HIT FOR SIX

Fresh from producing 194,261 bikes in 2021, making that its best year ever since it was founded 99 years ago, BMW Motorrad is on a product-driven roll that’s taken Europe’s largest manufacturer of premium motorcycles back to pre-Covid sales levels – and then some.

And that was achieved without making the transverse inline six-cylinder engine powering its range-topping line-up of K 1600 land yachts and mega-baggers Euro 5 compliant in time for the new sound and emissions regulations’ January 2021 introduction. That being so, it was widely believed the end had finally come for this premium model line-up on offer for the past decade, on the basis that with their presumably limited sales it didn’t make economic sense to invest the needed R&D budget.

But that assumption underestimated the commercial importance of these bikes to BMW, quite apart from their prestige in purely marketing terms, and the extra profit margin made possible by prices all north of $40,000. With a total of 68,843 examples of BMW’s entire high-priced six-cylinder range built and sold around the world since it first reached showrooms exactly 11 years ago ago in March 2011, this is far from being a niche product line.

That’s especially so in the USA, inevitably its target destination, where the K 1600 B bagger and its K 1600 Grand America tourer spin-off introduced in 2017 have been well received, with 10,011 global sales of both models in the five years since. Then there’s the 27,695 examples sold around the world in the past decade of the K 1600 GT sport-touring base model which kickstarted BMW’s focus on six appeal when it was unveiled at Cologne’s 2010 Intermot Show, alongside the K 1600 GTL full-dress luxury tourer. This range-topping model has in fact proved to date to be the most popular of the four different variants on offer, with 31,137 versions of the GTL delivered since then as a potent rival to the flat-six Honda