AGV Backmarker: Motus stakes a claim in the U.S. sport touring market

“I know, let’s start our own motorcycle company!”

The American entrepreneurial landscape is littered with defunct motorcycle brands. Look at Indian, which has been resurrected, only to die again, so many times that we should coin the phrase “Indian living,” to parallel the meaning of “Indian giving,” i.e., a state of ownership that’s only temporary.

Erik Buell had the best run we’ve seen so far from any upstart manufacturer in the post-World War II period. In the end, though, Buell needed the shelter of Harley-Davidson, and when Harley fell on hard times, Erik’s creation was left out in the cold.

Victory may well outdo Buell in terms of units sold over time, but it comes with solid backing from Polaris Industries. As for the others, it remains to be seen whether Roehr will enter the market with a roar, or leave with a faint meow. Using homebuilt race bikes as a point of entry is no better, either; witness the vaunted MotoCzysz MotoGP world-beater, which so far, anyway, is the answer to a million-dollar trivia question.

But hope springs infernal—oops, I mean eternal—and that optimism has, in large measure, been America’s strength for 200 years.

About two years ago, a couple of 30-something guys in Birmingham, Alabama, envisioned a new American motorcycle rising from the South. Lee Conn, an expatriate Calgarian (like yours truly) and Brian Case, a designer who worked on the aptly named Confederate Wraith, teamed up to launch Motus Motorcycles http://www.motusmotorcycles.com/statichome.html.

Right now, their shop is a design space in a Birmingham tech incubator a few miles from Barber Motorsports Park. There’s a clay model of the initial Motus MST-01 in there that Brian Case is using to evaluate components.

Most of the guys who’ve tried to launch new motorcycle brands in the U.S. seem to have staked out one end or another of the road bike spectrum. They’ve either tried to pry up one of fingers that Harley-Davidson uses to keep its stranglehold on the cruiser market, or they’ve tried to build a full-on sport bike.

There are huge hurdles to cross with either of those approaches. On the cruiser side, while it’s easy to imagine a more up-to-date machine than the ones Harley-Davidson makes, the people who buy those bikes are traditionalists. What they’re buying is Harley’s carefully crafted brand and image, so making what you think is a better bike is actually a recipe for failure. If it’s “better,” it must be different. If it’s different, they don’t want it. They want the same. They want to fit in. They want a uniform that says, “I’m exactly like everyone else, except in the minutiae of specific accessories.” Check out Main Street at Daytona Bike Week in a few weeks, and tell me if you see much diversity.

It’s not any easier to stake a claim in the pure sport market either. There, buyers will reject a bike that makes 5 horsepower less, or laps .2 seconds slower than the rocket-of-the-moment in the hands of an expert tester. Very, very few new players have recently entered this arena and really succeeded. BMW clearly did with the S1000R, and I’ve previously lauded the KTM RC8 R. But while those companies were new to superbikes, they were hardly upstarts.

Probably wisely, Motus has chosen to split the difference, and plans to offer a sport-tourer as its first bike. According to Conn and Case, the decision was made after a blue-sky session in which they described their ideal motorcycle and all the things they wanted to be able to do on it. Then they polled hundreds of bikers and concluded that a torquey, distinctive, good-handling bike that was comfortable over long distances would sell. Sure it would. I have to say that although I love riding pure sports bikes, when I think of what I’d buy with my own money if I had any, I almost always end up imagining something that’s fast but comfortable, with matching luggage.

Motus has outsourced two key roles, hiring Pratt & Miller http://prattmiller.com/ to create a chassis and Katech http://www.katechengines.com/katech_inc/ to create a motor. Both those companies are based in Michigan and have a lot of history doing specialty fab and race-car prep for General Motors.

Pratt & Miller responded with a welded-steel trellis frame that would be familiar to any Ducati fan. That’s a proven approach, and one that lends itself to small-volume fabrication. Katech’s motor, though, is quite unlike anything I’ve seen in a motorcycle. It’s a mix of the old and the new: a longitudinally mounted 1650cc, 90-degree V-four with a two-valve head and pushrod valve actuation. It could almost be the back half of a Chevy V-8, but it features direct injection; the fuel is atomized in the combustion chamber at something like 2,000 psi.

As the French aptly put it, “The only things that are new are those things that have been forgotten.” This type of fuel injection was developed for aircraft engines back in WWII, and appeared in hard-to-build mechanical form in the ’50s-era Mercedes gull-wing sports car. It’s been showing up again in cars for the last few years, where it’s fairly proven technology at this point.

Direct injection permits engine designers to crank up compression ratios (although at 11.5:1, the Motus’ compression ratio is no higher than some port-injected sport bikes). It also makes for higher fuel efficiency and lower emissions. If Motus is right, its motor will be something of a game changer; it’s a totally different solution than the smaller, higher-revving, overhead-cam four-valve designs that prevail amongst the company’s established foreign rivals.

While sticking with pushrods might seem like a cop-out, there’s nothing wrong with the old cam-in-the-valley’s inherently low C.G. Pushrods aren’t inherently problematic in low-rpm motors, and the mill Katech has created for Motus will spin at under eight grand. If it really does yield the claimed 140 horsepower, we might see other designers going back to the future too.

In the last ten or fifteen years, many attempts to adapt racecar thinking to motorcycles have flopped. Harley-Davidson’s outsourced VR-1000, the Aprilia Cube MotoGP bike, Kenny Roberts’ ill-fated Proton GP bike, and the Ilmor MotoGP prototype that hurt Jeremy McWilliams; all those projects were undertaken by successful racecar engineers. Car guys—even car guys who love bikes—often fail to grasp the much more dynamic relationship between rider and motorcycle. When you stop your car, step out of it, and walk away, your car sits there unmoved by your absence. When you stop your motorcycle, if you just get off it and walk away, the motorcycle falls over, dead.

Even racecar motors make power in a radically different way than motorcycle engines. Cars are all about peak power, whereas motorcycles are (even as traction control becomes de rigeur) all about the shape of the power curve. The challenge for Motus, then, will be ensuring that all those clever components can be assembled into a whole that at least equals (and hopefully exceeds) the sum of its parts. Since they’re located minutes from Barber, an hour from Talladega, and two or three hours from Road Atlanta, they’ll be able to sort the bike on tracks ranging from flowing and technical, to real horsepower monsters. For a perfect real-world test of sport-tourer, they can even ride from their HQ up I-59, run back and forth through Deals Gap, and get home before Dreamland http://www.dreamlandbbq.com/default.aspx?id=5 closes. If they need any help, I’m available! (While my input as a development rider might be nearly useless, I’m an excellent BBQ critic.)

Their goals for the motor are 140 horsepower, with 120 foot-pounds of torque at a rumbling 4,500 rpm. By modern standards, it’s only slightly oversquare, with a bore of 86.5mm and stroke of 70mm. The chassis dimensions call for a wheelbase of 57.5 inches, with 26 degrees of rake and 108mm of trail.

Compared to the new Honda VFR1200F, I note that while the steering geometry is a tad lazier, the wheelbase is a couple of inches shorter, so on balance it should feel somewhat similar to Honda’s flagship. You could do a lot worse, since I presume that Honda test riders wore the asses out of plenty of leathers before the engineers settled on the VFR’s dimensions.

You could do worse, but could you do better? Lee and Case told me over the phone that they were targeting a weight in the low-500 pound range (about 10 percent lighter than the Honda), which with a lower seat height (another priority) would result in a pretty nimble and user-friendly bike, considering it’ll be one with hard luggage and an adjustable windscreen.

I wish that they’d considered alternatives to a conventional fork, and almost expected them to, since Case’s old employers at Confederate have tried a few oddball front ends. My friend James Parker could’ve designed a bike with one of his RADD front suspension systems that mount directly to the engine cases, and the shaft-drive could easily pivot right off the transmission, much as a car transaxle does. If they’d gone that route, they wouldn’t have needed a frame at all.

Case told me that they chose a fork because “they work well and feel familiar.” Those things are true, but a good modern fork is a great answer to the wrong question. There are far better solutions (like Parker’s latest RADD prototype) that “feel” like the familiar fork but are lighter, stronger, far more adjustable, and more responsive. Maybe next time.

Of course, before there’s a second-generation Motus, there has to be a first one. At least at the beginning, Motus won’t be manufacturer, per se. It’s really a designer and assembler. As Case points out, it’s especially true right now that suppliers of components, worldwide, have excess capacity, so major subassemblies will be built to Motus’ specs and shipped to Alabama for final assembly. The plan calls for a Motus to sell through a network of existing independent dealers.

Conn and Case hope to have prototypes in testing by the end of the summer, and could be taking orders as early as the end of the year. That would make their investors—it’s a private company backed by several Alabama “angel” investors—happy. It would make me happy, too. I’d like nothing more than to give Backmarker readers a “first ride” report late this year.