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A custom commissioned by BMW won the Best in Show award at the Yokohama Hot Rod Custom Show, often referred to as the Mooneyes Show, in Japan early this month. The bike is interesting in itself, but so is the inevitable speculation about what new model this foreshadows in BMW's future lineup.
That's because BMW has gone this route before, collaborating with customizers as a first step toward a production model. Customs foreshadowed the R nineT line and the K 1600 B bagger. Following the Mooneyes show, speculation about the new boxer engine BMW has built has centered on the idea of BMW building a large-displacement cruiser.
Really? Have the middle-of-the-night doubts and questions about the R 1200 C line faded far enough into the past to allow BMW to try the cruiser market again? At a time when the large-displacement cruiser market (a United States-only market to begin with) is shrinking?
We'll discuss that in a minute, but first a look at the show-winning custom.
The Departed
BMW built a new air-cooled boxer and hired the Japanese custom shop of Custom Works Zon, founded by Yuichi Yoshizawa and Yoshikazu Ueda, to build something special around it. They turned out a high quality and stunning piece of work, from the girder fork carved out of solid aluminum to the 26-inch rear wheel. The look is low and long, inspired by land-speed racers of old. The multiple awards the bike won at Mooneyes is testimony to the quality of the work and the creativity of its builders, but customs are customs. What comes next?
An R18 boxer?
After the lights were switched off at the Pacifico Yokohama Convention Center and the celebrations wound down, the next step was speculating on what the future holds for this new boxer engine BMW obviously spent a lot of time creating. BMW is saying nothing except that more details will come later.
Based on the "R18" painted on the tail of the custom, we can assume the engine is about 1,800 cc. The air cooling, the displacement, the finned heads and the exposed pushrods that bring to mind BMW boxers of 50 years ago all suggest to me that "traditional" is the direction BMW is going with this mill, and that's how we get from a custom that's styled like a land-speed racer to speculation that BMW is going to get into the large-displacement cruiser business. And of course I'm not the only one (or the first one) to think that this engine could be used in a new motorcycle that adds another line to BMW's Heritage models.
BMW tried building a cruiser 20 years ago. The R 1200 C line lasted for about a decade and BMW sold tens of thousands of them, but it was never what you'd call a successful model. Would BMW try again, at a time when Baby Boomer cruiser riders are aging out and younger riders are mostly going for scramblers, cafe racers, sport nakeds and small-displacement bikes? I have to say, I'm skeptical.
The problem with selling a non-conforming cruiser
As a former boss of mine used to say, every March there are half a million rugged individualists in Daytona wearing the same black T-shirt. The truth is, there's a lot of orthodoxy in the U.S. cruiser market, and relevant to BMW's current situation, at the heart of that orthodoxy is a V-twin engine.
The Japanese learned that in the 1970s. Back then, they used to take, for example, one of their inline-four, 750 cc UJMs, rake the front a few degrees, put on a stepped seat and a buckhorn handlebar and a little extra chrome and try to edge into the cruiser market. They eventually learned two things: They weren't going to beat Harley-Davidson in that market segment, and if they wanted to join Harley, they had to join the Motor Company in building V-twins, too. Which they've been doing since about 1981.
I thought BMW came to the same conclusion when it finally pulled the plug on the R 1200 C. Sure, there is a minority of cruiser buyers who want something different, whether it's a Ducati Diavel power cruiser that defies convention with liquid cooling or a Moto Guzzi with the engine sideways. After all, some people bought those BMW cruisers. But the new presumed 1,800 cc boxer twin is a big engine that will be a very prominent feature of whatever motorcycle it's bolted into. Everyone will notice that it's unconventional.
Lemmy also pointed out that the boxer engine is an impediment to traditional cruiser styling for a couple of reasons. First, those cylinders make it impossible to mount forward controls, which are a fixture on all cruisers today. Another visual element the traditionalist typically wants is a straight line from the steering stem to the rear axle. It's something easy to see on most Harleys and there's nothing like it on that shaft-drive R 1200 C shown above.
For all those reasons, I suspect any design built around this big boxer will appeal to a few and instantly turn away the vast majority of traditionalists. "That's not how a motorcycle is supposed to look," they'll say. Then they'll go back to their Harleys and Indians.
Add to that the fact that the large-displacement cruiser market is limited almost entirely to the United States and is shrinking. Will BMW actually build one or are we speculating down the wrong road? Frankly, I can't imagine that hulking twin going into any style of motorcycle other than a large cruiser. Spurgeon speculated that the R18 engine could be used in another kind of retro model that pays tribute to BMW's early boxers. But those bikes were prized for light weight and simplicity. Why build an 1,800 cc behemoth for a retro model like that and go to the trouble of trying to make and keep it emissions-legal in Europe?
I don't know if BMW will greenlight a new large-displacement cruiser built around this engine, but if they do, they've got more guts than I would have if I were in the corner office making decisions about what to build.
