Harley-Davidsons are stereotypically big-bore V-twins, and always will be. Inline fours will always be associated with Japan, and in the past, Brit bikes ran air-cooled singles or parallel twins—now, Hinckley loves its inline triples. And for Communist countries in the decades after World War II, the biggest bikes available were sidecar setups with a flat twin engine, copied off the BMW R71 military mount. In Russia, the Ural ran an air-cooled knockoff of the Beemer engine. In Ukraine, Dnepr built much the same thing. And in China, Changjiang followed the same formula, reportedly on tooling sent over by the USSR.
This is no longer the case. After generations of following the flat twin formula, Changjiang is now building a bike that looks a lot like those old, classic sidecar hacks—but with a new parallel twin engine.
The new Changjiang 750 sidecar setups originally debuted in the Chinese market a couple of years ago, but they are starting to spread out to new markets around the globe now. They run a liquid-cooled P-twin that is built by CFMOTO, with electric start, DOHC/eight-valve top end and Bosch EFI. They’re supposed to make 55 hp at 8,000 rpm, and 45 lb-ft of torque at 7,000 rpm. A lot more jam than the old 32 hp flat twin of the Communist copycat flat twins, and they probably run a lot smoother too. They’re almost certainly way, wayyyyy more reliable. Although, one potential disadvantage is that they lost their shaft drive and now have a chain final drive, as seen below.
And, for now, they’re not available in Canada—but they probably could be, with very little work.
It looks like the engine used in these bikes is the same twin that CFMOTO has sold in Canada off-and-on since the mid-2010s, so it should meet our homologation standards. It is true that sidecar chassis limitations might make it difficult to get the hack past regulators, but Urals are sold here, so it’s certainly possible.
Indeed, the biggest question might be: Would people pay for it? Urals have become prohibitively expensive for most riders. If a Chinese lookalike came in at a lower price (and possibly better reliability), would there be a market, even as boomers age out of motorcycling? After all, they’d be the target market, most likely.
