What makes a better cruiser?

Assessing cruisers, in particular, is a little different because nobody judges them based on the spec sheet. Thinking about what makes a good cruiser led me to an even broader topic: What the heck even constitutes an advancement on a motorcycle these days? As motorcycles get more complex, so does the answer to that question.

Let's first unpack what I think makes a good cruiser and see if there's anything there that can be applied to motorcycles in general.

What the cruiser buyer wants

Ignoring the lineage of a Harley-Davidson in 2025 is a mistake to the point of maybe misunderstanding any product the company sells. With the 2025 cruisers I rode, that lineage can be traced back almost to the first twins before World War I.

Deciphering the whims of the cruiser buyer isn't hard, even if you don't agree with them. Looks matter. A lot. Performance does, too, but not at the expense of comfort. The bike needs to have a certain minimum wheelbase and weight to give the right feeling and presence. Gobs of torque and satisfying throttle response trump long trips up to a distant redline. The steering rake angle sure better be relaxed and the trail generous for predictable, stable handling. The seat should be low, but not so extreme that it makes the bike look goofy.

You could call the desires of the intended audience "simple," but "elemental" might be a more accurate description. In general, cruisers are large, heavy motorcycles that are more athletic than you'd think. Adaptable and comfortable enough to handle most duties between a weekday trip to work and a weekend trip to the nearest coast, the archetypal cruiser is uncomplicated. If I had to boil it all down, the cruiser is a motorcycle stripped of all the things except that which is needed to go get ice cream from that good shop three counties over. Nail that and you're in the ballpark, provided the bike looks good and the ride is comfortable.

I've said before that if you asked me when I was eight years old to draw a motorcycle, I would have drawn a Harley-Davidson FX-series motorcycle, because that was what I understood a motorcycle to be. That has not changed for me. I think many cruiser riders are about that straightforward about the whole thing.

Much like the learner bike, the cruiser recipe doesn’t need to be altered much from year to year. Improvement almost always comes by way of iteration, not obliteration, because the whole genre is pinned to the looks of yesteryear.

Long before there were dedicated touring rigs, the "big bikes" were just motorcycles. The Electra Glide, for instance, started life as a naked motorcycle that most people today would just think of as a cruiser. They are Harley's version of a standard before that was even a term. The motorcycles in the Motor Company's Cruiser lineup today — Street Bob, Fat Boy, Breakout, Low Rider S and ST, and Heritage — are sweet-smelling roses that have been known by other names at other times. Whether a Dyna or an FL or a Disc Glide, Harley-Davidson has always offered a Big Twin with modest or no bags, fairings, or glass.

This is the generalist motorcycle for the "feet out front" crowd. In car terms, they're personal luxury coupes. Were they horses, they'd be a very light breed of draft horse.

WYSIWYG. These bikes are for relaxed rides, as the name and appearance suggest.

Improvements in motorcycles are getting harder to come by

Innovation in many of the sharply defined categories is sometimes so incremental it can look uninspired. This is seen across many consumer products beyond motorcycles nowadays: chainsaws, firearms, clothing, phones, cars, computers (phones?), cameras (phones?) cosmetics, and food to name a few, and it spells change for how a motorcycle is evaluated.

To start with, I believe there are certain categories of motorcycle where great strides are not only impossible, but not even desirable. At risk of sounding like an old dinosaur shaking his fist at the sky, I feel pretty confident when I note that learner bikes don't become better with added displacement. The mission for touring motorcycles hasn't changed all that much over the years, either.

At the sharp end, when it comes to competition-oriented motorcycles where increased power, decreased weight, and faster lap times due to electronic helpers are the name of the game, there is still a need for a road test editor who can detect and evaluate ever more nuanced improvements. But the buyers who need that edge are a small segment of the population.

While I can tell you how a little less overlap on the cam or faster ABS processing speed due to hardware advances benefit you, in practice these improvements are so slight you'll hardly ever notice them. It's why many reviews you read now have these pretentious-sounding nits to pick, my own included. Except for a very short list of turds in the punch bowl, even the crummiest econobike on the market is damn capable compared to what was offered even just a short time ago. A writer like me is increasingly irrelevant in telling you if the products are any good. Plot spoiler: Almost uniformly, they are.

Look, even the electronics advancements are slowing. And you'll see right here in the comments of Common Tread that some folks, self included, don't mind some gee-whiz stuff on a motorcycle, but are a little suspicious of it because it sometimes feels like manufacturers are walling us out of repairing or owning fully our machines, and that seems like a price too high to pay. Heck, we're already starting to question if “convenience" and "safety” aids should be dealt with separately.

So what does improvement look like? If you ask me, maybe the next threshold for cruisers and other motorcycles in this vein is increased serviceability, either for the owner or the service technician. I would go absolutely nuts over a motorcycle that had an incredibly long warranty, or one with a service package and strategy cooked right into the price or maybe an open-book diagnostic protocol. (Fat chance, but hey, a guy can dream.)

Or perhaps it's increased rider safety in a form we're not yet familiar with, though one man's sensible risk is another man's stupid decision, as the comments on that piece and this article demonstrate. Or perhaps in the flurry of environmental law that gets written each day, longevity becomes the name of the game. (That would go hand-in-hand with the serviceability, wouldn't it?) Maybe "earth-friendly" will be more holistic and include advances in total usable lifespan, not just the reduction of bad things that come out of the tailpipe.

To continue using the word "perhaps" a lot, perhaps we're at a point where riders' desires range so widely and we have so many choices that "feature" and "bug" are no longer clearly delineated at all. Perhaps the concept of "better" is increasingly a matter closer to opinion than fact.

What makes a cruiser better? In my eyes, the time is drawing near when we ask different questions: What is the ethos behind a manufacturer's "improvement" of a given cruiser and does that ethos align with your personal vision of bettering the breed?

Or maybe, more succinctly, does it meaningfully improve the ride you may take to get that ice cream three counties over?