Today I had two letters from students who want suggestions on advanced motorcycle projects they are pursuing. I found myself spewing out (on paper, fortunately -- not to the presumably harmless, unsuspecting students) the usual silly ideas about how to make motorcycles even more expensive and useless and overspecialised.
Stop! I told myself. This is just what history has done to the motorcycle lately -- made it into a curiosity for well-heeled buyers who already had ambrosia this week. The real task is to find ways to translate all the great stuff that's been learned about how bikes work into something that actually costs less than a car. Can we do that? I wonder. That means just saying no to titanium carbide-coated fork legs that require six processing steps to make them smooth enough to slide properly through their seals. And no to three-layer fork tubes with metal on the outside and carbon fiber on the inside. And no to hand-welded aluminum chassis that cost as much per pound as Cold War fighter-plane parts.
But yes to what all those things can do. Let's please go through the whole thing and weed out all the hard-to-implement stuff and replace it with something that can be more cheaply produced.
First, where is the thermoplastic, fiber-reinforced chassis? And where is the twin-cylinder, direct-injection, separately-scavenged two-stroke engine of amazingly small size ? (maybe at Bimota) And the jointed front-end based on automotive practice (close, but still expensive). And the wheels made of the same sort of stuff as the proposed chassis?
Lots of the parts that are so beautiful on GP bikes -- foot controls, brackets, mufflers, and so on -- are made in the most expensive possible way -- carved from solid metal or fabricated in hand-layup fiber composite. We can probably have nice parts for cheap as soon as those thermoplastics full of chopped fiber can be molded into parts essentially interchangeable with magnesium or other weak metals.
The car people are creeping into these areas with plastic gas tanks, plastic intake manifolds, plastic radiator header tanks.
India is the world's second-largest motorcycle manufacturing country now, and they need vehicles that are cost-effective. Fuel costs a lot in India, so they may be the first to actually get direct-injected two-stroke engines -- because they need them as opposed to simply wanting them. So long as motorcycle development is paid for by a few upper-bracket RC30 and ZX7R owners, the pace of development will run slower and slower -- there is no mass market there. Motorcycles appear to be becoming wonderfully sophisticated only because that is what sells right now. I think the sophistication is false, for it is a kind that cannot be supplied to all who want it. In the same way, the YF-22 aircraft represents false sophistication because it has no sustaining purpose; the concepts and the execution are marvelous but they have no sustenance, and there is no way they can become part of our lives. They are fun, no doubt, for the few military pilots who have the privilege of flying them, but it goes no further.
Consequently I think it's time for someone (could that someone be a citizen of the Indian sub-continent?) to find a way to put our stock of advanced, privileged ideas into motorcycles that are within reach of more of us.