Just in case you were wondering why the Buyer’s Guide was only showing the main Euro and Japanese brands when in fact the blurbage said it was all-inclusive, you’ll be pleased to find out that we’ve now added a new batch of OEMs to make it more, but alas, not totally inclusive.
The Buyer’s Guide has now been updated to include Aprilia, Harley-Davidson, Â Husqvarna, Indian, KTM, Moto Guzzi, MV Agusta, Royal Enfield and Victory!
We do the updates in three batches to get the info out there as soon as possible rather than hold back on post it all at once, but late. With the latest update we have pretty much all the main manufacturers now, with just the smaller importers to add next week. Oh, and we also tweaked the code in mobile so that it shows there now too.
Great, go on, compare, drool, find that perfect bike. Have fun.
On one hand this is a great guide that works well in any format. On the other hand what were you thinking putting American style touring bikes as cruisers? Too many drops on the head riding dirt bikes? Eg a Harley FLH / touring bike is not a cruiser, they themselves would tell you that.
Hi Rui,
One of the hardest elements of the guide is defining categories. Everyone has their own take on it and in many cases a bike will cross over two or even three categories. Touring bikes are tough as you can have a cruiser with bags that is then also a tourer or a sportbike with bags that is then a sports tourer or maybe a tourer sports, etc, etc.
We opted to define cruiser as a parent category that has feet forward, low seat height and errs towards chrome. Thus I think all the Harleys would fit in this category, the ones with bags being classified as cruiser-touring.
In the future we’d like to build the buyer’s guide such that it decides the bike’s categories based on the bike’s spec sheet. That would be interesting to see what it spits out but then again a person ultimately has to set the criterion for the guide to follow.
But why make your own definitions? The manufactuers clearly state what they deem is a cruiser or a tourer – follow their lead when it’s available. Atleast with this one that’s pretty obvious. Indian’s buggering things up a bit with adding a third grouping called “baggers”, but clearly their standard bags and screen make it tour-ready. Once Honda puts bags and screens on a Fury then we got a problem, but until then…
And doing it by spec…oh boy! Next year your peeps will be calling a K1300S with it’s 63′ wheelbase and lazy trail/rake a cruiser! 😉
We have we have a chart with each OEM and each category they use so that we can pick the obvious ones. I’m going to stand by what we have for this year but revisit next year for sure.