In gearing up for the new bike season, I wrote to our A&R Pro members that Suzuki is a brand that seems lost in the woods.
The new models are uninspiring, the marketing seems flat, and while the brand keeps bringing back names from the glory years, the bikes are shadows of their former selves.
Those are harsh words for a motorcycle marque that once dominated the landscape, but I offer you the two teaser videos (above and below) in this post as evidence of that very statement.
Suzuki is almost positively giving us the teaser treatment for the upcoming DR Big model, which is really just a reworked V-Strom 1000 – hardly the rally raid motorcycle of the 1980s.
We can’t be 100% sure about this, of course, since the teaser videos really don’t tease anything. Take the first installment, for exampe, a video where a pair of keys are our protagonists, with a bunch of baby boomers fishing out in the woods.
This could be an advertisement for the new DR Big, or it could be a Viagra commercial, retirement investment fund, or an ad hocking disposable absorbent underwear for the elderly.
We really have no way of knowing, and if those alternative examples seem like hyperbole, just imagine the relevant bumper logos at the end of the short YouTube video, instead of Suzuki’s.
Go ahead. I’ll wait. Give each one a try…see, I told yah so.
The second ad (at the top of the page), is a little bit more telling, and we can see from the darkly lit shots that the lines appear to be the same V-Strom 1000 chassis that we know and love, with a slightly different motor in its cradle.
The appearance of an unbashable bash guard is pretty obvious though, and it looks like the general shape of what usually comes from Suzuki’s factory, so we are still guessing a bit here, but the pieces of the puzzle seem to paint the right picture.
It is tough to root for a brand that seems stuck reselling the same motorcycles decade after decade. We keep hearing rumors of exciting new machines, a new Hayabusa or even the turbocharged Recursion, but each year nothing comes of those rumors.
It is still early in the 2020 new bike season, but we hope that what is brewing here in these teaser videos isn’t the cream of the crop from Suzuki’s new motorcycle factory. We still have several more weeks until EICMA to know for certain, so stay tuned.
Source: Suzuki (YouTube)
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