BMW TO ENTER CRUISER MARKET IN 2020
BMW is seeking to go head to head with Harley-Davidson and Indian on the American giants’ home turf by developing a range of cruiser models to help achieve the coveted status of world’s No. 1 in the premium motorcycle sector.
It’s not the first time that the German manufacturer has tried to grab a slice of Harley’s business, after manufacturing 40,218 examples of the R1200C Cruiser model between 1997 and 2004, including a few thousand examples of the smaller-engined version, the R850C, produced from 1997 to 2000.
But both C-models were killed off by Herbert Diess when he took over as president/CEO of BMW Motorrad in 2003, citing as a prime reason for discontinuing them the apparent unsuitability of the Boxer twin engine to compete with Harley in a marketplace where a V-twin engine was practically ubiquitous. Instead, Diess (now heading up the VAG Group, and thus ultimate boss of Ducati) chose to develop an in-line four-cylinder Superbike with chain final drive to compete with the Japanese in the Hypersport sector, rather than create an equally out of character (for BMW) narrow-angle pushrod V-twin to take on Harley. Would he make the same decision now?
Over a decade later and 2016 Diess’s successor-but-one, Stephan Schaller, decided to inaugurate another assault by BMW on the cruiser market – and once again chose to attempt it with a Boxer engine. But this time around he took the wise decision not to do so by adapting the company’s existing 1200cc dohc liquid-cooled twin-cylinder motor, as with the R1200C, but instead to develop an
