News from the INTERMOT show is winding down, with the motorcycle industry waiting until the next trade show (AIMExpo) to get its fill of new motorcycles and products.
Such is the time of the season, where we jump from one headline to the next, as we get our first glimpse of next year’s wares. Sorry for flooding your social media feeds.
In my opinion, INTERMOT is the second-most important trade show on the schedule (the first being EICMA), as we always see strong showings from the Germanic brands at INTERMOT, and we can count on a few surprises from the Japanese OEMS as well.
When it occurs (INTERMOT is held every-other year, unlike EICMA and AIMExpo which are held every year), the German show is good for revealing trends in the industry, and this year was no different.
As such, I saw three big trends emerge from INTERMOT this year, which promise to shape the motorcycle industry for several years to come.
More Heritage Revival
Linking brands to their past is nothing new in the motorcycle industry – hell, it’s what keeps Triumph alive right now. The British brand has made a strong showing with its Bonneville and Thruxton models, adding to that line the last year with the Street Twin, and again this year with the Street Cup.
Chasing the trend du jour, for the past few years though, we have seen other motorcycle manufacturers latch onto the post-authentic movement with a fervor.
Ducati made an entire sub-brand dedicated to this aesthetic (Scrambler Ducati), as has Yamaha (Faster Sons), BMW Motorrad has an entire platform of machines for the beards and coffee crowd (based off the BMW R nineT), and other brands are in various stages of playing catch-up.
This year’s INTERMOT show touches the zenith of the hipster movement, with multiple offerings from a nostalgic past on display, and brands redoubling their efforts to capture the attention of on-trend youngsters.
This lead to the Yamaha SCR950 being released for the European market. It also meant BMW added to its heritage line, coming out with its Pure and Racer models. Meanwhile, Honda debuted a “new” CB1100 with two variants for its street bike lineup.
At INTERMOT, Ducati touched on a more recent part of its history, bringing back the SuperSport line, albeit with a very modern twist on the venerable sport bike.
Ducati’s true heritage offering though will become more robust in the coming weeks, when it debuts a long-travel suspension version of the Scrambler, as well as a café racer model.
The Italian brand, along with BMW Motorrad have made great strides to make their post-authentic lineups as complete as possible, offering standards, scramblers, café racers, and everything in between.
Ducati is perhaps the most savvy of the motorcycle manufacturers, in this regard, latching onto the zeitgeist of the industry, and exploiting it. Both BMW and Ducati can now rival Triumph for having the most complete heritage lineup, and sales seem to be rewarding them…at least, in the short run.
Of course, not all the brands seem set to hop on the vintage bandwagon, KTM being a prime example. To the Austrian company’s credit though, Husqvarna seems set to riff on the throwback movement, with its neo-heritage Vitpilen and Svartpilen street bikes set to debut in November.
Kawasaki and Suzuki have also been largely resistant to the post-authentic craze, though one could probably make a joke about the latter’s aged lineup already touching on a bit of history and nostalgia.
All of this is very interesting, and I expect to see more heritage-based concepts at EICMA. The question to be answered though is whether those concepts will have time to see the light of day as production models, before this whole house of card collapses.
I say this because the tides of taste are turning now, and we are already starting to see the wane of scramblers, café racers, and vintage standards. The arrival of the stalwart players in the industry all but confirms this notion. Punk is dad.
Homologation Specials Are Back, Baby
On the racier side of the equation, the use of homologation specials for road racing is back and strong. This should surprise no one, as the FIM loosened its WSBK homologation volume requirements in 2014…by half.
With tighter controls on what race teams can modify in terms of the chassis (virtually nothing) and the engine (much less than before), the forces pushing for homologation-focused street bikes are perfectly aligned.
We have already seen a few machines debut with this thought in mind, but INTERMOT saw four superbikes released with the sole purpose of working within the homologation rules: the Aprilia RSV4 RF, Honda CBR1000RR SP2, Kawasaki Ninja ZX-10RR, and Suzuki GSX-R1000R.
For now, homologation specials just look like up-spec versions of their cheaper counterparts, though there certainly is a spectrum in the bikes just listed, in regards to how far each manufacturer has adapted the machine for racing purposes.
The concept of having a special trim level, designed to side-step the racing rules, is not novel for the Italian manufacturers, though it is something new that we are seeing from the Japanese OEMs.
What I expect we will see in the coming years is a two-pronged approach for brands, with sub-$20,000 “street bikes” debuting to appease the normal riding public, and considerably more expensive, limited production, purpose-built race bikes coming to market in conjunction with the street models, for the sole purpose of giving teams the best racing platform possible.
This is a formula the Japanese manufacturers are quite familiar with, and such a strategy helped produce some of the most special sport bikes ever to hit the market. Honda RC30/RC45/RC51 anyone?
Rumors about a possible V4-powered Honda superbike still swirl, and Ducati could take a similar approach, abandoning the v-twin engine platform for the 2018 model year, at least for its “R” spec machine.
Will other brands follow suit? I expect so, but only as they deem it necessary. This bodes well for two-wheeled enthusiasts however, as it could bring much-needed halo machines into the lineups of the different brands, and it could very well save the sport bike market altogether.
Keep an eye on this space over the coming model years.
The IMU Movement
I saved the best for last in this analysis, the advent of inertial measurement units (IMU) has finally hit us, starting with the 2016 INTERMOT show.
This simple technology ushers in the sixth generation of superbikes (an article for another time), where motorcycles have sophisticated electronics packages that can adpat their braking, throttle, clutch, and other input settings on the fly – reacting to what the machine is doing along all axis of measure.
Of course, we have seen IMUs feature on superbikes already, with varying degrees of implementation. At the most basic level is cornering ABS, which uses the IMU in the Bosch MSC package to allow riders to safely threshold brake, even while fully leaned over.
The concept behind this powerful piece of technology can be applied beyond just the braking system though — see the slide control that features on the current generation Yamaha YZF-R1 — and we have only begun to scratch the surface of how OEMs can tap into this information, and what they can do with that telemetry once they have it.
New at this year’s INTERMOT though is we are seeing IMU technology, beyond just mere cornering ABS, trickle into street bikes – the Kawasaki Z1000SX being the first model I have seen employ an IMU not only on its anti-locking brakes system, but also on its traction control and throttle map inputs.
This is a big push forward for motorcycles, especially as we are just now seeing superbikes across the line adopt IMUs into their systems. The pace of the trickle down of technology here is truly astounding.
The Bosch MSC package, which is now making its way into virtually every OEM’s lineup, is already a very important piece of technology, doing for the front wheel what traction control has done for rear wheel.
However, the coming years of innovation will center around how all motorcycle systems take inputs from an IMU, augmenting the already powerful advancements that have changed the motorcycle industry, like ride-by-wire, traction control, and of course anti-locking brake systems.
This gives the industry a real chance to innovate when it comes to what motorcycles can do, and should also add another layer of safety for riders. Combine this trend with the rise of superbike homologation specials, and some truly interesting things could occur. Stay tuned.
As always, Asphalt & Rubber will covering all the new bikes debuting at the INTERMOT and EICMA shows this year. Be sure to follow our coverage for the most recent news and photos.
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