Sports Cycle

Kawasaki Motors was the last of the surviving Big Four manufacturers to enter Japan’s motorcycle business, although like its wartime peers Fuji and Mitsubishi it did make an aborted foray into scooter manufacturing during the early 1950s. Details about the vast and diverse Kawasaki Heavy Industries Corporation could fill several volumes, and while Kawasaki documents many of its manufacturing divisions extensively, it dedicates just three pages of its 1997 published history to its motorcycle operations.



This is perhaps appropriate because Kawasaki Motors makes up only a fraction of this vast corporation’s global operations, but it is undoubtedly the conglomerate’s most recognized division. Kawasaki does, however, document the origins of the motorcycle division’s parent firm, the Kawasaki Aircraft Company, in detail in a separate volume. This source illustrates the aircraft manufacturer’s steady growth during the transwar era and leaves little doubt as to the extent of the firm’s technological capabilities.


A late entrant to the motorcycle market, Kawasaki’s rapid success in the field stemmed from a long history of engine and turbine design and manufacturing. In April 1876, Kawasaki Shozo (born 10 August 1837) established the Kawasaki Tsukiji Shipyard alongside the Sumida River in Chuo ward, Tokyo, with the support of Prince Matsukata Masayoshi (1835-1924), who was then Japan’s vice minister of finance. When the first Sino-Japanese War broke out in 1894, the company received extensive orders for ship repairs.

Immediately after the war’s end in 1895, Kawasaki decided to take the company public, and in 1896 the firm was incorporated as the Kawasaki Dockyard Company. As Kawasaki Shozo approached sixty years of age without a son old enough to succeed him, he chose Matsukata Kojiro (1865-1950) to lead the company into the next era. Kojiro, Matsukata Masayoshi’s third son, served as the president of Kawasaki Dockyard for thirty-two years, from 1892 to 1928. During that time, the firm diversified its interests broadly, expanding into shipping and the manufacture of steam turbines, submarines, locomotives, rolling stock, and, of course, aircraft.




As Kawasaki grew, its principal divisions were spun off into separate entities (look at the figure above). The first to branch off was its marine freight department, Kawasaki Steamship Lines, or K-line, which was incorporated in 1919. In 1928, the company’s Hyogo works was incorporated separately as Kawasaki Rolling Stock Manufacturing Company. Kawasaki’s aircraft department had been established in this manufacturing plant in 1918, but in 1922 a new plant for aircraft construction was established at Sohara (today Kakamigahara City) in Gifu prefecture.

Here it began producing its first surveillance biplane, the Type Otsu 1, for Japan’s military. Kawasaki built roughly three hundred of these aircraft over the next five years. The aircraft department was spun off in 1937 as the Kawasaki Aircraft Company Limited. In 1938, the year after Japan’s invasion of China, Kawasaki sought to expand its operations at Gifu, but there was insufficient space to construct additional manufacturing and aircraft testing facilities. Consequently, the Imperial Japanese Army encouraged Kawasaki to construct a new plant just west of Akashi City in Hyogo prefecture, where there was enough land available (1.8 square kilometres, or 0.7 square miles) to build both a new factory and a pilot training ground. Kawasaki then moved its existing Kobe Motors plant to Akashi, where Kawasaki’s motorcycle production later began.


Kawasaki Aircraft designed and built a series of fighter and escort aircraft for Japan’s military until the end of the Second World War. Its products included a long-range escort and ground attack aircraft called the Ki-45 Toryu¯, or "Dragon Slayer," which emerged in September 1941 and was dubbed "Nick" by the Allies. The frame was designed and manufactured by Kawasaki, but it featured a pair of air-cooled, fourteen-cylinder, radial piston engines designed by Mitsubishi Aircraft. From 1941, Kawasaki also produced its own engine through a licensing arrangement with Daimler-Benz. Known as the Ki-61 Hien, or "Flying Swallow" (and called "Tony" by the Allies), this aircraft was based upon the Messerschmitt Aircraft Company’s Me109 and Me210 designs, all the parts for which were purchased from Germany by Japan’s army in June 1941 and January 1943, respectively.

The aircraft were disassembled and shipped to Japan aboard German navy submarines, and the engineers at Kawasaki Aircraft studied, sketched, and assembled each of the fighters over three-month periods. The engineers found the German designs and production methods highly innovative, but Kawasaki’s test pilots did not consider their performance in the air especially remarkable. Nevertheless, the engine casting plant at Akashi reproduced the Daimler-Benz engine, known as the DB 601-A, which was an inverted, liquid-cooled, V-12 cylinder machine. The resulting Kawasaki powerplant, designated the Ha-40, produced 1,175 horsepower and was the only liquid-cooled fighter engine manufactured in Japan during the war. Not limited to merely copying the Daimler-Benz engine, Kawasaki’s engineers later produced an improved version known as the Ha-140 that produced 1,450 horsepower.

Known to the army as simply the Type-3 fighter, the Ki-61 had its first flight in December 1941 and saw combat for the first time in the spring of 1943 during Japan’s campaign in New Guinea. Over 2,600 units were issued during its production run, and it later served as a defence against US B-29s, although too few remained by 1945 to be a significant deterrent to American air raids. In January 1945, Kawasaki was working on two versions of an updated model called the Ki-61-II, but only ninety-nine were completed before the firm’s engine plant was bombed on 19 January.

In an effort to make use of 275 remaining airframes, Kawasaki’s engineers substituted the Mitsubishi Ha-112-II radial piston engine for the usual V-12 powerplant and issued what it called the Ki-100 fighter. Although this turned out to be a tremendous design that performed exceptionally well against US fighters, too few were produced to be effective against the American advance. Production continued until the company’s operations at Hyogo were bombed by thirty B-29s on 22 June 1945 and again by ninety planes on 26 June, resulting in the destruction of Kawasaki’s engine and assembly plants.



By the time Japan surrendered on 15 August, Kawasaki records that it had designed, tested, and built roughly 11,600 aircraft. Crippling material shortages notwithstanding, the firm contends that its designs remained competitive and that its technical skill was closing in on international standards. With the end of the war, operations were idled until GHQ had assessed Japan’s industrial base and issued its ruling on which plants were to continue peacetime production and which were to be terminated. GHQ banned all aircraft design, testing, and production in the late summer of 1945.

For Kawasaki Aircraft, this directive meant that its bombed-out plants would have to convert, at least temporarily, to the production of other goods. This familiar pattern parallels the experiences of the Suzuki Automatic Loom Company, Nippon Gakki, and the Mitsubishi and Fuji aircraft companies. Early after the war, Kawasaki made arrangements to produce such items as firefighting equipment, duralumin suitcases, electric kettles, radio cabinets, typewriters, farm implements, and small engines. As a former manufacturer of its own V-12 aircraft engines, Kawasaki’s engineers were a uniquely skilled group, but the production of small engines for agricultural use was a significant shift in both purpose and scale. Combined with the difficulty in procuring production material, the Akashi works struggled to stay busy while General Douglas MacArthur and his staff considered its future.

In 1946, GHQ’s strict ban on aircraft production was relaxed, and on 12 June it announced that its total prohibition was “deleted” and replaced by the following order:

" You will permit no individual or group under your jurisdiction to develop or execute plans for the design, manufacture, procurement or operation of any aircraft, components or devices designed therefor; or for procurement outside of Japan of such services, except as specifically authorized by the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers."

This new policy permitted some leeway, and as Kawasaki awaited the opportunity to again manufacture aircraft, its Gifu plant began manufacturing bus and truck bodies as a subcontractor for the Isuzu Motor Company. At this time, Kawasaki Aircraft had three divisions: Kawasaki Aircraft, in Akashi, Hyogo prefecture; Kawasaki Gifu Manufacturing, in Sohara, Gifu prefecture; and Kawasaki Machine Industries, in Takatsuki City, Osaka prefecture. Although Japan’s aircraft industry remained idle until the Treaty of Peace with Japan came into effect in March 1952, former military aircraft producers were called upon to service and repair US aircraft following the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950.

This seven-year delay was a difficult obstacle to overcome, but Kawasaki had been able to maintain a baseline of technical skills and equipment through its interim role as a service subcontractor for the Douglas Aircraft Company of the United States. After aircraft production resumed, Kawasaki began developing the KAL-1 transport plane at its Gifu plant, while its Akashi works focused on the development of helicopters based on an agreement signed in 1952 with the Bell Aircraft Corporation of the United States. In 1954, Kawasaki produced six Kawasaki-Bell 47D-1 helicopters – the first helicopters built in Japan – for the nation’s Ground Self-Defense Forces.



At the end of the 1940s, meanwhile, Kawasaki’s management began laying the groundwork for its foray into motorcycle production. In 1949, aircraft engineers at the Kawasaki Machine Industries plant in Takatsuki began designing the company’s first motorcycle engine, an air-cooled, four-stroke, one-cylinder, overhead-valve, 148 cc machine, which they dubbed the KE, for "Kawasaki Engine." The prototype was completed in 1952, and Kawasaki began manufacturing the design in 1953.

For that purpose, Kawasaki established a subsidiary called Meihatsu Industries to oversee the production and distribution of a scooter equivalent to the Rabbit and Silver Pigeon scooters then being produced by Fuji and Mitsubishi, respectively.121 Kawasaki Machine Industries manufactured the engine in Takatsuki, and the Kawasaki automotive plant at Sohara, Gifu (which continued to build bus bodies for Isuzu) began building scooters with the KE motor in October 1953. Although the new Kawasaki brand scooter was priced competitively at ¥90,000, the company had no effective domestic sales network and therefore discontinued production after completing just two hundred units. As a munitions corporation, its principal customers had theretofore been Japan’s government, major rail companies, the army, the navy, GHQ, Douglas Aircraft, and Bell Helicopter, so Kawasaki did not have a great deal of consumer product sales or marketing experience. Though a skilled manufacturer, Kawasaki had not considered the challenges of bringing its new scooter to market, and the product was a failure.

In February 1954, the Kawasaki Aircraft and Kawasaki Machine Industries divisions merged, and, spotting another opportunity in a converging market, the company’s head office decided in July to enter the motorcycle industry. Under the joint company name of Kawasaki-Meihatsu, the parent company and its subsidiary worked together and followed Yamaha’s lead by developing a 125 cc engine called the KB-5 at the Kawasaki Aircraft plant in Kobe in 1955. At this point, Kawasaki designed and manufactured the engines, and the finished motorcycles were named Meihatsu. The KB-5 engine was installed in the Meihatsu brand 125-500 motorcycle in that year, and customers were pleased by the responsive torque that it produced at low and mid-range rpm.

The same engine was also installed in the Meihatsu 125 Deluxe, which debuted in 1956, and Kawasaki produced a modified version of the engine, called the KB-5A, in 1957. The 125 Deluxe was well received by industry writers, who reported that it reached a top speed of 81.5 km/h (51 mph), and it also completed a 50,000-km (30,068-mile) endurance test without breaking down. Kawasaki-Meihatsu also supplied engines to a variety of contemporary "assembly makers" throughout Japan, such as the Ito Motor Company and the Rocket Company. The latter company, however, judged Kawasaki’s engine too expensive and discontinued its use in the Queen Rocket motorcycle.

By 1959, the company was pleased with the performance of its Kawasaki-Meihatsu motorcycle division, and, like the three companies profiled above, Kawasaki determined that in order to compete effectively, a state-of-the-art manufacturing plant was required. The firm therefore erected a factory at 1-1 Kawasaki-cho, in Akashi, Hyogo prefecture, dedicated to production of complete motorcycles bearing only the name Kawasaki. Construction of the plant began in January 1960, and mass production of the 125 cc Kawasaki New Ace commenced in November of that year. At the Japan Auto Show in October 1960, Kawasaki displayed its newest 125 cc designs for the 1961 model year, the Pet M5 and the B7.

The Pet M5 was styled as a utility motorcycle, but because it boasted Kawasaki’s 125 cc engine, it appealed to firms in Japan’s service industry that wanted more power than Honda’s 50 cc Super Cub could offer. These new products sold well: production rose sharply from 5,400 machines in 1960 to 17,000 in the following year. The former subsidiary Meihatsu Industries, meanwhile, was absorbed by its parent in 1961 and converted into Kawasaki’s sales division under the name Kawasaki Auto Sales.

Kawasaki’s attention turned in 1960 to the troubled Meguro Manufacturing. Meguro was then Japan’s longest-running motorcycle maker, and it had remained one of the industry’s leading firms until the late 1950s. A manufacturing veteran, Meguro had issued its first four-stroke, 500 cc engine in 1937. By the mid-1950s, the styling of its motorcycles bore a strong British influence that was popular with consumers, but when Meguro’s designers tried to update their image in 1958, consumers deemed the new 125 cc, 250 cc, and 350 cc products too heavy, and sales were dismal. Its designers also tried to produce a 50 cc moped, but consumers found it too expensive, and the project was a failure.

In 1960, Meguro agreed to enter into a development partnership with Kawasaki, whose engineers learned a great deal about building four-stroke engines from the senior manufacturer. In 1962, Kawasaki released the first motorcycle both designed and built by its own engineers, the 125 cc B8, which performed well in the market. Kawasaki was the financially dominant partner in the relationship with Meguro, and having learned what it needed to know, it absorbed the elder firm formally in October 1964.


Like the industry’s leading firms, Kawasaki understood that in order to be taken seriously as a manufacturer it had to perform well in races. Well aware that Honda, Suzuki, and Yamaha were several laps ahead on the world Grand Prix circuit, Kawasaki decided to focus first on motocross racing, which was growing especially popular in western Japan at that time. In 1963, the company’s designers issued the B8M, a motocross model with a distinctive red fuel tank, and with it Kawasaki’s riders took the top six positions at that year’s Hyogo Prefecture Motocross Tournament. Despite its recent arrival to the sport, Kawasaki went on to win most of the motocross races in western Japan that year, including every event at the Fukui Prefecture Motocross Tournament, prompting the media to dub the Kawasaki racing sensation the "Red Tank Furor." Kawasaki’s dealers rode the wave of media attention, and the company’s reputation continued to hit new highs as it performed well in international races throughout the 1960s.

In parallel, export sales had begun in 1960 and were supported by Kawasaki’s reputation for designing larger, faster motorcycles than its competitors The company’s product development engineers broke new ground in 1965 by designing Kawasaki’s first 650 cc motorcycle, the W1. Powered by an air-cooled, two-stroke, parallel twin-cylinder engine featuring rotary disk valves, the W1 was aimed at both Japanese and Western consumers. Its styling owed much to the machines once produced by former partner Meguro, which had closely resembled British makes. The W1 marked Kawasaki’s arrival in the United States as a “big bike” maker.

Thereafter, steady progress in international racing improved Kawasaki’s position as a world-class competitor and manufacturer. In 1966, Kawasaki’s first 125 cc Grand Prix racing machine, the KAC Special, took seventh and eighth places in the final race of the FIM (Fédération internationale de motocyclisme) World Championship. In the same year, its 250 cc A1R racing model finished second in the All-Japan Championship. At the Singapore Grand Prix race in 1967, Kawasaki entered the 350 cc class race with its A7R and took both first and second places, while the 250 cc A1R finished second and third. Determined to improve its standing in 125 cc class races, Kawasaki also developed a new machine for the Japan round of the 1967 FIM World Championship. Known as the KA-2, it boasted a liquid-cooled, V-4, 124 cc engine, and with it Kawasaki’s race team took third and fourth places.

In 1968, the company issued a three-cylinder, 500 cc production model known overseas as the H1 (and domestically as the 500SS Mach III) that could reach 200 km/h (124 mph), prompting significant safety concerns throughout Japan. In 1969, Kawasaki rider Dave Simmonds at last scored victories in both the West German Grand Prix and the Isle of Mann TT Race, winning that year’s overall championship series atop his KR1. Although several years behind its principal rivals, Kawasaki had finally arrived at the podium to confirm its status as one of Japan’s Big Four manufacturers.

In 1970, just a year after Kawasaki’s three machinery divisions merged to form Kawasaki Heavy Industries, annual motorcycle production neared 150,000 units. In 1972, Kawasaki bid to out-gun its leading rival, Honda, by producing Japan’s largest postwar export motorcycle to date – a 900 cc machine named the Z1. Nicknamed “New York Steak” during its five-year development program, the Z1 was powered by the world’s first air-cooled, in-line four-cylinder engine, which boasted dual overhead camshafts. The bold marketing strategy behind the Z1 was met with enthusiasm by consumers, and it enjoyed strong reviews and sales.

In Japan, the domestic Z2 was released in 1973 with only 750 cc and also enjoyed widespread popularity, but the overseas success of the Z1 kept Kawasaki on top as the maker of Japan’s largest production motorcycle for much of the decade. Honda did not begin issuing 900 cc machines until the late 1970s.

Having set its sights on the motorcycle market, Kawasaki was clearly a powerful competitor. The wartime experience earned while producing the Daimler-Benz 601-A aircraft engine was its principal technological advantage over firms that had produced nothing but motorcycles for the last four decades. Furthermore, its determined investment in a brand-new, fully automated manufacturing plant set the stage for its late-entry bid for market share. Timing, in this case, was critical, for the vast majority of makers had already departed from the industry when Kawasaki built its dedicated motorcycle manufacturing plant at Akashi in 1960. Armed with products designed and built by Kawasaki Aircraft and fuelled by international racing victories, Kawasaki Motors was well positioned to move into the motorcycle market of the 1960s, and the firm capitalized fully on its financial advantage over even the most veteran manufacturers.

As Japan’s surviving manufacturers are well aware, China is the world’s largest motorcycle market, followed by India in second place and Indonesia in third place. Japanese firms have been making inroads into Asia for many years, in terms of both sales and local manufacturing. From the Suzuki Motor Company’s first overseas motorcycle assembly plant in Thailand in 1967, the manufacturing web of the Big Four (Honda, Suzuki, Yamaha & Kawasaki) makers has spread to developing countries throughout Asia.


The Honda Motor Company entered the lucrative Indian market in 1984 through a joint venture with a local producer, thus forming Hero Honda Motors, Ltd. To date, the New Delhi-based firm has created 2,400 customer “touch points” comprising a host of dealers, service centres, and parts shops throughout urban and rural India. Driven by this well-informed effort to stay connected to its customer base, Hero Honda has been the world’s leading motorcycle manufacturer since 2001. In that year alone it produced 1 million motorcycles – a figure that boosted its total sales history to 5 million units.

The firm’s sales soon doubled to 10 million units by 2004, and in July 2006, pleased with its 48 percent share of the Indian motorcycle market, Honda announced that it would invest an additional US$650 million in a new subsidiary company to expand its production of both motorcycles and automobiles. In a press release, Honda announced that it expected its share in the Indian motorcycle market to reach 7 million to 7.5 million out of a total 12 million units annually.


Faced by such a manufacturing juggernaut, India’s second-largest motorcycle producer, Bajaj, has opted to pursue the world’s third-largest market, Indonesia. Although sales in Indonesia jumped from roughly 1 million units in 2000 to over 5.1 million in 2006, the country now has just one motorcycle for every seven people – compared to one in four people in neighbouring countries. Bajaj therefore sees serious potential in Indonesia and, despite a recent market slump due to inflation and rising interest rates, the company announced in 2006 that it expected to sell 100,000 motorcycles there in its first two years. The Honda, Yamaha, and Suzuki motor companies all have production facilities in Indonesia, however, so Japan’s top producers continue, for the moment, to maintain a greater reach than their Asian rivals.

In the long term, the country with perhaps the greatest manufacturing potential is China. Already by the year 2000, Chinese motorcycle manufacturers had an annual production capacity of over 20 million units, even though the country’s domestic sales then totalled approximately 11 million units per year. Domestic sales are limited by China’s municipal governments, and motorcycle usage and sales are banned in major cities in order to curb traffic congestion, noise pollution, and exhaust emissions. Consequently, China’s many motorcycle producers have been forced to pursue aggressive export strategies – particularly to large developing countries like Indonesia, Vietnam, Argentina, and Brazil. Chinese makers have been less successful in India, Thailand, Malaysia, and the Philippines, however, because those countries’ governments fear that inexpensive (and often illegally copied) Chinese imports will damage their domestic motorcycle industries.

In China itself, Honda Cub - type motorcycles are not as popular as scooter and sport models, but due to the popularity of the Cub type in Southeast Asia, particularly in Indonesia and Vietnam, most exports from China are illegal copies of Japanese Cub-type models. In 2001, Indonesia granted import licences to eighty-seven new motorcycle brands, fifty-seven of which came from China. The quality of these Chinese exports, however, was often very poor.

In a 2001 report, the president of the Association of Motorcycle Industries of Indonesia, Ridwan Gunawan, highlights an important parallel between the development of China’s motorcycle manufacturers and Japan’s postwar motorcycle industry. Gunawan points out that many Chinese motorcycle manufacturers were once government-owned defence companies that produced arms and materiel for China’s military. Over time, many became redundant and therefore converted their operations into vehicle and particularly motorcycle production facilities. Their initial investment cost was low due to their ready supplies of production material, machinery, and trained technicians, and they shortened development time by obtaining licences and forming joint ventures with Japanese manufacturers. But many of these Chinese firms’ local partners later copied those Japanese models without entering into any licensing arrangement with the Japanese patent and design owners.

Thus while the Japanese motorcycle and scooter designs entered the Chinese manufacturing network legally, their illegal replication by unlicensed firms expanded the volume of production tremendously.



The Japan Times reported in 2002 that in addition to China’s 140 licensed motorcycle manufacturers, as many as 400 unlicensed makers were in operation. The article cited a survey by the Beijing office of the Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO), which found that roughly 90 percent of the 1,300 motorcycle models with engines measuring 125 cc or less sold in China in 2000 were copies of Japanese models. JETRO continues to press China’s government on the issue of the illegal copying of motorcycle designs and their various component patents, but Chinese manufacturers are merely speeding up the product development process. This is precisely what the Japanese firms Fuji and Mitsubishi did in 1946 when they copied American designs to produce their Rabbit and Silver Pigeon scooters, respectively.

Nevertheless, the products issued by China’s unlicensed firms are often inferior to Japanese designs because the firms lack the requisite technical skills to manufacture the components correctly; they often incorporate inferior emission- and noise-control devices; and they use locally made materials and machine tools, some of which do not meet the minimum quality standards demanded by licensing agreements. Despite their lower quality, both legal and illegal Chinese motorcycles appeal to consumers in Indonesia and other parts of Southeast Asia, where they are sold less expensively than domestically produced models. Although Gunawan notes that competition from imports is positive, giving consumers more choice and stimulating domestic industry, illegal import practices such as under-invoicing and tariff-avoidance cheat the government and undermine the competitiveness of domestic producers. China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001 may well obligate its manufacturers to follow rules against intellectualproperty rights violations, but in reality only tougher import regulations and smarter consumer behaviour in other regions will affect the bottom lines of unlicensed Chinese motorcycle makers.

On this front, there is hope for licensed manufacturing. In May 2007, George Lin, the president of the Taiwanese motorcycle firm Taiwan Golden Bee, said that although China’s domestic motorcycle industry is still home to dozens of makers and sellers of low-quality, low-cost, copied products who provide no after-service, consumers in neighbouring countries are becoming savvier. Lin said,

"Several years ago, international buyers were very much attracted to China’s low-price motorcycles and parts, but now users of these ‘Made in China’ products have been scared off by their poor quality and durability."

As a result, noted Lin, most of the importers of Chinese motorcycles, especially in developing countries, have closed down. This leaves competing regional firms like Taiwan Golden Bee in a good position to follow the model set forth by Japanese manufacturers in the 1950s and 1960s. Lin explained:

" Japan offers a good example for us; motorcycle makers there stayed competitive despite increasing production costs by taking the lead in the upper-end and larger-displacement segment with unmatched design, development, and cost-control capabilities, and with the introduction of high-end, high-quality products that rivals in Europe and the United States were not producing. Our manufacturers have equally good competitiveness, and they can make the most of the small-volume, large-variety business model. Our motorcycle makers should take aim at their Japanese rivals and not get mired in segments of the industry that can easily be occupied by price-cutting rivals in emerging countries, especially China."

As Lin points out, Japanese firms were forced to stay competitive by investing continually in new designs and manufacturing systems and taking full advantage of economies of scale. Japan may well have begun its initial postwar boom in scooter and motorcycle production through copying foreign designs, but that is not what kept its industry growing and advancing. Copying alone is a technological dead end that will turn only short-term profits, and firms that rely solely upon copying will ultimately fall by the wayside just as they did in Japan during the 1950s and 1960s.

The pattern of explosive growth and rapid contraction of Japan’s motorcycle industry will ultimately play out once more in China, where the illegal copying of licensed designs by inferior firms will eventually fail to generate significant or reliable returns. Furthermore, Japan’s industrial development is not the only pattern that should be studied as a model for developing nations undergoing rapid motorization: Japan’s comprehensive efforts since 1970 to combat road accidents and fatalities could be usefully applied in developing regions throughout South, East, and Southeast Asia.

Choppers, customs, cruisers - whichever term you use, you are referring to a distinctly American style of motorcycle. The American landscape, both social and geographical, shaped this style of motorcycle into its present form.

As the history of motorcycle, many of the restless soldiers returning from Europe and Asia after World War II chose to explore the United States on motorcycles, but the motorcycles available didn’t suit them all that well. Outlaw bikers called the big Harley-Davidson touring bikes of that time "garbage wagons", because they considered all the accessories and extras mounted on them garbage.

In fact, Bylaw Number 11 of the original Hell’s Angels charter states : An Angel cannot wear the colors (club insignia) while riding on a garbage wagon …. The first thing most outlaws did was chop off all superfluous parts, which to them was anything that didn’t help the bike go faster: fenders, lights, front brakes, whatever. Hence, the term chopper.



Choppers came to symbolize the outlaw motorcycle contingent, the infamous onepercenters. By the 1960s, these bikes had evolved into radical machines far removed from the intent of the original customized bikes, which was improved straight-line performance. Anyone seeking outright performance would ride a Japanese or British bike. Harley had long since given up the pretense of producing sporting motorcycles.

People rode Harleys to look cool, and nothing looked cooler than a Harley chopper. The extended forks and modified frames of these motorcycles made them nearly impossible to ride, but the owners didn’t seem to mind. Riding a motorcycle with unsafe handling characteristics seemed to be another way of letting society know the rider didn’t care if he or she lived or died.

Over the years, such machines gained in popularity - even as they declined in practicality - but manufacturers seemed not to notice. It wasn’t until the 1970s, after decades of watching American riders customize their bikes, that the manufacturers got into the act and began offering custom-styled bikes.

The birth of the factory custom can be in large part attributed to one man: Willie G. Davidson. Willie G., as he is known, worked in Harley’s styling department, but he was also an avid motorcyclist who knew what people were doing to their bikes. One popular customizing technique was to take the fork off of a Sportster and graft it onto a stripped-down big-twin frame, so Willie G. did just that at the factory. The result was the original Super Glide.

The Super Glide model, offered in 1971, was not a screaming success, due in part to a funky boat-like rear fender (known as the Night Train fender). The next year, Harley gave the bike a more conventional rear fender and sold thousands of Super Glides. Harley wasn’t the only company working on a custom-styled bike. The British manufacturer Norton also developed a cruiser in the early 1970s. Unfortunately, its cruiser, the ungainly High Rider, wasn’t well received. The bike only contributed to the company’s eventual demise.

Kawasaki was the first Japanese company to test the factory-chopper waters, introducing its KZ900LTD in 1976. The kawasaki cruiser motorcycles featured pull-back buckhorn handlebars, a teardrop-shaped gas tank, a seat with a pronounced step between the rider and passenger portion, and a liberal dousing of chrome plating. These bikes forced the rider into a backward-leaning riding position (raising unbridled hell with his or her lower back), but otherwise, they were still functional, useful machines. As the decade progressed, the Japanese stuck to this formula. This approach had a limited future; the real future of cruisers was being forged elsewhere, by Willie G.

Two of Willie G.’s creations in particular proved to be the models for today’s cruisers: the Low Rider, introduced in 1977, and the Wide Glide of 1980. Study these bikes, and you’ll see elements of every cruiser now produced. The bobbed fender of the Wide Glide can be found on cruisers from Honda, Suzuki, and Kawasaki. The kickedout front end and sculpted fenders of the Low Rider hint at the shape of Yamaha’s Virago. These two bikes are arguably the most influential factory customs of all time.


What of the Japanese ? As the 1980s progressed, Japanese manufacturers got closer and closer to building motorcycles that looked like Harley-Davidsons. But they have taken cruiser styling in new directions, too. Honda now builds its Valkyrie, a massive, six-cylinder cruiser. Yamaha cruiser motorcycles Royal Star looks as much like a classic Indian motorcycle as it does a Harley-Davidson. And BMW’s cruiser, the R1200C, doesn’t resemble any other motorcycle on the planet.

This segment of the market is thriving, and for good reason: Cruisers are easy bikes to live with. Many of them are nearly maintenance-free. They look good, and when outfitted with a windshield, are comfortable out on the road. They may not handle as well as sportbikes, nor haul as much gear as touring bikes, but in many ways, they fulfill the role of a standard, all-around motorcycle. Many riders don’t ride a motorcycle to get from point A to point B as quickly as possible. They just like to ride. If that describes you, you might be cruiser material.

The V-Fours (V4) Engine

When Honda introduced its water-cooled V-four engine bikes for the 1982 model year, pundits predicted the demise of the inline four. It seemed reasonable at the time. These engines have exceptional power characteristics, providing good torque figures and more than adequate horsepower. Plus they are one of the smoothest engine designs in existence.

This engine design has become something of a standard - powering a variety of sportbikes, cruisers, and touring bikes - but it never came close to replacing the inline four. That was probably due to the expense of manufacturing such a complex engine design rather than any inherent flaws with the concept. In service, these have proven to be remarkably reliable motorcycles.

" A V-four engine is an engine with four cylinders arranged in a V-shaped configuration."

If you are in the market for a used motorcycle, a bike with a V-four engine is a safe bet. These bikes have been nearly indestructible. I have a friend who has 125,000 miles on his 1985 Honda 700 Magna as I write this. By the time you read it, he will probably hit 150,000 miles.

Inline Six Engine

For a few years in the mid-1970s and early 1980s, a few manufacturers fooled around with inline six-cylinder motorcycle engines, but these proved to be oddities, footnotes in the motorcycle history books. The odds of you stumbling across one of these beasties by chance are slim; most such machines are now the property of collectors.

"An inline six-cylinder engine is an engine with six cylinders in a row."

The Italian company Benelli produced a 750cc six-cylinder bike, but like many Italian bikes, this is one you’ll probably only see in pictures. More common were the big Sixes produced by Honda and Kawasaki. These were functional motorcycles, but both were victims of their own excess. The width of those six-cylinders just proved to be more bulk than would comfortably fit down in the engine bay, and handling suffered, especially on the water-cooled Kawasaki, which weighed nearly as much as a small car. And if four-cylinder engines are complex to maintain, sixes are absolute nightmares.

The Gold Wing - Flat-Six Engine

The engine Honda uses in its Gold Wing touring bikes is so unique, it doesn’t fit into any other category. The only thing comparable to the same inline six-cylinder version is the engine Porsche's uses in its 911-series. This is a flat, Boxer-type engine, with four or six liquid cooled cylinders, rather than two air-cooled cylinders, like BMW uses. The flat-four and flat-six-cylinder engines used in Honda’s Gold Wings are called flat because their cylinders are arranged in a flat, opposing configuration.

"When Honda introduced its Gold Wing in 1975, it created a new class of motorcycle : the luxury tourer."

These are the smoothest engines used in motorcycles, period, and are a major part of the Gold Wing’s appeal to the touring crowd. They also have a fairly centralized mass, which makes the entire motorcycle easier to maneuver. I’ve seen Gold Wing riders whip their bikes around as if they were riding sportbikes instead of ultimate behemoths weighing twice what the average sportbike weighs.

The Americans were huge fans of longitudinal in-line-four configurations, but it was Flemish arms manufacturer FN that was first to produce an Inline Four Motorcycles in Europe back in 1905.

Pre-1920s, a great many companies opted to try the stretched Inline Four Engine layout, including Indian, Excelsior, Henderson and Cleveland. In the UK, Wilkinson (the forerunner of Wilkinson Sword) produced an 850cc model with this configuration called the TMC, which was considered a luxury touring product.


The onset of war saw restrictions kill off production in 1916 and although Wilkinson continued to develop the engine post-war, it never built another motorcycle. In a similar fashion, Vauxhall famously dipped into the bike world when it commissioned the production of six luxury prototype motorcycles in 1922. In the end, only two were built and Vauxhall decided not to pursue its motorcycling interests any further.

When people refer to Inline Fours Engine now, they typically mean across the frame fours (transversely mounted, not longitudinally), such as Honda’s 1969 CB750.

The Inline-Four Engine Revival : Honda CB750 !

The effect Honda’s CB750 Inline Four Engine had on the motorcycling world can be compared to the effect the introduction of Microsoft’s Windows operating platform had on the personal-computer industry. Sure, the old DOS system retained a few die-hard adherents, as did the British motorcycle industry, but just as the vast majority of computer users prefer Windows to DOS, the vast majority of the motorcycling public wanted four-cylinder bikes.

Although twin-cylinder bikes have experienced a resurgence in popularity in the past several years, riders still want four-cylinder motorcycles, which makes sense: The benefits of four-cylinder bikes can’t be denied.




The primary benefits of a Inline four-cylinder engine in a motorcycle are smoothness and a capability to run at higher RPMs than a comparable twin. (Higher RPMs is why almost all sportbikes use four-cylinder engines.)

Inline Fours tend to make their power higher up in the power band than twins and produce less torque at lower RPMs, but all but the most highly-tuned Fours (such as the Suzuki's GSX-R 600 or Honda's CBR600RR) make adequate torque down low. Some Fours aimed at a more general audience, such as Suzuki’s 1200 Bandit, make more torque than many twins.

The downside of Inline four - cylinder motorcycles is that the engines tend to be rather bulky, although designers are working to rectify this situation. For example, Yamaha has moved the water pump inside the engine cases on its latest big-bore sportbike in an attempt to make the engine more compact. These engines are also more complex than twins and singles. More parts means more expensive maintenance. The odds are you’ll end up with a four-cylinder engine, not because it’s better (or worse) than any other type, but because it is such a common design. This is especially true if you buy a used bike.

Eventually, the British responded to the Japanese invasion and introduced a new engine design, the inline triple. In many respects, this was just a Speed Twin with an extra cylinder grafted on, but it featured some unique characteristics, notably its compactness. British twins gained their reputation for being fine-handling motorcycles in large part because their compact engines allowed designers to tuck everything in, leaving very few hard parts to scrape the pavement during high-speed antics. With the triples, designers went to great lengths to retain that compactness.

An inline triple is an engine with three cylinders placed in a row.

Although promising, these bikes had too many problems to save the British motorcycle industry. Anyone who wants to learn how not to conduct business would do well to study the development of the Triumph Trident and BSA Rocket 3. A design firm with no experience in motorcycles was hired to style the bikes, resulting in bizarre-looking machines. Mechanically, the new bikes also failed. Although the engines were powerful, they proved unreliable in service, victims of underdevelopment.

After the styling of the new bikes was universally rejected by motorcycle buyers, Triumph redesigned the Trident (BSA had gone out of business by that time) and gradually worked out the mechanical bugs, but it was a waste of time. By then, Honda had already introduced its CB750 four-cylinder bike, and in doing so, effectively stripped the British of any influence in the motorcycle market.

In 1923, Max Friz, an engineer working for BMW Motorrad, built a motorcycle engine, the R32, a 500cc opposed twin, using basic principles still in use today. Afterwards, This engine configuration earned the nickname "Boxer" because the pistons thrust outward, away from each other, like fists.

This was not the first opposed engine, but Friz’s execution was unique, and the effectiveness of his design makes BMW’s Boxer engines popular to this day. By opposing each other, the pistons cancel out primary vibration, creating a remarkably smooth twin-cylinder engine. And by locating the pistons on the side of the engine, Fritz placed them in the cooling airstream, leading to a cool-running, and thus long-lasting, engine. It’s not uncommon to find BMWs with 200,000 or more miles showing on the odometer.


The success of Friz’s design was not lost on manufacturers from other countries. During World War II, Harley-Davidson used his Boxer design for a military motorcycle, and in 1941, Ural began manufacturing a Beemer clone in Russia. Harley ditched this idea soon after World War II, but Ural is still at it, and you can now buy Ural motorcycles in the United States.

Many people find that the Boxer design offers an ideal compromise between twin-cylinder torque and multi cylinder smoothness. Like the V-twin, a Boxer’s primary characteristic is abundant torque rather than massive peak horsepower. This torque is usually found a bit higher in the RPM range than a V-twin’s, but it still comes on early enough to be useful in the real world. In return, Boxers tend to have more top speed than V-twins. That, combined with the engine design’s inherent smoothness, allows Boxer riders to cruise for extended periods at elevated speeds. You can get yourself thrown in jail on a Beemer without much effort on your part.

The V-twin design found widespread support even in the early days of motorcycle development, largely because it fit the shape of the bicycle-style frames used on motorcycles at the time.

By 1907, Harley and the Davidson boys displayed a prototype V-twin engine for their motorcycles. When Philip Conrad Vincent (the maker of Vincent Motorcycles) decided to add another cylinder to his Comet and create the first Rapide, the two cylinders together formed a traditional V. And when the Japanese got serious about building American-style cruisers, their engine of choice was the V-twin.

Modern manufacturers build V-twin motorcycles for a variety of reasons; some are practical and objective, while others, like tradition and style, are purely subjective.

" A V-twin engine is a two-cylinder engine with its cylinders splayed out in a V shape. "

V-twin engines vary widely in their characteristics. Some designs, like Harley-Davidson’s 45-degree V-twin, vibrate excessively. Some Harley touring models, as well as the Dyna Glide series, compensate for that vibration with elaborate rubber-mounting systems. Other models, like the Sportsters and Softails, just shake away, rider be damned. The reason for this involves the crankshaft design used in all Harley V-twins, but the vibration is also caused by the narrow angle of the V.

Other V-twin cruisers use narrow-angle V engines but also use some sort of system for reducing vibration. Honda uses a staggered crankshaft, which fools the engine into thinking the V angle is a wider 90 degrees. Other manufacturers, like Kawasaki, use heavy counterbalancers.

One characteristic common to most V-twin engines (and all successful ones) is ample torque, especially in the larger models. Riders of high-revving sportbikes often comment on the lack of peak horsepower V-twin bikes usually display, but they’re missing the point. While V-twins usually give away a lot of power up at the top of the power band (which, in the real world, means at triple-digit speeds), they make up for it by offering tremendous usable power at lower RPMs.

On a cruiser with a large V-twin engine, you can probably forget about riding all day at 145 miles per hour, but when you whack open the throttle at lower speeds (like the 65 to 70 miles per hour you’ll usually find yourself riding), you are rewarded with jetlike thrust that sets you back in the saddle.