vespa history.

Explore the ideas, engineering and context that shaped the Vespa 150 TAP, then continue into its specifications and place in the marque's lineage.

Origins

Piaggio licensed Vespa production in France to ACMA, which built scooters at Fourchambault through the 1950s. Among them was the strangest military vehicle of the decade: a standard 150 cc Vespa modified to carry a 75 mm American recoilless rifle, mounted through a hole cut in the frame so that the gun's weight sat over the machine's centre.

1956 Vespa 150 TAP · C. Gallianik · CC BY 3.0

Design and engineering

The idea was cheap airborne anti-armour capability. Scooters were dropped by parachute in pairs — one carrying the gun, the other the ammunition and a tripod — and could be assembled and moving within minutes. The rifle could be fired from the tripod or, in theory, from the scooter itself, aimed by pointing the whole machine. Being recoilless, it did not tear the frame apart, though the back-blast made the second option a matter of some commitment.

In production

A few hundred were built between 1956 and 1959 for French forces engaged in Indochina and Algeria. It answered a real question about how to give lightly equipped paratroops something capable of stopping a vehicle, and it did so at roughly the price of a scooter — which was the point.

At a glance