My Buell XB12X Ulysses Adventure Sport Bike Some of you that follow my blog may remember that I bought a new Buell motorcycle in March as one of my retirement presents. So I was shocked to hear on Oct 15th that production of Buell motorcycles was being discontinued. Buell's parent company Harley Davidson was experiancing third quarter losses and made the decision to discontinue Buells and to sell off MV Augusta(an Italian motorcycle company owned by HD). More casualties of the slow economic climate.
Buell motorcycle company was formed by Erik Buell in 1983. Erik is an ex-Harley Davidson engineer who has a passion for motorcycle road racing. He developed mainly racing bikes untill the rules were changed that made his racing motorcycles obsolete. He launched into production sport bikes. He developed and patened many innovations. Some include fuel in frame, mass centralization, ZTL(zero torsional load) disc brake(caliper inside the rotor), underslung exhaust and muffler and multifunctional components like the swing arm oil tank. The result of much of this development resulted in light, stiff framed motorcycles that had very low center of gravity and low unsprung weight. This resulted in great handling and performance. Way beyond my capabilities!
Buell was involved in racing and this year a Buell 1125R motorcycle won the year long Daytona Sportbike Series with Danny Eslick riding. Buell became a wholly owned subsidiary of Harley Davidson in 1992. There were 135,000 Buell motorcycles built. Certainly the only American made sport bike.
I selected my Buell motorcycle for the engineering and innovations that I could see that were built into it. I really could not find any foreign or domestic motorcycles that offered the features and the design that I liked. So it saddens me to see the company be discontinued. My investment in this bike is in jeopardy and parts may be hard to obtain in the future. Also 180 people at the company are out looking for new jobs. I can only hope that somehow it can be resurrected.
Here is the announcment from Erik Buell:
http://www.buell.com/en_us/company/
Unfortunate that the company went away, but HD will/should be required to supply parts for a certain length of time. Cars are covered for ten years. And a secondary supplier will most probably pick up the manufacture of many items.
ReplyDeleteI am sure that parts will be available for a while. Just seems strange to have a new motorcycle and now the company has been shut down. I guess similar to Saturn automobiles.
ReplyDeleteSome recent news articles have noted that a group of businessmen from Wisconsin have been talking about purchasing Buell. May be just wishfull thinking.