The Sturgis Motorcycle Museum & Hall of Fame boasts a collection of nearly 100 motorcycles dating back to 1909. Some of the collection is extremely rare. Other bikes are really quite common. The vast majority of the bikes on display here fall somewhere in the middle. This little Triumph Tina is one of those.
While the Tina is not a common sight, it’s by no means the most rare of the collection, either. It is one of only a handful of scooters on exhibit at this museum, though – and certainly the only British Scooter we have.
In the early 1960s, Triumph (which at the time was owned by BSA) attempted to cash in on the market potential it saw for a “shopping basket” vehicle with this new model. The 100cc automatic transmission motorcycle was advertised as “easy to ride.” Despite an extensive marketing campaign, using British pop star of the day Cliff Richard, sales of the new scooter didn’t do as well as the company had hoped. The Tina was renamed the T-10 in 1965 and discontinued around 1970.
The ad for this 1964 model screams, “No Gears! No Clutch! It’s Automatic.” The ad went on to claim it was “Simple and Safe.” In fact, “So simple are the ‘Tina’ controls that anyone can master them in a few minutes.” Yet another headline in the ad said “Easy to pass the test.”
Besides the actual scooter – which has just over 200 miles logged on the odometer (notice that the speedometer is reversed from that of most motorcycles in the U.S.), the Sturgis Motorcycle Museum also has on display the ad flyer that went with the scooter as well as the Manufacturer’s Certificate of Origin of a Motor Vehicle showing that the scooter was originally delivered to a dealership in Maywood, Illinois.
