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With the internet buzzing yet again about rumors of Ducati planning to build a scooter model, Ducati CEO Claudio Domenicali has also once again had to dismiss any truth to the matter. Talking to MCN about the matter, Domenicali said simply that “A scooter is not in the foreseeable future for Ducati.”

Domenicali went on to explain that small-displacement machines were not in the cards for Ducati and the brand’s foreseeable future, with the Italian motorcycle company electing instead to focus on niches with the larger displacement categories. It is no secret that Ducati is looking to introduce a scrambler-style model for the 2015 model year, and other models are presumably in the works as well.

Motorcycle industry gossip is at a fever pitch this week with speculation that Italian motorcycle apparel manufacturer Dainese is up for sale. Adding credence to that rumors, Asphalt & Rubber has received a number of tips about the possible sale of the company, with a private investment group cited as a possible buyer.

When we approached with this information, Dainese simply said that rumors were simply that, rumors. However it is worth noting that at the helm of the company for the past few months has been interim-CEO Federico Minoli, the same man that lead Ducati Motor Holding to being acquired by Texas Pacific Group, and later took the Italian motorcycle manufacturer public on the New York Stock Exchange.

After posting a 49% sales gain in November of this year, KTM USA says it is up 29.8% in year-to-date sales, which according to the Austrian brand, makes it the “fastest growing motorcycle company” in the US for 2013.

There is no word of course on how much volume KTM USA has actually moved, which makes the claim a bit specious, but it does show that there is some momentum behind the “ready to race” brand.

Once upon a time, Hero MotoCorp was Hero Honda, with the Indian brand relying on its Japanese counterpart to provide the technology that then went into the partnership’s emerging market motorcycles. The joint-venture was a stepping stone for Honda to launch into India, and for Hero it was a quick way to gain marketshare in its lucrative domestic market.

Fast-forward to present day, and Hero has not only become Hero MotoCorp, but it has also become the largest motorcycle manufacturer in India. Honda is a stand alone brand in India now, and trails only Hero MotoCorp with its motorcycle sales volume in India.

To maintain its position at the domestic leader, Hero MotoCorp has had to rely on replacing its technical partnership with Honda by forging alliances with various other brands around the world. Perhaps the most famous of these partnerships is the one with Erik Buell Racing, which includes the Indian brand sponsoring the American company’s racing efforts, and owning a sizable 49.2 % chunk of Erik Buell Racing’s private corporate stock.

Add a new brand to the list now though, as Hero MotoCorp has formed a joint-venture with the Italian electronics wizards at Magneti Marelli. There are bonus points for good timing as well, as the news comes just a few weeks before Hero MotoCorp is to be completely free of Honda’s technology.

KTM USA is going to have a mutiny on its hands if it doesn’t bring at least the KTM RC390 street bike to American soil, and we won’t even mention the KTM RC125 & KTM RC200.

Not only have bikes like the Honda CBR250R and Kawasaki Ninja 300 shown a lucrative market for small-displacement machines in the United States, but AMA Pro Racing’s recent announcement that it is considering a national racing class for ~250cc bikes should sweeten the pot for the “Ready to Race” brand.

MV Agusta had only a single new model to show at the 2013 EICMA show, its new sport-touring machine, the MV Agusta Turismo Veloce 800. An important brand extension for the Italian company, CEO Giovanni Castiglioni admitted that MV Agusta scrapped its original design for the Turismo Veloce, simply stating that the produce design didn’t have the same “wow effect” that the MV Agusta motorcycle should evoke. Developing the current iteration of the MV Agusta Turismo Veloce in just eight-months time, time will tell on whether the Turismo Veloce has been rushed to market or not.

MV Agusta has cleverly spun its recent history of releasing half-baked motorcycles to market (the press debut of the MV Agusta F3 675 and its horrible fuel-mapping are still fresh in our memory), by saying the company has adopted a strategy where its machines are in “constant upgrade” from the MV Agusta’s legion of engineers. There is an interesting story there about the sophistication of electronics now, though we would just prefer the bikes work properly in version 1.0, not 1.1.

Now raising its own bar on sophistication, the Castiglioni says that the MV Agusta Turismo Veloce 800 is the most advanced model ever to come from Varese. Time will soon tell how the sport-tourer rides (we hear it was a non-runner in the company’s promotional video), but as for the future of the Italian company, it is still full-speed ahead on other projects, which brings us to where we are today.

Some news that seemingly got lost with all the other announcements at EICMA, Giovanni Castiglioni shared at the Milan show that his road map for the future of MV Agusta includes two more yet unannounced new models, in two new market segments, which will debut in the first-part of 2014.

Polaris Industries has announced that it has bought back 3.96 million shares of the company’s stock from Fuji Heavy Industries, for the tidy sum of $497.5 million — roughly 6% of Polaris’ total market capitalization.

Paying for the stock purchase with roughly $247 million in cash, and $250 in credit, the move is a response to Polaris’ continued push to develop its own engines in-house.

For some background, Fuji Heavy Industries was the sole-engine supplier to Polaris from 1968 until 1995, at which time Polaris began developing its own power plants.

Despite that shift nearly 20 years ago, Fugi has had an integral part of Polaris’ business up until this point, and in 2013 one in four engines in the Polaris model lineup was built by Fuji Heavy Industries.

For 2014 onward though, the use of Fuji engines is expected to drop as Polaris produces more of its own units.

Have you ever wanted a .motorcycle domain name for your website? Us neither, but if did, your chance is coming soon. Dealer software solutions group Dominon Powersports Solutions has been granted…ahem…dominion over the new .motorcycles domain, one of many new interest-specific domain names made available by ICANN.

Like the .xxx domain name that came before it, the ICANN hopes that it can corral specific interests into these domains, thereby relieve some of the overcrowding that is going on with the current top-level domains (.com, .net, .org, etc). Will it work? Maybe yes, maybe no.

It has long been rumored that Brammo, Inc. CEO Craig Bramscher envisions his company heading to Wall Street for an initial public offering one day, but now we are getting our first public words from Bramscher about how he hopes that his Oregonian company can go public in the next year or so.

Quoting remarks made at the Portland Business Journal Power Breakfast, the Sustainable Business Oregon is reporting that Bramscher is targeting late-2014 to mid-2015 for an IPO, with the figure of a $150 million being banded about as a fundraising goal from the public stock offering.

Signs of life are finally coming back to the motorcycle industry, as Harley-Davidson has shown strong gains in the third fiscal quarter of 2013. Posting an increase in sales of 15.5% worldwide, Harley-Davidson grew 20.1% in the United States the last three months, due mainly to its “Project Rushmore” line of water-cooled motorcycles.

“Rider response to the 2014 motorcycles we introduced August 18 was extremely positive. In fact, initial retail sales of the new Project Rushmore motorcycles sparked the largest year-over-year new model year sales increase in two decades,” explained Harley-Davdison CEO Keith Wandell in the company’s investor communique.

I’m actually surprised it has taken this long for a national player to enter into the motorcycle rental business, but this week Enterprise Rent-A-Car announced that it was launching its own motorcycle rental business, Motorcycle Rental by Enterprise.

For now, the business is limited to one location in Las Vegas, and Motorcycle Rental by Enterprise offers only a small selection of Harley-Davidson motorcycles. Presumably if the Las Vegas experiment is a success, Enterprise could expand the concept to other locations.