[starvingstudent]

Does anyone care about X-Henderson, Quantum, Titan, etc? If your into the Harley thing, you buy a Harley. If you like cruisers but want more performance, you go Japanese (or German!). But these other American makes are offering NOTHING truly original--they're all 45 degree air cooled V-twins. It's time American manufacturers tried something new and original.

 

[El_Flaco]

Cruiser Flop

And another one bites the dust!

But seriously, folks.

It has been said before so many times, but if enough people say it, maybe someone will take heed: It is time for an innovative, ground breaking American sportbike.

 

[Bladerunner]

Why is it that when one talks about "American" motorcycles all that is thought of is the large cruiser, ala Harley? I wonder when someone will actually decide to build an american sportbike. Eric Buell tried but decided to use his ties to Harley to improve his company. And who can blame him, he was just doing custom race bikes up till '93.



Now granted, the "sport bike" is not cornering the market. If I remember correctly they only account for 30% of the market share. But their reliability, performance and lessons learned transfer directly to the cruiser market. I've often wondered, does HD actually have engineers working on better engines?



Granted it ain't cheap starting a manufacturing company but to only have one bike really limits your market appeal. Also, these companies aren't making cheap ones either. A $20,000 bike only appeals to a certain part of the market and so does it styling. I don't know how these corporate heads didn't see their demise right from the start.

 

[MartialStax]

Actually, I do care about Excelsior-Henderson. At the very least, they designed and built their own engines. Virtually everything about the bike was unique to E-H. It's just too bad that the Hanlon brothers had egos bigger than the $100 million they squandered. They could have put exactly the same bike with exactly the same build quality on the market for only $60 million, leaving them with plenty of working capital, but they just didn't know how not to overspend on everything. Much like the fools who buy Quantum, Big Dogs, Titans, Indians, and all the other poorly engineered, poorly built Harley clones. They can all fall into oblivion, and no one will notice except the historians.