Re: Funny how Harley guys are insulted even when you don't even mention Harley
You have to give the devil his due, Harley and Bmw, though completly different target markets, both have to upgrade and modernize their designs while sticking to an extremely narrow focus of what's considered acceptable by their target demographic, case in point Bmw's K series and Harley's V rod, In the mid 80's Bmw's focus was to phase out the air cooled boxer in favour of the K bikes, they've since backed away from that goal in the face of resistance from their core market, the best they could do was upgrade to the 259 series motors in modern [butt-ug IMHO] versions of the old R series, Harley had to get Porsche to design them an engine for whatever reason, I know their own attempt at a sportbike that they raced in AMA superbike pretty well stunk, Alot of Harley guys I know say they wouldn't own a V-rod because it looks like a Japanese bike, how do you market to that mindset? when you put out a realitivly modern design your target market denigrates it as "asian". The best you can do is upgrade what you have, and play up the nostalgia happy days theme, or the bad boy custom theme and watch 'em line up at the door, Harley has some good designs like the superglide sport and the T-sport, which is a fairly competent all-rounder, but even THAT don't sell well. go figure. The Japanese don't have those constraints, in fact their target market expects cutting edge technology and will switch brands in a minute if they don't keep up, so they race and develop the best they can. AAAAAND up untill the last few years you didn't see to many 100k Harley's unless you rebuilt them a few times, none of my shovelhead top ends lasted more than 30k without valves or guides or rings or something.