The Indian Motorcycle company has been teasing us about the upcoming FTR1200 street bike that it’s bringing to market next year, and now we have a pretty good look at the machine, thanks to a patent application with the USPTO.
Showing the engine and chassis of the Indian FTR1200 in line drawings, we can see that the new street bike will have a trellis frame, and an engine that looks very much like the v-twin motor found on the Indian Scout cruiser.
For quite some time now, manufacturers have been focusing on this concept called the “last mile” – the idea that the final mile of a daily commute will have to be undertaken with something other than an automobile.
Driving this concern is the vehicle crackdown in urban centers, with cities like London, Paris, and others already creating congestion zones for their city centers, which all but outlaw the ability for one to commute via car into a downtown area.
Mass transit is surely filling this void, as are taxis, but we have also seen a shift towards two-wheeled solutions. That is where today’s story kicks in, as Ford is looking at its own city center solution, patenting a car concept that has a built-in motorcycle.
In this installment of “This Week’s Suzuki Hayabusa Rumor,” we again take a look at the motor of this venerable sport bike. The rumor going around the interwebs right now is that the 2019 Suzuki Hayabusa will feature a “semi-automatic” gearbox.
Side-stepping the part where saying a gearbox is semi-automatic is a lot like saying someone is “semi-pregnant” (you either are, or aren’t), the rumor stems from a patent filed by Suzuki that shows a gear-shifting mechanism with the foot-shifter that doesn’t require a clutch.
If this sounds a lot like an up/down quickshifter system, then you score extra bonus points today for being a rational human being, but you would be very wrong about what this whole rumor should actually be about.
This is where reading the patent is actually really useful, because it turns out that this patent has a lot less to do with some sort of new transmission type, as the internet rumors would suggest, and a lot more to do with repackaging the transmission of a motorcycle (or any engine with an integrated gearbox) into a tighter unit, while retaining a standard manual shift mechanism.
Has Harley-Davidson just tipped its hand regarding its upcoming electric motorcycle? It would seem so, according to the latest trademark application to the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
Registering the name “Revelation” with the USPTO, Harley-Davidson has set aside the trademark for two uses: 1) batteries for vehicles, and 2) drivetrains for electric motorcycles and vehicles.
Other publications are running this story as the “Revelation” name being the moniker for Harley-Davidson’s production version of the Livewire electric motorcycle concept, but the actual trademark makes a very clear alternative to that narrative.
They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. If that’s the case, then the folks at Benelli are positively glowing for their fellow Italians at Ducati, as the Benelli 402S seems somehow very familia to our eyes…
Ok, let’s just call a spade a spade here: Benelli wholesale copied Ducat’s XDiavel motorcycle when the Pesaro company designed its latest machine, the Benelli 402S.
I thought when I wrote this piece – “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly About Motorcycle Patents” – that we would see a more sophisticated handling of motorcycle industry patents from the motorcycling media going forward.
Clearly my expectations were too high, since I just saw RideApart’s story, “Honda Underseat Exhaust Patent Hints at V4 Supersport”, which claims to show a patent for a new Honda V4 supersport. It doesn’t, and quite frankly, RideApart should know better…let me explain.
EBR Motorcycles is set for another go at this liquidation thing, with its owners Liquid Asset Partners having put the company and its assets on the auctioning block once again.
Loyal readers will remember that Liquid Asset Partners bought Erik Buell Racing last year, with public plans to restart the brand. That activity never really moved beyond assembling a few motorcycles that were still languishing on the production line, while LAP looked for other investors in the company.
Now confirming what we long expected to be the final outcome, Liquid Asset Partners is chopping up EBR Motorcycles once again – looking to sell the brand’s remaining assets, including the brand itself.
I am really excited about the Suzuki brand right now. Out of the four Japanese motorcycle manufacturers, the recession affected Suzuki the most, probably more than many people realize, but the Hamamatsu brand is poised to bring out some exciting machines in the coming few years.
We have already seen Suzuki return to the MotoGP Championship, and the work there has brought about the all-new 2017 Suzuki GSX-R1000 superbike, which is looking to a potent weapon in liter-bike warfare.
By 2019, we expected to see Suzuki debut all-new GSX-R600 and GSX-R750 offerings as well, which should follow the footsteps of their 1,000cc sibling, by offering modern electronics, class-leading performance figures, and cut-throat pricing.
A new Hayabusa is also rumored to be in the works, though scarce details on that machine have us feeling it is more internet rumor than real-world reality. But, Suzuki has not been bashful about teasing a turbocharged sport bike for its lineup, showing us its Recursion concept on more than one occasion.
Could we finally see a turbocharged Suzuki this year though? The rumor mill is pointing to yes…but just pointing, and the reason is because of patents.
Much of this internet rumors stems from a flood of patents that have been found, where Suzuki is patenting technology related to turbo-powered engines in motorcycles, or because of other patents that make reference or inference to being part of a turbocharged motorcycle.
Exceptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) have finally gone into effect, which means that you can now legally hack the computer systems on your motorcycle and other motor vehicles.
The exceptions were put into place last year by the Librarian of Congress, despite pressure from vehicle manufacturers, who wanted to extend digital right management (DRM) practices to the computer systems that now permeate the two and four-wheeled spaces.
This is a win for security researchers and hobbyist mechanics, because it means that they can modify the software on their personal and research vehicles, without the fear of running afoul of the DMCA, which we should point out was written roughly 20 years ago.
American Honda currently carries the Honda NC700X in its adventure-touring lineup, while our friends across the pond have the Honda NC750X – a slightly updated machine.
This has always been a slight oddity between American Honda and Honda Motor Europe, though it probably doesn’t change the price of bread for most motorcyclists. It is strange, though, that even our brothers to the North have the NC750X in their arsenal.
Appeasing our OCD tendencies of congruency and order, it would seem that the Honda NC750X is finally going to come to the USA, with Honda filing for a trademark for the motorcycle with the USPTO.
If you read as many motorcycle news sites as I do, then you surely know that Honda is almost definitely probably maybe debuting a new “monkey bike” in the near future. The source of this news is Honda’s recent application for design patents in the European and Japanese markets.
Intellectual property filings are a great way of seeing what a motorcycle OEM is up to, but as our colleagues at Motorcycle.com correctly pointed out, they can also be a great source of red herrings.
This is because motorcycle manufacturers not only patent and trademark the design they intend to put into production, but also the design they don’t intend to produce, but have still shown the public. This is just smart policy when it comes to intellectually property protection.
Fortunately or unfortunately, it’s easy to jump to conclusions when one sees a filing that exactly mimics a show bike or concept, as we’ve seen this week with the Grom-powered Honda Monkey.