The Honda CBX was too much motorcycle for its own good

honda's classic period for motorcycle production culminated in one of the craziest motorcycles to ever be released to the public the honda cbx1000 now you've probably seen or rather heard of this bike [Applause] [Music] but this wasn't always an iconic motorcycle more of a business and even engineering failure some would say from honda motor company the cbx was meant to be a flagship bike but it sold a mere 25 000 units in its four year run from 79 through 82 and if you know anything about honda from this era and this time and even up until today it's that they sell motorcycles more motorcycles than anybody else and 25 000 units in four years might be okay for you know ducati but it's not okay for honda though this bike is known by the general motorcycle community primarily for its sound [Applause] the honda cbx was so much more than a motorcycle belting out an unholy formula one sound this bike was actually the first production motorcycle in its standard form available to the general public that exceeded 100 brake horsepower and the cbx was in many ways the logical sort of final step for honda during the classic period for them more cylinders bigger displacement more cams more engine in this case as one writer puts it from the time acres of engine but if this bike was such a statement piece and considered so iconic and collectible today then why did it fail first though a bit of history regarding honda honda's motorcycles in the late 60s and early 70s were engineering marvels revolutionary platforms outperforming virtually all of the competition think motorcycles like the cb750 of course but also the 500 and 550 and cb350 the double overhead cam cb450 basically the best of the best a lot of these bikes were light years ahead of most of the competition honda of the late 70s was a different story however bikes like the cb750 and 550 were better versions of their original self for sure but largely unchanged in the last decade since their inception honda was still making some of the best and certainly the most popular motorcycles in the world but they weren't really innovating the way that they had 10 years prior other japanese companies like kawasaki were making faster more audacious motorcycles for the general public honda was becoming dare i say conservative and nobody likes a conservative motorcycle manufacturer not to name names but honda itself as a company was sort of in a transition period at this time in terms of designers and engineers traditionally at this point the older more experienced minds were creating the bikes for production and sales whereas the younger engineers and designers were building the race bikes but with the cbx room was made for these bright young sort of wild mines to build something audacious and the honda 6 was exactly that so this was obviously a six cylinder motorcycle a step up from the four cylinder that they had been making they chose to go with a double overhead cam and 24 valve setup essentially four valves per cylinder instead of two in part for weight savings and also in part because having the label 24 valves was just ridiculous and cool the engine itself was tipped forward 33 degrees to make room for you know a rider and the six carburetors are mounted to the engine at a v to sort of fit within the frame and there was an interesting component called a jack shaft that was added basically they needed to keep the width of the engine down i mean it's already wide enough but it could have been a lot wider because basically this jack shaft runs the alternator and the ignition timing and more and this made room instead of tucking those items on the end of the crankshaft miraculously this engine is only a smidge wider than the cb750s i've gotten different reports on how much wider one person said two inches from the time which i think is actually correct but somebody else said just a you know less than an inch so i don't know it really wasn't that much wider than the four cylinders that they were already making but because you see the pipes and you see the six cylinders it looks so much wider and this jack shaft really did help to keep it down this was one of the project leader soichiro irmagiri's favorite innovation for the cbx this motorcycle really marked a return to innovation and a focus on just raw performance for honda this was sort of a crown jewel for the company and cycle world at the time notes the incredible hush surrounding this bike as journalists were allowed to test the bike prior to its release so the bike came out in 79 but in 78 they were all getting to look at it it should have been presented to the higher ups first this is sort of what cycle world notes instead of being potentially leaked by the americans but after it's sort of production creation it was given to the americans for basically test rides and for journalists to get a pre-look at it but when the bike was not being ridden by testers it was either being filmed by honda motor company or it was hidden under covers away at the racetrack now there's quite a bit more to note about this bike's development this really was honda's racing technology adapted for the street but quite a lot was missing namely it still utilized a tubular frame and conventional front and rear suspension in reality these areas probably should have been rethought for a bike of this magnitude but to understand why the cbx failed i've decided to go right to the sources in this case my favorite kind of source articles and road tests from the time of the original bike sure you or i could ride a cbx1000 and yeah i could compare it to the few other old motorcycles i've ridden but these journalists at this time they were writing everything the same way the journalists are today so if anybody's going to understand this motorcycle it's those guys they know the innovative aspects of a six-cylinder configuration for example the fact that a six can actually utilize lighter smaller mufflers than a four as six smaller explosions are quieter than four larger ones so this actually means that there's more clearance for the mufflers when leaning the bike over you don't have to muffle as much as when you have four larger explosions and reviewers praise the engine's smoothness and power on track their stories of this bike running in dealerships and they could put a quarter on the gas tank and it wouldn't move because it was just so smooth while it was idling this was the smoothest bike ever made at this point the braking was phenomenal if not geared a little bit more towards experienced riders some reviewers at the time said the braking wasn't adequate but cycle world actually says that it was bitey and almost more aggressive than most people would even be able to handle but the suspension and the swing arm really were not up to par with the bike's power but when i say that this bike was too much motorcycle for its own good it's not that the motorcycle couldn't handle itself as many have made it sound people make claims that the bikes frame like couldn't handle how powerful the engine was or that it couldn't handle the weight of the bike or you know that the bike felt like it was just gonna explode or that it was incredibly unreliable and that just isn't true this bike failed for a different reason it actually has proven itself to be incredibly reliable the brakes were really fantastic for this time it's something else it's that this bike was actually almost too committed to performance the design is a great example of this it's meant to convey what the bike really is it's not designed specifically to look appealing they wanted to convey that this is an absolute beast of a motorcycle monsters aren't pretty and they should be taken on with a healthy amount of fear the instrument panel was originally prettier but the engineers decided to nix it because they wanted function to be everything and that had to be conveyed at every point for the motorcycle so the bike's performance wasn't pretty so i make the gauges and all the lights pretty now from our perspective we may see a cockpit like what's on the cbx and just think oh it's meant to be simple or that's just old looking but there's so much more going on when you actually dig in for example the gauges have black backgrounds glare free glass and white tipped needles all of these so that you could have better visibility at high speeds a lot of this was technology taken straight from military and fighter jets and the sound of the motorcycle which is now so incredible and iconic at this point is so much more than just the sound of any given six-cylinder engine i mean the gold wing has a six-cylinder engine it doesn't sound anything like this [Applause] the designers were making the motorcycle equivalent of a fighter jet this thing is a fighter jet on two wheels and so they wanted it to sound like a fighter jet and the exhaust was actually designed and built to match the sound of a fighter jet so the designers actually spent time at the hayakuri japanese air force base listening to fighter jets and laboring to capture that sound for this bike now if you think this bike sounds like an airstrike happening around you which it does know this they actually scrapped those phantom exhausts as people call them for something a bit more civilized in other words the version that we know and are hearing is actually the tame version and we'll never know what the bike was originally meant to sound like because apparently they took the bike and they took its exhaust and they presented it to the people leading the project and they said listen we can't make a motorcycle that sounds like this it was that crazy but if so much was right and innovative about this bike i mean we haven't even talked about the carburetors this is the most advanced carburetor setup to ever be attached to a street going motorcycle at this time anyways like up until this point but anyways the question still stands why didn't the cbx work the way the cb750 did when it was released now many point to its shortcomings like we've mentioned the frame the suspension primarily i really think that's missing the point and i think that's a bit off honda's other more successful motorcycles had shortcomings as well the cb750 didn't handle near as well as many of its other competitors but people still bought it and they bought it like crazy now you'd assume that this wide engine would cause the bike to have less cornering clearance than the competitors but cycle world notes that it actually had better clearance than any other big bike that they had tested in the five years leading up to this better than any ducati or suzuki or kawasaki or yamaha the thing leaned over and turned just fine some testers actually found it hard to get the bike to wobble or wallow in high speed i mean with our reviewers again saying that the suspension is antiquated and terrible and obviously it wasn't quite up to par but the average rider out on the street was never going to be able to get this thing to feel like the suspension was a real problem and when i actually undertook learning more about the cbx i was assuming that this bike was too much for its own good meaning that it was too much for itself too much power for the frame or brakes too much performance for its own capabilities but that's not true experienced testers again found the brakes to be incredible this wasn't a powerful bike with brakes that couldn't stop it these were the most performance oriented brakes to ever hit a honda motorcycle and therein actually lies one example of the problem it's not that the bike was too much for its own good in that way i think that it was too much for the riders people were afraid of this bike it really was a motorcycle for experienced riders with 100 horsepower and 600 pounds wet i mean it was an absolute handful and you could tell looking at it or sitting on it at a dealership that it was probably too much for you the ninja h2 of its time you could say maybe not the best handling maybe a bit heavy but unbelievably powerful and incredibly fast in a straight line pure just raw acceleration like nothing that had ever been built before it and the bike exudes that personality in that aura of being an experienced rider's bike you know excessive is the word that comes to mind size design power weight the whole bike was excessive in every way and the cb750 was not that way that was the bike for riders a do-it-all machine yeah sure it outperformed and was faster than pretty much everything else that was available but it was a do-it-all machine it was a tourer if you wanted it to be it could be fast if you wanted it to be it was highly customizable it was incredibly reliable very simple and it was beautiful it looked like a proper motorcycle but this thing just appeared to be a monster with that gigantic six-cylinder engine right there at the forefront the cb750 was one of the most powerful fastest motorcycles of its day but it really was a rider's bike those four cylinders were audacious in their day but not the way the cbx's six cylinders were in its day the 750 was great and popular not primarily because it was so ridiculously fast or powerful but because it was just good in every way from the brakes to the suspension to the performance to the reliability to all the different features that came with the bike the cbx was not like the cb750 in its day it wasn't better at really anything other than going incredibly fast in a straight line sure it had virtually no vibration and was incredibly smooth but you know honda's 750 at this point and gl 1000 and other bikes that were available other japanese bikes were already incredibly smooth it just wasn't really offering anything better for the average rider and it intimidated people the cbx failed because it was a weapon because it really was a fighter jet on two wheels in every way and in 1978 i think the average rider was very intimidated by it now this was really the point where innovation and engineering and performance among motorcycle manufacturers started to surpass the skills of virtually all riders and because of that it also started the trend of really the highest performing bikes within a lineup no longer being the best selling bikes sure at panagali v4 and yamaha r1 sure they sell but they don't sell the way that the cb750 sold but it's the high margins that make those bikes really profitable not the volume the average street rider really doesn't need any more than what a cb750 offered 65-ish horsepower is enough for virtually anything you can do on a legal road and bikes that were faster and started to get faster and more powerful than the cb750 for the most part didn't perform quite as well as it did there's a great quote from dale bowler regarding the cbx that really explains and actually predicts why the cbx wouldn't sell here's what he says he says i feel their six cylinder 24 24-valve approach reflects fanaticism to prove a point without regard to practicality what is the cbx good for the bmw and xs-112 are better the z1r looks flashier the gs 1000 handles better and is far more versatile some people will buy the cbx because that's how they see themselves as motorcyclists and want to be seen as motorcyclists some buyers will have swooned at the technology but none of this relates to traveling down the road in a practical manner admittedly motorcycles are not practical vehicles to begin with but most motorcycles reflect a good deal of practicality within their impractical definition at what was honda aiming when it unleashed the seething six was it prestige and publicity intended to help sell hawks perhaps it was to make the achievements of competing factories seem less impressive to understand the cbx we must return to the primal motivation of hardcore motorcycle enthusiasts the only ones who will be buying the cbx's and he's spot on and also note he's predicting this the public won't be graduating from moped to cbx nor will teenagers be riding them to school however people who live eat drink sleep and worship motorcycles will lay helpless in the wake of cbx performance probably the most intense of all the sensations that attract the enthusiast to motorcycles is acceleration raw wind in the face engine screaming acceleration there can never be too much and it can never be experienced too often nothing will bring an instant reputation to a motorcycle and a motorcycle company faster than great heaps of raw unmuzzled performance its appeal is so intense an enthusiast will overlook an abyss of impracticality to get it when i experience the cbx i feel power satisfaction fright and a dozen other emotions not from its handling or breaking or looks or even from its technology but from its throttle for this reason alone i will probably buy one so perhaps it is me and not honda that is afflicted with fanaticism i feel like this is such a perfect description of the bike it offers absolutely raw unmuzzled performance that's really not what the cb750 was and for that reason people didn't buy it because that's not what most riders want now the last thing i wanted to do for this video was reach out to someone who owned a cbx and get their perspective and there's this great channel on youtube called villian's garage he owns a cbx and rides it and talks about it so if you guys want to learn more about this or just go show his channel some love go give him a subscription i'll put a link down below and you guys can check him out he actually goes through in a couple different videos getting the bike cleaning it up getting it running and it's really cool it's really fun so i think you guys should definitely check it out anyways i wanted to ask him some questions about this bike and get his perspective so let's check that out let me start off by saying who wants a base model in anything um and the the the cbx was the flagship four honda at that time so it was it was the pinnacle of what they can offer um it's always nice to have something like that uh so yeah that's that's the first thing and combined with that the look of the bike if you think about riding a motorcycle if you break it down to the bare minimum you want to ride an engine that's what you want to do unfortunately you can't sit on it so you need a you need a seat you need some kind of a container to keep the fuel and you need somewhere to hang on to and if you take like a the front corner look of a cbx if you look at that picture say from a 10 o'clock angle you see that big wide engine with the six pipes coming out of it it's got a seat it's got a fuel tank and some place to hang on to just that bare almost simplistic nothing's been hidden look i love that it's it's it's how a bike should look um especially a classic bike the british bikes also looks like that it just got that bare openness on it in it so um this sound obviously is incredible i love how the bike sounds um some people say it sounds like an old formula one car it really does it sounds phenomenal so i i love the i just love the sound and then lastly it's because it's so rare you can't find them anymore especially the early c or z as you call them z and and a models you can't find them um it's nice to have something that was the best and is rare now um and it looks good and it it rides the way you like so that's why i always love them and uh i don't think i'll ever i ever sell this one um i got my hands on it at last so um i wanna i wanna keep it so yeah that's why i like it in one word heavy i mean you can't get you can't get away from the fact that it weighs 600 pounds ready to go so you definitely feel the weight as soon as you start moving um it's manageable but when you stop don't let it tip over on you because it will drag you down just a little a little fact that i can bore you with um it looks pretty wide but did you know that there's only one inch on each side that is wider than a cb750 it's not that it it's it's not unmanageable um it looks very impressive and it looks very wide but it's very torquey um from low down i mean i think about 2000 rpm two and a half thousand rpm it pulls really strong so it's got that nice meaty talky feeling to it the acceleration is brisk um it did the the quarter mile under 12 seconds back then so it's yeah it's a quick bike but i don't ride it for the speed i ride it for the the whole event how it sounds and and how it goes uh smooth if the six carburetors are tuned properly and synced it's a nice quick ribbing engine i mean it's like it's it's quick it's got a quick response to it and it's smooth it's smooth as hell so um i i love it the best thing about it i would say um is if i'd lands down uh on the on the fuel tank it says cbx double overhead care cam 24 valves and you see this big moat just sticking out on the side i mean it just looks and feels so mean think arnold schwarzenegger in terminator 2. you get that you get that mean feeling and it just it's just it's a joy to ride so um what's it like to ride you'll smile you'll smile when you when you ride one i think there were two big concerns or two big issues um that that period um in the late 70s um a big recession was looming which affected the world's economy so just when they launched the bike um people were buyers were being scared off um in buying anything basically then and they sold the bike for like i think it was around four thousand two hundred dollars if if i remember correctly now adjusted for inflation that's about sixteen to seventeen thousand dollars in today's money even even today that's a lot of money for a bike put that in a in a time of recession you'll see you you can start to see why it didn't sell that that well it's it's always the accessible ones that sell well um it's it's the one everyone can ride um it starts up quick you get up and go you get on it and go and it's easy to ride if you tell someone this is the h2o get on it and go i mean i'll i'll be a little bit intimidated by that and it was kind of the same thing for the cbx those years it was a a big heavy powerful quick machine i think yeah i think you're correct people were a little scared of it if you can call it that it's not that that accessible to them so i hope you guys enjoyed this video i again want to give a big shout out to villian's garage and this was kristoff who we were just talking to i cut out my parts where i was asking him the questions partially because they weren't important and also because my camera died in the middle of it and i don't have them anyways he was super helpful and he gave me a lot of really good perspective about the history and about the fact that a recession was looming and just the price of the bike and things like that is just really really interesting and he was really knowledgeable but yeah guys hope you enjoyed we'll see you guys in the next one ride safe you

Channel: bart

Views: 886,897

Keywords: bart, motorcycle, motorcycles, vintage, retro, classic, modern classic, best, worst, moto, bike, motorbike, honda, Honda cbx, cbx, cbx1000, sound, best sounding motorcycles, motorcycle sound, engine, cylinder, cylinders, the honda cbx was too much motorcycle for its own good, craziest motorcycles, history, f1, f1 car, exhaust, cbx 1050, honda cbx sound, formula 1, vintage honda, vintage honda motorcycle, 70s, greatest engines, engines

Id: aU3aCq2znhU

Length: 23min 47sec (1427 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 27 2022