Looks interesting: And discuss...... Lotus to make 200bhp motorcycle - | Motorbike reviews | Latest Bike Videos | MCN
The styling of the fairing, tank, and seat is the least interesting bit of a new bike. What about the engine? Transmission? Frame? Suspension? Brakes? How will it handle? Performance? If this is going to be the first attempt at designing and building a motorbike by a set of guys who have never done it before, what are the chances it will be any good? Very small indeed, I would say.
So... Designed by Daniel Simon, and built by Kodewa. Which part of it, exactly, will be Lotus ? Apart from the name painted on it, obviously... It looks to me like a giant publicity exercise - "look what we can do with high-tech materials and expensive design houses"... Strange how they quote "safety" as a one of the most important factors in the design, and then go on to describe its "brutal force" and call it a "high-tech monster" - surely some contradiction there? And it brings to mind the standard Lotus neumonic - Lots Of Trouble, Usually Serious. I'm not saying that it won't work, but Lotus haven't always got it right in the past ( DeLorean, anyone?), and history shows that very few people get it right first time when it comes to superbikes...
If it ever gets built, all of them will end up in "Jay Leno" style garages, it is bound to be more expensive than their whole car range, so really this will just be an exercise in futility.
I am all in favour of new endeavours. However, I predict that: it will be extremely ugly. it will be hugely expensive it won't work any better than a zillion things already out there it will be massively unreliable It is unlikely that people who have worked on bikes for decades and have refined them for track performance will suddenly be knocked into a cocked hat by a small car manufacturer. Car people nearly always get bikes wrong.
Honda was a bike manufacturer who made cars. Suzuki cars (the Vitara, wasn't it?) were notorious for flipping over into ditches. BMW gave us the flying brick. The RR1000RRSSTTTRRRRRR or whatever it's called is pretty recent. It took them that long to get it right. And most of their things still look like railway bridges.
I'll give you the Honda one - although I'm sure the Gold Wing and Pan-Euro were designed by the car division. The Suzuki SJ series were famous for being driven by blonde fashion-conscious air-heads who thought that they handled like normal cars not 4x4's, and hence crashed them fairly regularly. And BMW were also a bike manufacturer that got into making cars. They've been doing it for the best part of a century, so they must be doing something right - a million BMF members can't all be wrong... And Geoff Duke raced one. The Rennesport bikes were actually pretty competitive in their day. I was, of course, not being completely serious, by the way...
I can see the good people of Hollywood clambering to order theirs. Their "people" will be speaking to the Lotus "people" and deals will be clinched. They'll be able to say there have any been 30 built and how proud they are to own it. What they won't say is that it's a piece of shit and goes slower than a Chinese knock-off. They also won't tell you they couldn't tell the arse end of a motorcycle from the arse end of a Duck Billed Platypus.
indeed. They tend to forget the two golden rules of bike design. 1) a Chassis can be to stiff. (just ask ducati how their ultra stiff MotoGP bike performed) 2) the centre of gravity can be too low as well as too high. (even Honda got this wrong when they got some car guys to design the early 80's 'upside down' NSR500 GP bike)
