The shape of the motorcycle is dictated by its two wheels resting on the pavement and the imagination of designers looking for ways to ensure their machines make an impression on crowded streets or on the open road.
After all, motorcycles, along with automobiles, are probably the icons of the 20th Century, says Ultan Guilfoyle, director of film and video production at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, who helped organize the Art of the Motorcycle exhibit there and later at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History last fall and winter.
“They encompass all the great themes of the 20th Century. Romance, adventure, freedom, speed, sex and danger,” says Guilfoyle.
“You don’t get many bland motorcycles.” adds Erik Buell, a motorcycle designer as well as president and founder of the Buell Motorcycle Co., which is now part of Harley-Davidson. Buell has its own design studio in East Troy, Wis., that employs three industrial designers, who work on future products. Motorcyles typically hit the street two to three years after development begins, whereas it takes carmakers three to five years to bring out new products.
“We want to be different. We have a goal of not copying, and we definitely make sure there is a functional look to the bike. We very much don’t want to do a look that will be gone in five years,” says Buell as he summarizes the company’s design philosophy. He cites the X1 Lightning as typifying Buell’s fresh but enduring styling.
Motorcycle designs in the last century have been very functional, incorporating a few essential elements–frame, fork, engine and clutch, fuel tank, seat, handlebars and brakes.
However, other influences have shaped motorcycles, including technology, racing, popular culture and a respect for tradition that shows up primarily in the big cruiser class, where the Harley-Davidson with its tear-drop shaped gas tank, artfully turned fenders and broad-fork has largely defined the motorcycle.
Because the basic motorcycle design is relatively easy to customize, customizers also have had an effect on manufacturers in areas such as texture, color and graphic design of the finishes applied to motorcycles.
“Everyone watches what goes on. Everybody wants their bike individualized,” says Buell.
For a long time, Harley and other maufacturers wouldn’t cooperate with customizers. But in the late 1960s and 1970s, Willie G. Davidson, grandson of one of Harley-Davidson’s founders, developed a rapport with the customizers and borrowed elements from them, such as changes in fork shapes in the late ’60s, as he formulated designs for the company’s production bikes.
After World War II, veterans helped inspire an outlaw subculture that influenced clothing, movies and popular culture–as well as motorcycles, says Guilfoyle.
And the inspiration for many of today’s motorcycles comes from the street scene in Los Angeles, where young Latinos and African-Americans make over Japanese machines into personal creations.
Miguel Galluzzi, who had studied at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif., took ideas back to Italy with him in the early 1990s and inspired some enormously popular designs from Ducati, considered a fashion leader in the motorcycle business.
Nevertheless, motorcycle designs from the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s have proven so durable and popular that they have inspired several startup companies such as Excelsior-Henderson Motorcycle Manufacturing Co., which this year brought out a new interpretation of bikes that were enormously popular in the 1920s.
Excelsiors and Hendersons were pioneers, with such novel treatment as placement of gauges on the gas tanks, notes Brad Banister, a spokesman for the Belle Plaine, Minn., company. And the new company, which began shipping motorcycles this year, has remained faithful to that tradition.
Several groups are contending for the right to bring out a new Indian, a legendary motorcycle that was Harley-Davidson’s chief American-made competitor for more than 40 years before it went out of business in 1953.
Indian partisans argue that Harleys are copies of bikes Indian designed in the 1920s and 1930s. Though similarities exist between the two, that may be a matter of the evolution of the motorcycle.
Unlike the modern motorcycle makers with art-school-trained design staffs, motorcycle pioneers relied on engineers or shop-floor craftsman to shape the vehicle. Banister of Excelsior-Henderson, says the Excelsior and Henderson built before the company went out of business in the Depression of the 1930s were designed by the company’s engineers.
Guilfoyle says in many cases motorcycle designs in the late 1800s and early 1900s were the result of builders simply figuring out how to bolt a motor to a bicycle frame. Engineers early in the 20th Century, influenced perhaps by shipbuilders, had a great reverence for the concept of good lines, or visual beauty, says Guilfoyle.
“From the very beginning aesthetics were very important,” says James Parker, who worked on the Indian project for Eller Industries, one of the operations seeking to resurrect the Indian. “I have a database in my head. We wanted modern architecture that has the chemistry of a classical bike.”
Big companies such as Honda, Harley and Ducati maintain industrial design staffs. However, the large companies will bring in outsiders to work on specific projects, and new startup companies have been drawing from same talent pool as they get into the growing market, says Parker, who lives in New Mexico and also has worked on designs for Japanese motorcycle maker Yamaha.
Harley’s designers pay strict attention to tradition. Its advertising that notes the shape of its gas tanks, a critical factor in the appearance of any motorcycle, hasn’t changed since 1936. Brock Yates, a chronicler of America’s love affair with the internal combustion engine who just completed a new book about Harley-Davidson, “Outlaw Machine,” notes the Harley-Davidson has evolved into a status symbol.
“The rich urban bikers view it much as you would a piece of jewelry. It’s a status symbol like a Rolex watch or a Mont Blanc pen,” says Yates. The throaty roar, which, while it might not technically be considered a design element is part of Harley’s aesthetic, originates deep inside the old V-twin engine that has powered the company’s motorcycles since World War I, says Yates.
Buell says the design has to include the sound and feel.
Harley’s latest V-twin engines have been updated with new technology, lighter materials and carefully machined components that reduce friction, but Harley’s engineers have fought to make sure the distinctive sound remains.
Japanese and European bikemakers have produced their share of exceptional designs ranging from the elegant Italian Vespa motor scooter to the simple Honda 50 Super Cub, a key part of the Asian transportation system since it was introduced in the 1950s and the inspiration for others, including what many believe is the most beautiful motorcycle, the Ducati 916.
Success in racing has been critical to the commercial success of Honda and the other Japanese motorcycle manufacturers such as Yamaha, Suzuki and Kawasaki. Peter Ter Horst, a spokesman for Honda’s motorcycle business in the U.S., says racing has had a big influence on the Hondas. “It’s had a fundamental influence. It applies to everything,” he adds.
Honda, for example, has just begun shipping a new series of off-road motorcycles made to look like race bikes, says Ter Horst.
The track has spurred new technology, such as digital injection systems controlled by microchips, to the broad use of lighter-weight materials such as aluminum or specially designed plastics polymers and even more exotic metals such as titanium. Motorcycle magazines contain discussions of the use of even more exotic materials such as beryllium, which is difficult to work with but lighter than titanium and stiffer than steel.
The lighter materials trim the mass of a bike and have allowed for more exotic shapes gas tanks, seats and fenders.
The more sophisticated technology has spread to segments such as the touring bikes built by Honda and BMW, says Yates. “These are very serious bikes for guys who want to go a long way. They are very smooth.”
Buell says ergonomics are certain to play a bigger role in motorcycle designs. “You want to get bikes that require a little less black magic to ride. That’s one good way to get more people to ride them,” he says.
