Membership
Riders Preferred Membership
Shop by Vehicle
Track Order
Contact Us
It's now a tradition almost as old as Common Tread itself: Every year we make predictions about the coming year and every year we look back at last year's prognostications to see how far off the mark we were.
There's no evading the verdict, so let's see how we did in 2024.
Full of hopefulness, Common Tread writer Dustin Wheelen predicted a year ago that Harley-Davidson would "go beyond its comfort zone and enter a new market segment in 2024." He was hoping for something like a Pan America 975 adventure bike using the smaller Revolution Max engine or maybe even the Bronx naked bike introduced as a concept bike in 2019 and later scrapped. Verdict? Nope. Let this be a lesson for young Dustin. This is what happens when you make predictions that go directly counter to the CEO's stated strategy.
Dustin's long-shot prediction of a cool-down in the electric motorcycle segment looks better in hindsight. On one hand, we saw new models introduced by Can-Am and a street-legal bike from Stark Future. At the EICMA show, we saw new models from Zero Motorcycles and an entire new brand, Flying Flea, from Royal Enfield. But it remains to be seen if any of those new offerings can change the trajectory of weak sales in the segment. Meanwhile, we also saw Cake, Fuell, and, most shockingly, Energica, go out of business in 2024, following Sondors in 2023. It's hard to say Dustin was wrong and there isn't a chill in the air in the segment.
Meanwhile, our colleague Spenser Robert also predicted "this next year will see the bubble burst on a great many electric motorcycle startups." For the same reasons, he has a strong case for saying he was right.
The predictions made by Ari Henning were a little harder to judge. On one hand, he predicted increased sales of CFMOTO motorcycles on the back of some interesting new models and expansion of the dealer base. The thing is, we don't have year-end numbers yet to corroborate that, but anecdotal evidence suggests that Ari was right and CFMOTO is still growing its motorcycle sales and expanding beyond the realm of four-wheelers in the U.S. market.
Ari's long-shot prediction was that increasing use of off-road trails by four-wheelers, including larger side-by-sides, would increase erosion, raise maintenance costs, and lead eventually to trail closures. It could be. But neither Ari nor I have any concrete evidence yet. Is he wrong or early? We'll see.
Spurgeon's long-shot prediction was that Yamaha would finally bring at least some of the off-road versions of the Ténéré — the Ténéré 700 Extreme, World Raid, and World Rally editions — to the U.S. market, instead of keeping them in Europe only. That part didn't happen. So call it 50-50 for Spurgeon.
Probably inspired by his impending test of the Ducati Hypermotard 698 Mono, Zack Courts announced a year ago that "the singles shall rise" in 2024. When he made that prediction, we already knew the heavily revised Royal Enfield Himalayan, at the practical end of the spectrum, and the Hypermotard, at the wild end, were coming, so it wasn't total clairvoyance. But that was also followed up by the first redesign this century of Suzuki's do-it-all dual-sport and supermoto 400s, so I guess Zack was on the right track.
Well, at least until his long-shot prediction, which said that car companies would introduce some new innovations in the two-wheel world. Even in hindsight, Zack admits he can't think of one good example of that happening in 2024, so I think that was a swing and a miss.
And now for my own predictions. Some readers suggested I'd lost my senses when I predicted that Jorge Martín would win the MotoGP championship and Marc Márquez would finish third. How could I not see that with Márquez finally on a Ducati he would thoroughly dominate? A year later, I have to say it was my most accurate prediction ever.
On the other hand, I shouldn't get any credit at all for my long-shot prediction, which wasn't even a serious prediction but rather a demonstration of cynicism, expressed as snark. After another year without products from Damon Motorcycles, LiveWire vastly underperforming the projections it provided to investors, and unkept promises from Buell and Sondors, my long-shot prediction was that a small North American motorcycle company, somewhere, somehow, would actually keep a promise. Of course lots of promises were actually kept in 2024 and I'm not really that cynical, but if this place had a decent editor, my long-shot "prediction" would have been ruled unfit for publication.
Who's running this rag, anyway?
Image Gallery
