COVID-19 sadly killed off Indian’s plans for the 2020 centenary of its iconic Scout model’s birth to be celebrated with a series of global parties, with the result that it passed almost unnoticed. Still, the ongoing showroom success of what is the Minnesota firm’s bestselling current model since making its born-again debut in 2015 with its liquid-cooled 1133cc 60º V-twin eight-valve engine, thus hastening the demise of Harley’s air-cooled OHV Sportster, will have helped make up for that as far as the marque’s current owner Polaris is concerned.
A conservative but astutely managed Midwestern company, Polaris’ management today could hardly be more different than the bunch of spivs who ended up running the Indian Motocycle (sic) Company into the ground during the Teens and Twenties of the last century. For after gradually reducing his slice of Indian equity as new investors were brought in to underwrite the company’s growth, co-founder and chief engineer Oscar Hedstrom had deserted Indian in 1913 — the year in which it made over 30,000 motorcycles, the most in its entire history prior to Polaris acquiring the marque in 2011. Hedstrom was horrified at the nowadays illegal, but then permissible actions of Indian board members to ramp up the company's stock values so as to make a financial killing, with his equally outraged co-founder George Hendee following him in 1916.
During the years the USA was involved in WW1 Indian devoted most of its production to the military, but that meant commercial problems at the conclusion of hostilities.
By 1919 a new group of investors took over the company, with CEO Frank Weschler given full support in launching a completely new kind of motorcycle for 1920, the Scout.
This physically smaller, lower capacity model was intended
