R&D – Motorcycle New Features: All New, All Beautiful? – Motorcycle news: key points and MNC opinion

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Motorcycle News Folder: all new, all beautiful ?

R & amp; D - Special feature Motorcycle news: all new, all beautiful? - Motorcycle news: key points and MNC opinion

Despite the crisis, motorcycle manufacturers are renewing their range and creating new models at a dizzying pace. But don’t too many new things risk killing the new? MNC is investigating in its column Des words (o) s et debates.

Motorcycle news: key points and the MNC opinion

Novelties, novelties: not a week goes by without the appearance of a new motorcycle or an evolution – often superficial, sometimes profound – of an existing two-wheeler. To believe that the "R&D" budget of the manufacturers does not know the !

However, the reality is quite different: the economic recession is affecting sales of motorcycles and scooters – and therefore the turnover of manufacturers – even if growing demand from emerging countries partly compensates for the collapse of "historical" markets ().

Under these conditions, continuing to invest so many resources to create or renew a motorcycle may seem surprising … Because between the development costs and the tests necessary for the validation of each component, designing a new model is expensive, very expensive: a simple aesthetic remodeling – often referred to as "face-lift" – accompanied by updates request between "1 and 5 million", estimate the manufacturers interviewed by MNC (read our interviews with manufacturers on page 3).

According to Jean-Luc Mars, CEO of Triumph France, developing an engine from a blank sheet of paper requires an oscillating budget "between 10 and 12 million euros", while the total cost of a completely new model climbs to"tens of millions of euros", reveals Éric de Seynes, general manager of operations of Yamaha Motor Europe and president of Yamaha Motor France..

Expensive to design, the motorcycle novelty also takes a long time to develop since "between the moment a new model is designed and its marketing, it takes between 2.5 and 3 years", figure for MNC Fabrice Recoque, director of the motorcycle division of Honda France. This delay can even go"up to 5 years", adds Jean-Luc Mars.

Potentially, this implies that today’s novelties were imagined in 2009 (!), Their designers having to foresee future trends in advance. But the fashions being by definition ephemeral, anticipating them in this way is a perilous exercise … which explains the already old-fashioned lines of some motorcycles barely out of the box. !

This aspect turns squarely into the puzzle when the pace of renewal is as sustained as it is now: Honda has unveiled no less than, including the new NC700 triptych, the Crosstourer and significant evolutions of the Goldwing and the CBR1000RR !

In doing so, the winged coat of arms took the risk of exhausting the inspiration of its designers and complicating the task of its network (read our interviews with dealers on page 4), sometimes overwhelmed by this continual flow of new products, as admitted. the leader of the French subsidiary Honda interviewed by MNC.

The content and the form

Renewing or maintaining a range therefore requires significant resources, sometimes even greater than the short-term benefits generated by a new model. This is particularly the case of sports motorcycles, a category among the most expensive due to their technological content and their necessarily higher performance level..

Thus, revamping the large reinforcements of technologies derived from MotoGP would not be an approach "necessarily profitable from an accounting standpoint", assures Eric de Seynes.

We can assume that the same goes for the sulphurous, completely new motorcycle whose supercharged 4-legged would spit more than 320 hp !

Same story for the extremely sophisticated Superbike designed from a blank sheet of paper. According to an inside BMW source interviewed by MNC, such an elaborate motorcycle would ask "between five to seven years"before balancing the" cost-benefit "balance !

This temporary imbalance is due as much to the importance of investments as to the collapse of sales: for example, registrations in France of the emblematic rose from 2,708 in 2000 to … 373 last year ( read our).

Yet in 2015, five manufacturers ignored this sad observation and reinvested massively in the sports category with motorcycles of 200 hp and more: Aprilia and its, BMW and its, Ducati and its, Kawasaki and its and Yamaha with its. Honda also holds the rope with its prototype "compe – (rich) – customers" .

How to explain that such sums are swallowed up to design motorcycles with incredible performance, when the very concept of speed is losing … speed? Quite simply for the image generated by this phantasmagoric category: even if very few will buy them, many will dream of them and praise the technical mastery of their designers..

It is therefore an investment, a kind of technological showcase enhancing its know-how and reputation. In another register, but for the same reasons, Fabrice Recoque thus considers that the is a "rolling pub"responsible for showing Honda’s ability to break new ground, despite a tense economic context.

This marketing aspect holds a preponderant place in the current strategy of (over) renewal of motorcycles: each manufacturer interviewed by MNC admits that new products play an essential role in their communication plan. The idea is to bet on the natural attraction of (conso) bikers to new products to create traffic in concessions.

The catch is that due to the drastic cuts imposed by the on their advertising budgets, most are no longer able to promote their new models over a long period of time through ads in the media..

Blame it on a fairly small budget, of the order of "2 to 3%"of the turnover devoted to the" marketing-communication "item, reveals Eric de Seynes. To be compared with the advertising budgets included"between 8 and 10% of turnover"in the automotive sector !

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