Yep. They were desperate for his money and he wanted an asset before he paid. All they could offer at short notice was an unregistered bike.
What use is a bike you can’t register or use? It’s worth nothing other than scrap value. I would guess you might struggle to ever get it registered if it’s not compliant with Euro 5.
Is that legal? Wouldn't that be selling something that is unfit for purpose? Or do the purchasers have to sign for a collection of spares/ motorcycle art statue? Staggering... Someone remind me how much these cost?
I wonder how easy it will be to insure a bike of that value that does not comply with current regulations? It’s only a matter of time before the bank pulls the plug surely?
Hmm not sure about the insurance aspect. Maybe the government will bail Norton out again (IIRC it would be the third time) with few more taxpayer millions. Far better than feeding or housing the "Lame and Alledgedly Lazy"... Garner has a standard of living to maintain don't you know.
He is not riding the bike, so doesn't need insurance for the road. Dont know if it is insured for theft, as a personal asset, via home or business insurance, or is just waiting to get the bike back with its road docs. I wouldn't be in a rush to ride it in Jan, if it were me.
That one that fell over coming out of a carpark was ridden with some sort of trade plate. Wonder if that wasnt fully registered?
If it’s not homologated I wonder if you could ride it anywhere other than the UK. The whole Norton set up is amateurish in the extreme.
Sounds like Norton just copied CCM's business model down to the letter. A lot of this just seems to be a rerun of the Spitfire debacle.
If the guys got the physical bike and the worst happened with Norton going under, could he go for a ‘ single type approval’ to get it registered?
SVA is exactly that, a single vehicle approval. I believe, as they are being produced in limited numbers (at least for the SS) this is probably a cheaper and quicker way of getting approval for them
Just browsing the web to find anything relating to the V4 (as i often do) and saw a recent video by a foreign channel "Motoride TV" on what must have been one of those Factory Tours. What struck me was what little seemed to be going on? Perhaps most of the staff where on there Christmas break-if that's when the video was shot?
I’ve never seen a shot of the factory where there is any evidence of anything other than carefully staged assembly work. Never seen any signs of machining or anything dirty.
When we did the factory tour, the fab shop was busy, lots of welding and polishing. The assembly shop however had bugger all going on, just lots of bikes lined up all missing bits.
Fire, the welding and fab is all in a building out the back. Quite a good setup to be fair. They employed a whole bunch of people from a company that was winding up (spondon I think) a number of years back. As for machining, we were told they did set up a CNC workshop, but the cost of the tooling and machinery wasnt cost effective as they couldn't put enough work through it at the time. I believe it was all sold off, but might be remembering that incorrectly. The twatter link above is a classic
