Web Bike World

(Contributed post for North American readers) Are you planning a road trip on your motorbike or in your car? Sure you must be feeling the adrenaline rush! However to live up to your expectations and to make your trip a memorable one, there are certain things that you need to prepare for. Before you set off on a trip, it is suggested that you prepare your car or motorbike for the journey so you don’t hit any snags while driving on the road.

This week, we have a rather insane dump of goodies to the ol’ docket: Volkswagen’s tightening finances and obsession with EV means their advisors are recommending Ducati Motor Holding be sold. BMW Motorrad’s CEO, Markus Flasch, has just landed the role of President of ACEM – and the new board seat means BMW Motorrad could be ahead of the game in their predictions for upcoming emissions and decarb rules.

In the spring of 1969, big motorcycles still ran on drum brakes, kickstarters and a fair amount of faith. British twins ruled the top end of the market, American V-twins thundered along their own separate path, and real speed usually came bundled with oil leaks, vibration and electrics that quit without warning. Then Honda showed up with a 736cc inline four that had a front disc brake and an electric starter, and it outran, outbraked and outsold nearly everything else on the road.

Used vehicle prices haven’t come back to earth the way a lot of buyers expected. Clean-title inventory is still expensive, dealer markups haven’t fully disappeared, and the affordable end of the market stays thin. More people have started looking at salvage auctions as a result, not because it’s a perfect solution but because the math works out better there for buyers willing to put in some research time before they bid. If you ride, that research habit is probably already there.

There is a factory in Chennai, India, that turns out close to a million motorcycles a year. The bikes rolling off that line trace their DNA back 124 years to a small engineering works in Redditch, England, where two businessmen had just bought a needle manufacturer and had no particular plan to stay in the needle business. That origin story, needles to motorcycles, England to India, near-bankruptcy to global growth, is one of the stranger ones in two-wheel history.

Back in 2024, webBikeWorld reviewed the Macfox X1S. At the time, nobody really knew who Macfox was because they had exactly two bikes to their name, a tiny social media following and virtually zero footprint online. Still, the X1S made a pretty compelling argument for a $999 bike. It was comfortable, incredibly easy to ride and nailed that vintage moped look. It wasn’t perfect though.

There’s a particular kind of frustration that comes with a motorcycle electrical problem, and it’s nothing like a blown fuse or a dead battery. What we’re talking about is the kind where the bike runs fine for a week, then leaves you stranded in a gas station parking lot for no apparent reason. You swap the rectifier-regulator, it keeps happening, so you buy a stator kit and three hundred dollars later you’re no closer to an answer than when you started.

To say this week’s news list has been a shining pile of …shenanigans… would be putting things lightly, but we’ll get into all that below: Indian Motorcycles released a new ad campaign pointing the finger at Harley-Davidson and calling out sub-standard community support; now, RideApart has received a letter from a member of Indian’s company in defense of that ad (we’ve got the letter’s contents below).

In this week’s news round-up, we’re celebrating the old with something new… and in several cases, the new is still poised to be revealed to the masses. Harley-Davidson files papers for a “Low Bob” and a model they’re calling “Deadwood.” CEO Artie Starrs’ new “Back to the Bricks” Strategy comes with a massive set of caveats under the proverbial hood; we dissect the factory’s post-release Cautionary Note to outline the best-case and worst-case long-term scenarios.

Ladies and gentlefolk, we’re back swinging! This week, we’ve scoured the ‘net for the biggest, juiciest morsels, and alternated all of that with a few bits of Powersports eye candy.