Old but gold
It's an interesting thing. 1960s and 1970s Hondas are so appealingly svelt and simple and classic when compared with the futuristic, severely angular, Jetsons -space-agey, heavily-computerized nature of modern bikes. As my wife likes to say, "Our bike looks the way motorcycles ought to look". She's right. Yet, simple does not mean flimsy. Vintage Hondas are definitely over-built. Look how they have endured for the half-century! And how many suffer more from neglect than from breakdown or failure! Drag it out from under the weeds or from the shed and oil it, clean it, gas it and charge it--and wow, it runs! Our refrigerators should be this durable. Such wonderfully artistic amalgamations of function and form, are our fifty-year old Hondas! Do we even care that they don't have ABS? Nor does simple have to mean kludgy. Vintage Hondas are so elegantly beautiful, so simply pleasant to look at, so artistically rendered. But Gen Z would be aghast at having to manually provide a fast idle function, or doing without a digital screen, there being rubber tubes inside his tires, and not having even a fuel gauge or a clock. Our 70s bikes are not spaceships, but neither are they artillery pieces. They're unpretentious, almost minimalist, but still essential and adequate and uber-functional. And that's why I like them so.

Sterile?
In 2013 Consumer Reports for the first time in its history did a survey of motorcycle owner satisfaction, and their results rocked the industry, particularly the leading segment, the Big Four OEMs. I worked at the corporate office of a major Japanese OEM at the time and I can tell you, they were so unnerved they refused to believe it, refused to talk about it even. The issue was that riders reported that they would rather own a machine that gave more mechanical problems yet had a "soul", than a bike with fewer issues that connected with them less emotionally. That's right, Consumer Reports magazine's subscribers reported that they preferred more quirky Harleys, BMWs, Triumphs and Ducatis over historically more dependable (by a three-to-one margin) Hondas and Yamahas. If this doesn't mean there's something odd about the magazine's subscriber base (and there may be), then maybe it's speaking to what people inside the industry have been talking about for many years--the fact that Japanese bikes don't incite the passion that Euro bikes do. For what it's worth, this is a thing. I mean, how many people do you know with Honda tattoos, and how many Honda dealers organize toy runs and barbeques and regular mass gatherings of any kind? And how many riders of today's Big Four motorcycles even wear full riding gear, demonstrating not only a lack of safety consciousness but also of any kind of lifestyle commitment, any immersion into or real participation in, riding culture? Sure, the Big Four Japanese all use the same equipment vendors, and all source their clutch assemblies from the same Japanese company, get their fuel systems from either Mikuni or Keihin and their electrical parts from the same three companies. But does this mean they're generic? Does drawing from the same technological well work against them? Are Japanese bikes sterile? Many people think so. Evidently.

Demographics
You may not be aware of it, but every manufacturer in the industry is losing sales. The powersports business is in a huge decline. The riding public is shrinking. At the same time it is also aging--its members are getting older. Young people prefer Gameboys over motorcycles. The OEMs are very aware of this and gravely realize the implications. They constantly think of the need to get new blood into the sport, and they are putting a lot of effort into attracting Gen Zs and women. Look at the largest growing motorcycle segment--midsize cruisers with aggressively (and sadly, superficially) "hard ass" pseudo-gothic styling and lower than average seat heights, not to mention entry--level price tags. I hope the industry rebounds. Right now may be the period of the biggest challenge in its history.

Market disconnect
Many motorcycle makers' larger models are available with keyless entry systems similar to that on modern cars. Either the head of the key or the key's fob is a silent radio transmitter, actually a transponder, which passively communicates with the bike's computer and signals it to allow starting of the engine. This likely seems overkill for most riders, but manufacturers offer these systems as superior theft deterence--they offer security codes that number into the hundreds of thousands. They're so big in Europe that they are mandatory. Insurance is hard to get there for a vehicle that lacks antitheft technology. But are Americans really ready for this? It is interesting to note that Kawasaki's flagship touring bike, the ZG1400 Concours, was dropped after just a few years' lifecycle. This bike's systems did everything but make your lunch: Not only mandatory ABS but also automatic windscreen height, keyless entry, a glovebox that locked itself after a certain mph, tire pressure monitoring, stability intervention. Was all of this ahead of its time or did it just not connect with Kawasaki's customer base? Well, one demographic, law enforcement, who adopted the Concours as their profrssional workhorse, passionately hated keyless entry. Maybe theirs' was a special case. But nearly everyone I talked with hated it too, including nearly all of Kawasaki's dealers. Does today's rider really want what the OEMs think he does? Are the OEMs out of touch? Is one of the many ills of today's powersports marketplace a general consumer disconnect?