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A year ago, as we wrote our predictions for the motorcycle world in the year to come, I noted that 2020 was the year nobody saw coming. Well, I may have been too hasty. Based on the accuracy of our predictions, 2021 was also a year we Common Tread prognosticators didn't see coming very clearly.
Our track record in predicting 2021 resulted in more gravel-trap tumbles than podium celebrations. Here's a look at what we said would happen in 2021 in the motorcycle world and what really happened instead.
Our guest prognosticator a year ago was Mark Gardiner, who started off by warning readers that "You might be surprised to learn that even at my advanced age, I still occasionally prognosticate. Not nearly so often as I did in my youth, of course."
Mark then went on to record his regular prediction for 2021, which was that at the end of the American Flat Track season, Indian would announce it was no longer fielding a factory team. Why bother? Harley-Davidson shut down its factory team, so having driven the competition to oblivion, what was the point in spending money to continue? Indian could save the cash and just sell its all-dominant FTR750 to customer racers and still be all over the AFT podiums.
The argument made perfect sense. It was also 100 percent wrong. At the end of the season, Indian announced it was actually expanding the Wrecking Crew, as its factory team has been called on and off since before I was born. The three-rider lineup for 2022 will consist of 2021 champ Jared Mees, two-time champion Briar Bauman, and his wife, Shayna Texter-Bauman, who moves up to SuperTwins from the AFT Singles class. Sorry, Mark, that's a miss.
Mark's long-shot prediction was a change of ownership at Harley-Davidson, and again, the logic sounded good. In the wake of layoffs, restructuring and retrenchment aimed at making Harley-Davidson more profitable, Mark suggested that maybe the end goal was to sell the company. Well, it didn't happen and today it looks even less likely. So that's another guess gone wrong.
Always the optimist, Spurgeon Dunbar predicts every year that U.S. motorcycle sales will increase. (He made the same prediction for 2022.) In strict terms, he was right. Sales in 2021 were larger than in 2020, but then 2020 was the strangest year just about any of us have lived. Sales started off solid, came to a halt in the spring, then roared back, but unevenly, as dirt-bike sales exploded while other categories didn't. Spurgeon was right that sales went up in 2021, but overall U.S. unit sales have stayed in the same range for a decade. The real story will be whether sales can break out of that range for the long term.
For his long-shot prediction, Spurgeon expected to see Harley-Davidson launch the popular Bronx naked sport bike. Instead, it was shelved as part of new CEO Jochen Zeitz's refocusing of the company. So that's a miss. In our predictions for 2022, Andy picked up the mantle and predicted we'll see the Bronx, or something like it, perhaps labeled as a Sportster model, in the coming year. If we predict it long enough, maybe we'll eventually be right.
Speaking of Andy Greaser, he predicted a year ago that two highly anticipated adventure bikes, the Harley-Davidson Pan America and Husqvarna Norden 901, would be too expensive and arrive in a crowded field of great ADV bikes and would therefore have less impact than expected. I have to call that a miss. We had reviews of the Pan America by Spurgeon, Mark and Zack and Ari in a video, and all of them were impressed. Harley-Davidson claims, plausibly, that it's the best selling adventure-touring motorcycle in North America. We haven't ridden the Norden yet, but initial reviews from elsewhere suggest it's different enough from the KTM 890 Adventure it shares parts with to be an attractive option and the $13,999 price isn't out of line. Sorry, Andy.
Andy's long-shot prediction was that Ducati would get new ownership in 2021. (Was he too much influenced by Mark?) The theory was that the Volkswagen Group, which owns Ducati, Audi, Bentley, Bugatti, Lamborghini, Porsche, and more, might have to sell off some assets if the effects of the pandemic proved to be too damaging. But this is another easy call. It didn't happen. Again, sorry, Andy.
While Mark, Spurgeon and Andy were turning their gaze to broader industry movements, Zack Courts stuck to talking about the hardware in his 2021 predictions. His regular prediction was that we would finally see a Kawasaki Versys 400 in 2021. Though it seems like an obvious choice, given the praise we have for the Z400 and dreams of how the Versys-X would be even more versatile with a third more displacement, it simply didn't happen. Yet another prediction unfulfilled.
Zack's long-shot prediction was "the beginning of a new wave of turbo motorcycles." It's a topic Zack and Spurgeon (and a few listeners) have sparred over in the Highside/Lowside podcast, and I think this was more wishful thinking than serious prediction on Zack's part. In any case, there not only was no wave, there wasn't even a trickle. Not a drop. No new turbo motorcycles. I have to say Zack's 2021 predictions were the equivalent of a DNF.
By now, as you can see, we're desperate for a win, so let's look at Ari Henning's predictions. He suggested the surge in sensible, competent, mid-size motorcycles would continue, and it definitely did. He cheated a little, since he knew the Aprilia Tuareg and Tuono 660 were coming. But he also added, "Wouldn’t it be great if Yamaha offered a full-faired sport bike based on the MT-07 and sprinkled on some of the leftover suspension and brake parts they have from the discontinued YZF-R6?" That's not far off from what Yamaha did with the YZF-R7. On top of that, we also got a new Triumph Trident and Kawasaki announced the Z650RS is coming in 2022 for those who want their middleweight in a retro flavor. The middleweight class is strong and getting even more attractive.
Ari's long-shot prediction didn't fare so well. He predicted "an engines-on-fire, wings-falling-off kind of nosedive" in sales for Harley-Davidson. 2020 was not a year to be used for comparison purposes, but looking at the first three quarters of 2021 compared to the first three quarters of 2019, Harley-Davidson shipped 8.1 percent fewer motorcycles. That continues the long downward trend in Harley-Davidson sales, but in part, that was by design. New CEO Jochen Zeitz has been closing down marginally profitable operations abroad and trimming the product line at home. In fact, despite selling fewer motorcycles than two years ago, Harley-Davidson made more money than two years ago by selling more expensive motorcycles at a slightly higher margin. So do higher profits and an 8.1 percent drop in unit sales constitute a "wings-falling-off kind of nosedive" for Harley? I'll let readers decide, but I'd say "not really." Harley-Davidson still has structural issues to address, without doubt, but catastrophe hasn't hit the company yet.
And finally I have to turn to my own predictions. First, I predicted a U.S. racer would win a world championship in 2021. I was hoping, quite optimistically, that one of the three road racers would accomplish that feat against the odds: Joe Roberts or Cameron Beaubier in Moto2 or Garrett Gerloff in World Superbike. None of them even won a race, so I had to rely on my "cheater" fall-back position. Cooper Webb won the Monster Energy Supercross championship, giving me my U.S. world champion. And then in the middle of this year it was announced that Monster Energy Supercross will no longer be a world championship. There goes my escape clause.
My long-shot prediction, made back at the end of the terrible year of 2020, was a gauzy look ahead to a post-COVID-19 end of 2021, with Spurgeon celebrating his promotion to Comoto Vice President of Big Ideas and Brandon Wise fulfilling his boyhood dream of becoming a Hollywood stunt rider, among other developments. It didn't quite work out that way. Certainly, the pandemic is not "a blurry and unsettling memory," as I predicted (hoped?). Plus, I didn't predict that Joe Zito would decide to leave the team to return to his own shop full-time or that we'd make the great addition of Jen Dunstan to the video and writing talent this year. So my vision of year-end 2021 was way off, but I was right that I would still be very proud of the team we've assembled and I was also right that the Common Tread audience would still be the best moto-centric audience on the web.
We didn't get many predictions right in 2021, but the most important one is true.
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