the Game changer bikes

[Horse]

Well yeah...to me a game changer creates a part of the market which didn't exist before.

I think the Tesla Model S is the easiest to get your head around. Before the Model S you could buy electric cars and you could buy fast cars and luxury cars. You couldn't buy a fast, luxury electric car that didn't cost a few hundred K.

Tesla put it in on the market and then forced everyone else to up their game and start developing cars they previosuly had no immediate intention to develop...something most of them are still struggling with!

I can't think of many bikes which did that.

And the customers probably wouldn't buy? Is that the root of it?

Funny Front Ends? Nah, want forks, etc.

The most radical that bikes have been was shell-suit colour schemes and the current 'broken transformer toy' styling.

So far as radical goes, who led the superscooter evolution? Honda had a 250 on the 2000s, then there was the Burgman & TMax. Without them, there might not be the recent Hondas, including the 'adventure'* version.

* Get an unreliable bike, every trip has potential for adventure.

[Mr. Dazzle]

Yeah absolutely part of it too.

BMW wouldn't make a electric luxury saloon cause they (or rather their customers) are too conservative. Not for 10 years anyway. Tesla come along and upset the apple cart, forcing everyone else to react. They changed the game.

[mangocrazy]

I think that what this thread has shown is that were actually vanishingkly few real game-changing bikes. There were no end of evolutionary improvements, a few large ones, but most quite small. Each of us thinks of standout bikes in our motorcycling lives and those bikes were game-changing for us, but not for motorcycling in general. Most of what we have perceived as game changers were actually incremental engineering improvements, often allied to a change in fashion (which is by its nature cyclical and feeds on past fashions).

The only real game changer that I've seen in 8 pages of thread was, as Demographic said, the Honda Super Cub (C50/C70/C90). That brought personal mobiolity to huge chunks of the world that had never previously experienced it and the basic design was so right that it hardly changed throughout its extended lifespan.

[Horse]

The only real game changer that I've seen in 8 pages of thread was, as Demographic said, the Honda Super Cub (C50/C70/C90).

Ahem, page 1.

How about the Honda C90 et al?

[The Spin Doctor]

The GS is a good call, of course it could just be called a sports tourer but the reality is it was the first adventure bike made for the road with proper handling and performance so yeah a game changer

If you're talking about the R80G/S, it was hardly a performance bike. 50-odd hp. And I'd say it was really a road bike with a modicum of off-road ability.

[The Spin Doctor]

monoshock suspension (everything prior to that had been twin shocks),

The "unitrack" suspension was created in the 30s by Vincent.
(yes it used 2 shock units, but the basic idea was the same.)

The LC isn't even the first Yamaha with monoshock, the DT175MX is earlier than the LC, and there are at least 3 years worth of competition off road bikes with Monocross before the LC.

And I think the first bike with rising rate monoshock suspension was...

TA-DA!

...Kawaksaki's AR50 / 80. I had an 80 as a London nip-about and it was a lovely little machine. Spent half the time on the back wheel and the rest on the front. Amazing how much fun you can have with 10hp.

[Yorick]

The "unitrack" suspension was created in the 30s by Vincent.
(yes it used 2 shock units, but the basic idea was the same.)

The LC isn't even the first Yamaha with monoshock, the DT175MX is earlier than the LC, and there are at least 3 years worth of competition off road bikes with Monocross before the LC.

And I think the first bike with rising rate monoshock suspension was...

TA-DA!

...Kawaksaki's AR50 / 80. I had an 80 as a London nip-about and it was a lovely little machine. Spent half the time on the back wheel and the rest on the front. Amazing how much fun you can have with 10hp.

Bloody hooligans.