Today I am going to take a look at some of the worst bikes ever made. You know in general I love anything on 2 wheels, but the bikes I have included all had such serious flaws that they cost the companies concerned very seriously in one way or another.
Whether it was poor workmanship, bad market research, awful design or poor engineering decisions, they all had such major issues that success was never an option for most of them.
They are an example of how even the biggest most successful companies just get it wrong sometimes.
These are the bikes that the manufacturers would rather we forgot
So let us dive straight in to find the worst bikes ever made.
And I look forward to hearing in the comments below which bikes you would have included. I will apologise as I know I will upset a few people at least.
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Anyway, To the bikes.
First and most obvious choice today is the
Honda DN01
This bike came with its own catch phrase, Do Not Own 1
The idea of the DN01 was to attract new buyers to the world of motorcycles who were previously afraid of them. The engineers designed something born with an identity crisis. It was neither a motorcycle nor a scooter, but it was awful.
Can you imagine Vespa or Lambretta building a scooter that weighed more than a Harley and had a 1609mm wheelbase and no storage space or screen? That made it over 6ft or 1830mm long overall.
Looking like something out of a Batman film it is unmistakable in the worst way possible.
You aren’t likely to see one very often and despite its weight of over 270Kg, comfort was non existent and it has no load carrying capacity for touring or a passenger, I have no idea who Honda ever thought would buy it.
The gearbox was called the Human Friendly Transmission. But it wasn’t,
It had 2 different auto modes and a six-speed electronically shiftable manual mode. So it was just too complicated and because the bike was so long and heavy it was useless for city riding,
I remember one quote being that it was “Two parts scooter; one part cruiser; and one part sportbike,” The problem was, they had used the wrong parts of each.
Next, we have the
Morbidelli V8
The Morbidelli Story is a complex one I may look at more deeply, but Giancarlo Morbidelli wanted a V8. And after leaving racing, he decided to build it.
The aim, to build a faster, smoother and more comfortable bike than any other Italian Motorcycle.
He failed on all 3 counts.
The 850cc, 32 valve DOHC V8 engine ran like a Swiss watch, but produced just 100HP and had poor performance compared to the opposition.
Pininfarina were blamed for the design, but that is a story in itself.
The chassis was too short making it uncomfortable, unstable and with little room for a passenger and with a price tag that would be the equivalent of between £150,000 and £200,000 today it was outrageously expensive.
If truth be told, only 3 or 4 were ever built and the projected orders never happened. The original bodywork gave it the look of a frog that was having something horrible done to it, and even after the original bodywork was reworked again, It looked little better.
It was a sad end to a once great company, but the motorcycle industry can be brutal.
Next we have the
Honda 400 Hondamatic
Now imagine, it was the late 70’s. Motorcycle manufacturers were throwing everything they had into building better, faster motorcycles. We had the 2 stroke wars and then we had the CB750 and Z1 at the top of the four stroke market.
Maybe not Honda’s best motorcycle, but the CB400T or Honda 400 Dream was a good bike. But Honda had the ridiculous idea of bolting a 2 speed semi automatic gearbox with a heavy torque converter to it. And they ruined it.
The Hondamatic 400 had two forward gears, slow, and slower, and they had to be manually selected by the rider anyway.
There was a gear position indicator instead of a tachometer in the instrument cluster for those people who couldn’t count to two, but it did have a parking brake. The engine was strangled by small carburettors just to give it enough low-down response to get the torque converter spinning.
Rarely have so many things been wrong with a design, and there was just no market for a mid range underpowered automatic motorcycle.
Next we have the
Buell R1000 and R1200 Battle Twins –
Now Erik Buell might have been a genius designer in some ways, but the Buell Battle Twin shows, he shouldn’t have been given his crayons back as a child.
Buell’s interest was engineering and efficiency, not styling
The Buell Battle Twin hid the heavyweight air cooled Harley engines in bulbous, fully-enclosed bodywork to improve aerodynamic efficiency, but it wasn’t exactly good at cooling the engine.
About 100 Buell R1000 and 1200 Battle Twins were manufactured in the end. 50 using the engine from the XR1000 and just over 50 more using a 1200 Evo Sportster engine.
The front mudguard was huge, and if you thought that was bad, going around the back you saw that they had modelled the rear on hippo with diarrhoea.
Despite its bloated looks, the Battle Twin was actually a small bike with a very short wheelbase. This made the riding position great for someone who was 5ft 2 and 8 stone wet through, but for anyone else, it was cramped to say the least and was made even worse by the constant unbearable heat from the air cooled engines, which dumped that superheated air straight onto your legs.
The production models had a clunky and fairly standard Harley four-speed gearbox, and the 16-inch wheels and ultra short wheelbase just made it too twitchy.
Despite all of its shortcomings, the Buell Battle Twin’s bulbous bodywork worked, and even with a Harley engine, the factory race bike would hit around 180mph.
But it won few friends, even in the diehard Buell community, and it was a horror to ride anywhere the tarmac wasn’t perfect.
Next I am going to upset even more people.
Bimota Vdue
Because the Bimota Vdue could have been fantastic
Now Bimota were known as the best designers in the business. Their bikes were the epitome of Italian Exotica, and despite the dominance of 2 strokes in racing, they had always built their bikes using 4 stroke engines.
Then, As the world of racing decided to move away from 2 strokes, Bimota decided to build one.
Fuel injection had hastened the demise of the 2 strokes. It had improved the performance of the 4 strokes a lot, but no one seemed to be able to get a fuel injection system working properly on a 2 stroke.
So when Bimota launched its fuel injected 2 stroke to the world, everyone was drooling. Early reports screamed that this bike was everything you’d expect and more.
It wasn’t.
Despite all the hype and promises, even the masterful engineers at Bimota had failed to make a 2 stroke fuel injection system work.
Hardened racers described it as unrideable, in an era when the bikes they rode every weekend would kill an average rider in under 2 laps of most circuits.
Uncontrollable surges of power were followed by fits of coughing, choking, stalling and spluttering.
The V-Due was just a mess.
After over 10 years developing the bike, Bimota went bankrupt buying bikes back from disappointed customers in a desperate attempt to save their reputation.
The only way it would ever run is if you scrapped the fuel injection and put carbs on it.
Yamaha Niken
Now with the premiss that 2 wheels and an engine is what makes something a bike I am not sure The Yamaha Niken or Nighken should even be called a motorcycle.
I still have no interest or idea how you pronounce it, They sold so well I have never actually seen one outside of a showroom and they manage to miss the point completely from a bikers perspective in my opinion, which is a pretty big miss for a company as big as Yamaha.
Who was it who told them that a 3 wheeled high performance sports tourer was a good idea?
Where did they think the market would come from?
Who would ever buy one?
You can imagine the engineers sitting there with a picture of the side profile of the Honda DN01 and thinking, yes, I know it failed, but if we add an extra front wheel and make it go a bit faster it could work.
Wrong.
This was another abject failure when it came to market. Sports bike riders wanted the MT09 engine in a pure sports bike, The Touring fraternity was well served by the Tracer 9, and the 3 wheeler owners? Well, there weren’t any really anymore.
No one bought it.
The front suspension has so many components it doesn’t matter that it is over engineered. It simply has too many parts to go wrong.
They sat on showroom floors doing nothing because however good a product is, if there is no market for it, no one will ever buy it.
Suzuki RE5
Now I know I will upset some more people by including the Suzuki RE5.
This is a bike that was based around a free-revving Wankel rotary engine, so the RE5 wasn’t short of power.
What it was short on was real world performance. And what it needed, was servicing more than riding.
Wankel engines are notoriously high maintenance, and the RE5 needed a service point at the end of every road. Suzuki metal is sometimes more like the consistency of cheese than steel or aluminium. So those all too sensitive rotor tips never stood a chance.
They used more oil and blew up more often than any 2 stroke race bike.
Fuel economy was atrocious too. Getting 100 miles between fuel stops was always a gamble, and if you were silly enough to open the throttle more than a fraction, you would never make it that far.
So as a lardy long range tourer, which is what this bike was supposed to be, it was completely useless.
The radiator looked like it had come out of a world war 2 tank and the instrument cluster looked like it had fallen off the set of a terrible 70’s Sci-Fi show.
The Suzuki RE5 cost twice as much to buy, and at least 4 times as much to maintain, as anything else coming out of Japan and did absolutely nothing better.
It had all the problems and none of the saving graces of the Norton Rotary. So it failed completely.
It is often described as the bike that almost bankrupted Suzuki, but our next bike went one step further.
BSA Ariel
That bike was the BSA Ariel 3.
In 1967 Ariel began designing a three wheeled moped, but unlike other trikes this one was designed to bend in the middle.
BSA was looking to re enter the moped market, and wanted something a bit different. So they bought manufacturing rights and went on to produce the Ariel 3.
George Wallis, the original designer who became a consultant to BSA, bsaid “the Ariel was designed by BSA design staff who would not take any advice or suggestions on the design” and in 1970 the bike was launched.
The Ariel was created after years of market research, and this predicted a brilliant future. But it was a complete and utter disaster.
This little trike is often described as one of the final nails in the coffin of the whole British motorcycle industry.
It was only sold for three years, and truth be told, all of the ones sold may well have been built in the very first production run in 1970.
BSA had tooled up to build over 2,000 units a week. In fact, only a few hundred were ever sold and the whole exercise is reported to have cost BSA over 2 million pounds and that is the equivalent of over 26 and a half million pounds today.
It finished BSA.
Dodge Tomahawk
Next we have the Dodge Tomahawk and I can hear the screams already.
Not only was the Dodge Tomahawk not really a motorbike because it had 4 wheels, but it never worked either. Just look at the torque reaction at a standstill on the mock up that was b uilt.
It was all a big scam.
If you had the 80 gzillion pound asking price, you would still have waited forever.
As far as I am aware none of the advance orders were ever fulfilled, because the bike simply didn’t work beyond the marketing blitz.
There were endless tales of deceptions, and mock ups, but the truth around the whole project will probably always be shrouded in a little mystery.
I think the closest it ever got to being built was when Allen Millyard built a V10 Viper engined motorbike that did work.
Yet I still see people today saying it was the fastest bike ever built.
Unless I see it run with my own eyes, I am unlikely to ever believe it now.
Now we started today’s list with a bike that had an identity crisis and I am going to finish with one too.
CF Moto V5 Sport Cruiser
CF Moto have now become one the giants of the industry with tendrils that reach into many pies. But before their success. They made mistakes too.
The CF Moto V5 Sport Cruiser wasn’t sporty, or a cruiser, so we were not off to a good start.
The name just confused people.
It looked like a lawnmower engine was powering a Ray Gun.
The 250cc water cooled lump of an engine was a copy of the Honda Helix scooter engine, but it was a bad copy. This bike leaked oil like a sieve.
The performance of that sporting 250cc engine, depending on the market it was being sold into, produced a massive 15HP but was dulled even further by an awful CVT gearbox.
The engine was bolted into an average motorcycle frame, then all of the bits you wanted access to were covered up by badly fitting plastic panels held together with push clips.
Just about every panel had to come off to do any work on it, which is what you would spend most time doing if you are unfortunate enough to own one.
Faulty oil lines were assembled without seals, creating a self draining oil system that poured the oil directly into the path of the rear tire.
If the engine didn’t blow there was always the chance of a long uncontrollable slide on the horizon, and that horizon always seemed very close.
The seat padding was luxuriously ineffective and the seating position meant that comfort levels were non existent. Not helped by the suspension.
You hit the stop on the rear suspension so often it was torturous. Between forks diving and rear suspension bottoming out, the ride felt like it was more likely to induce motion sickness than actually get around the corner.
The wheels looked like they had come off a Road Roller too, and didn’t help with the unsprung weight or the steering.
Every corner was like a wrestling match with an Elephant seal coated in grease.
It did have its own stereo system mounted on the upper triple clamp, but it had no display at all.
And if you dared to turn it on while the bike was running your ears would be met by an ear splitting screech as the radio was driven past it’s limits by the RF interference from the electronics on the bike.
If you can get the hopelessly optimistic speedo up to an indicated 60 mph, that will be downhill, with a tailwind. And if you do get it there, you will probably have a maximum of about ten minutes left.
If the oil slick being dribbled onto the back tyre doesn’t get you and the leak is slow enough to hold in at least some of the oil, don’t worry, the overheating will make sure you still have a seized engine by the end of the ride.
Final Words
I guess it is fitting that the worst bike on today’s list is also one of the newest.
It proves the point that even today, the biggest companies often make the biggest mistakes.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this video and as always I look forward to hearing about the bikes you would have included in the comments.
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Ride Free everyone.