motorcycle design today... boring?

heres a topic, discuss...

what has happened to visual design? i mean its out there, to my eye Ducati and KTM are cutting edge, they make some great looking bikes that happen to go as well as they look. do you guys factor this in when looking for a bike?
Honda, Suzuki, Kawasaki, BMW, all make bikes that i could nowhere use their performance to the max, but they just look so bland to me (well maybe not the SR1000R). i im curious as to why Ducati and KTM have great looking machines while the majority of motorcycles today look like, well, Toyota/Nissan/Hyundais.
what do you guys think makes for a bike that stirs your soul and why... and be honest

Agree not a lot new out there, fashion trends obviously dictate what we all want. Nothing appears radically new on the market, even the Beemer 1000 has only different looking head lights to the rest of the breed of hypersports.
Now not saying I overly like it but Honda's new crop of X-Overs with the high waist line is at least something different, whether it will be game changing I highly doubt it. Remember the DN-01?
As for soul stirring, maybe the 675 Brutale (best looking zorsts on the market), Panigale (again Italian) or pretty much any sport v-twin. Hard to get a hard-on for anything non European.
I dont like the look of the early SD but it stirs my soul like none before, bit like getting the best head job you have ever had from an ugly bird (sorry Chicky).

Me thinks bikes have become soulless, character has been engineered out and now we get fly by wire,traction control, electronic suspension etc...... Do manufacturers really understand why we buy bikes...... I think not......
For me nothing made after 2005/2006 has any appeal at all, some are nice to look at but thats about it............
I just bought a new fridge freezer......... kinda reminds me of a BMW S1000R

Was the MT01 the last funky bike Yamaha made
(Can somebody insert a pic here please )

Thanks. Comments

It think the reason you say it was the last good looking Yam is because the lines are similar(ish) to the SD. And with the SD as your current steed, that'll influence your tastes.

It is nice, in a different to the norm kind of way.

This is what we need 130kg / 150bhp / 800cc 2 stroke, start with two models TDR and TZR

Oh and KTM want to stop fooking around and build a road & track version of this, not with a puny 450 motor........ a nice 730cc / 75 bhp version of the 690 would be just the jobby

I watched the nat. Geo. Documentary last night on the mv f3. The present company owner was saying cookie cutter bikes produced from large corporations dont represent the same kind of passion and effort that goes into making works of art that are produced from solely motorbike companies such as mv, ducati, ktm. People who work for the jap companies might also be severely restricted with what they can do creativity wise.

My father-in-law takes delight in winding me up by stating that they stopped building motorcycles around 1960!!!
He likes things that are practical and low tech like magneto's and wheels that are interchangeable. Maybe even
centre stands Certainly, while I like the open rear wheel look I rue the loss of the ability to carry a passenger.

When I think about what I like in the look of a bike and what makes it special its the detail - the polished alloy crank
cases, the tubes for the drive on the old desmo engines, the font used on the dials, the shape of the cans Etc.

When I was teenager all bikes except racers were naked. Eventually one or two manufacturers started to offer Bikini
fairings and eventually full fairings - these looked so cool Today, of course, a vast majority of high performance
bikes are fully faired and I think herein lies the problem: That it is pretty hard to make a fully faired bike have a
shape that remotely different from anything else. Having said that I think that even those manufacturers that
do produce Nakeds have forgotten why it is that people like nakeds.

If I was at Kiska at the top of my list would be "Give them things to look at".
With the 1290 prototype I think they have listened that's why the prototype has no airbox (wow look at the secondary throttles go)
and why it has a SSS. That's stage one of making a bike look interesting/different. The next stage is making the overall
look interesting. Some manufacturers have made their bikes look like insects, some like bulls, some just aggressive. The 05
SD was the latter. It achieved this with the tank shape and that fook awful battery spoiler. On fully faired bikes a lot of
manufacturers settled for paint schemes. KTM made the RC8 which really was a bit different insofar as it had interesting
shapes in the plastic.

I don't know where bike design is going but I suspect that a lot of bike sales are based on performance figures. I think
it is unlikely that we'll see a naked capable of doing 300kph so there are certain economic constraints. I also think that
there is a lot of interest in nakeds and an emerging interest. It's only when that interest is sufficient to trade off absolute
performance that designers will yet again have the freedom to make bikes interesting. Perhaps we'll see some company
offering the same model with or without covers in the near future.

My favorite bike,,simple ,inter changeable parts between models,,,air cooled,,,,dry clutch,,,,handled like nothing else,,,,better than a TZ 250 I was told,,,it was slow,,,so you had to run it to the stop's,,,once at the ton you had to "run" the thing to keep it there,,trying not to loose momentum using the hills and dales to do so,,,,"engaging" it was,,,you had to work it,,,always looking for something like it,,,with 40-50 more hp,,,like 90 or so,,a V twin ,,narrow where it counts,,, so,,,if I could find a minter I would own one again without a second thought,,,,,

I am somewhat perplexed as to how this title forms its hypothesis. Motorcycle designs run the gammut.
Bored is not what I am when waliking through a parking lot full of motorcycles or a salesfloor with new and used bikes. I was just at a coupla local dealers the last couple of days. If I have some tyme to kill, I will peruse the offerings in such.
The last case was drooling over the Ducati 848, KTM 950 Adventure, BMW R1200GS , Niel Hodgson Ducati 999 in Parts Unlimited livery, Kawasaki Versys, to name a few.
There are many bikes that hit homeruns with me. The SuperDuke was not purchased for reasons of design in art excelleance, it was in the fact that the bike just excelled at its intended use. My V-Stroms were three ugly ducklings, yet I will be forever hard pressed to find a steed that handle thier tasks better.
The bike that nails all the artistic requirements to fall into the term beautiful to me, may fall short to others. This particular bike that comes to mind is Desmosedici.
Honda is failing in the spark the fire category for me also. I even think Triumph may have sparkeout a bit.
No blanket statements about design....

ive been a KTM fan since i saw the second gen Duke. i bought a 2001 640 SM. make no mistake the bike has to work first, but for me if it looks good on top of that then ill buy it. always been that way. its the complete package for me, performance and design.

Nearly €5k for a fairing kit and rearsets That's a lot of money.

Most new bikes need some mods to make them look good imo.

Stock:


Modded, would ride:

Think "simple" carb,,stack,,,light,,,not for "fat" people,,, I'll take the 500,,,,

http://www.aermacchi-racing.com/

Then there's Honda with their "new" ugly model,,,,some people might like it,,,not me,,

http://www.fasterandfaster.net/2013/02/ ... bably.html