Canadian Biker Magazine

Use the clutch lever, don’t use the clutch lever, use it some of the time. The Honda eClutch promises a scenario for any ride. For a while it seemed the motorcycle world was headed towards that of the auto world when it came to shifting your own gears. Good or bad? Who is to say? Some of like shifting ourselves, other prefer an easier way.

Let’s talk about Ninjas. They are silent, dressed in black and …. No hold on, the other Ninjas, the Kawasaki Ninja. There are a lot of them and more on the way. The latest is the 2024 Kawasaki Ninja 500. There are currently 12 Ninja models for sale in Canada if you count both the hybrid and the electric bike. But that is only Canada. You could find at least one more if you look to other markets.

Reba McEntire famously sang “Here’s your once chance, Fancy, don’t let me down.” That sentiment can now be applied to this new offering, the Harley-Davidson CVO Pan America. Harley-Davidson CVO offerings are renown, as we illustrated in our feature story found in issue #363, for their impeccable and lustrous paint finishes, the addition of choice pieces of kit and an extra helping of performance. All very admirable qualities even though the sticker price can be cause for a loss of breath.

Kawasaki dares to tackle the electric future with a different answer in the Ninja 7 – a hybrid alternative. Let’s get the obvious out of the way. The Ninja 7 and the Z7 are, as with a host of other Kawasaki models, the same platform with slightly different appearance packages – faired or naked. Next, the “7” in the name unlike most other Kawasaki models, has nothing at all to do with the displacement of the motor.

Keep the Vitpilen weird might not be a saying but it should be. Husqvarna heeded the message when they decided to give the Vitpilen and Svartpilen an overhaul. The original Husqvarna Vitpilen and Svartpilen deserve credit for bring some much needed funk to the small displacement segment. Those first bikes looked like nothing else on the market as the designers were seemly given free rein to design outside the box to achieve a style that stood out from the crowd.

Honda to focus its efforts and bring corporate muscle to the electric motorcycle segment. At the end of 2023 the company provided a briefing on the plans for Honda electric motorcycles. Turns out they are substantial. First the big numbers. Honda had previously announced an annual production target of 3.5 million electric motorcycles by 2030. That number has jumped to 4 million electric electric motorcycles produced annually by 2030.

Yamaha goes retro flavour for a new version of the triple-power bike with the 2024 XSR 900 GP. Nostalgia is an ever tempting lure – although when it comes to this particular bike, the question might be who is feeling the nostalgia. The look of the Yamaha XSR900 GP is intended as a tribute to the great Yamaha racers of the 1980s including Wayne Rainey who road for Yamaha on the YZR500 in similar colours with winning results back in the 1980.

The Canadian Motorcycle Show series has, for the first time since COVID, five events planned for 2024 that will run in January and February of the new year. The dates are a little different than you might remember so make a note. Rather than start in Calgary followed by Edmonton, the 2024 series will begin in Vancouver a touch later than the usual start date and make its way east without much of a break between shows.

A little bit of good news regarding the Honda Transalp 750. Turns out this time the bike is coming to Canada as a 2024 model. Not since the old XR650 has Honda Canada had a seriously capable dual sport offering in the middleweight segment – and the Transalp is a gigantic leap ahead of that old, really old, Honda stalwart (but that’s understandable as the origins of the XR650 went well back into the last century). So what brought this on?

It has been a rough couple of years for those with a need for maximum speed. The end of August (this year’s dates were to be August 26th to 31st) usually heralds news of record attempts run on the wide open salt flats but 2023 will see no such attempts, again as 2022 was also cancelled, at the AMA Landspeed Championships/ FIM Landspeed World Records. The problem this year is water – too much of it after Hurricane Hilary dumped additional rain on the salt prior to the event.