The WEIRDEST Motorcycle from every Manufacturer

in our last manufacturer video looking at the most expensive motorcycles to come out of each company well that one was quite a bit less subjective than the one we're looking at today we're back to the more subjective topics today with the weirdest motorcycle from every manufacturer but you know this is kind of just a fun way to look at some really unique crazy odd motorcycles sometimes they're interesting and sometimes you know rather crappy and to just see these bikes in history so hopefully you guys enjoy it as always let us know down in the comments if you have any other strange weird motorcycles that you think should have made the list or if any of you guys owned any of these motorcycles at any point definitely let us know all right let's jump in let's start with Norton when looking at strange Norton motorcycles you really have to look no further than the interim period between the original Norton company sort of dying in the 70s and the current iterations of Norton's motorcycles so between that you know time period and especially during the 80s this is a time when the British marks that did survive well they were kind of grasping as straws and during that time Norton experimented for whatever reason with rotary engine setups on their bikes some air-cooled some liquid cooled there was the Interpol 2 which was the successor to the classic it was literally just called the classic and that was the first rotary Norton but then you ended up with the commander which was the liquid cooled version and these were sold primarily to police force but also there were some civilian models but they're incredibly rare just a few hundred of these were made now the problem with this bike well they're no different than the problems with any other Wankel rotary motorcycle from this period yes they were incredibly smooth and relatively powerful but they had to be overpriced because of what they were Norton really didn't have any dealer support at this time and in the end they just never really showed to have any benefits over you know a regular engine setup for me it's not even the fact that this was a rotary-powered Norton though that is a little odd obviously that whole project just didn't work for motorcycles in general I mean mean Suzuki couldn't make it work but it's more just the overall design of this bike that just doesn't work for a company like Norton you know you come out of the 70s where Nortons were some of the coolest sleekest and most performance oriented bikes that you could buy and really the last Great British bike was the commando but then we have the commander this ugly entirely two dated 80s bike and it just didn't work for Norton and it's really no surprise it's just an odd strange off-brand thing I've talked quite a bit about a few odd BMW Motorcycles in my videos from the highly Tech focused K1 to the rather hideous r1200c Cruiser thing I think for me though the strangest weirdest BMW motorcycle of all time goes to the enclosed C1 now this motorcycle though some may not want to call it that was in production from 2000 to 2002 and really didn't sell all that well for BMW this was yet again an attempt from a major manufacturer to get car people to turn into motorcycle people BMW claimed that this would have the same front-end protection of a European compact car which is a pretty big claim hence the need for a roof with essentially rollover bars but problems abounded as they always do with these sort of crossover car motorcycle vehicles for one wearing a motorcycle helmet while being belted in is questioned by many in terms of safety some countries did give a helmet exception for the C1 and in the end BMW is just frustrated with the whole thing and you have to give it to them they were really trying to innovate and make riding a safer thing going into the future but not only did you know governments not really help with this project but sadly Riders look at this kind of thing and they just say nah because let's be real it's just not normal it doesn't look like a normal motorcycle and if you like to you know drive a car normally what's the motivation for having this so yeah not great without a doubt the strangest Ducati motorcycle to ever be produced is the mh-900e now this bike was Innovative not so much on the tech side I mean the stock two gallon gas tank is almost entirely useless for most modern Riders but this bike was more of an art piece from the get-go though there is a passionate group who own and ride these if you want to get your hands on one you're going to spend a pretty penny as only 2 000 units were made on release back in 2001 and the bike cost 15 000 Euros all the way back you know over 20 years ago from everything I've heard though most of the mh-900e owners do actually ride and love their bike which is pretty cool and there is a pretty cool Community around it now the story behind just the sale of this thing is a crazy one in and of itself but the bike is both interesting and worthy of discussion because of how odd it is designed by the now famous and somewhat Infamous for some Pierre terblanche that's the guy who had to basically succeed Massimo tamborini's 916 and was tasked with creating the now how somewhat hated 999 a bike that really did not at all try to copy its famous predecessor so give him credit for that but with the mh900e you know you can take your hand and cover the bottom half of the bike and the bike does look rather classic it looks like an old race bike but then when you cover the top half you see those you know iconic Ducati features like the upswept exhaust and modern suspension and trellis frame and the bike looks rather modern and that was intentional there was supposed to be kind of a dichotomy within the bike being thoroughly retro but also having modern styling cues and yeah it's just overall as a package you know a pretty odd motorcycle but this one is a good kind of odd I've talked quite a bit about unique Honda motorcycles on this channel but thankfully there's so many that there's still loads more to cover and for this specific topic I'd like to look at the Honda motra now visor down says that if Tonka made a motorcycle this would be it and you know I don't think they're far off this is the kind of bike that sums up Honda's business approach through the 80s and 90s so well you know innovate innovate new markets new kinds of motorcycles for different Riders and we can all credit Honda for bringing in loads of riders with all the different kinds of motorcycles that they have made but sadly most of those bikes have failed very few of this bike was ever made they were only ever available in Japan the motra was meant to be a sort of off-road fun trail bike powered by a 50cc single with three speeds kind of a common setup for Hondas throughout history and it also had a high low option it was kind of like a mini rocon in ways but much less you know hardcore the bike itself isn't all that crazy it's just so odd for Honda you know it doesn't look like a Honda in any way but this bike just looks so fun and I would love to see a modern version of this even though it is pretty strange so we included BSA in our last video in this series so let's keep doing that and let's look at what I would say is without a doubt the oddest two-wheeled machine BSA has ever made okay technically it has one more wheel than that this is the BSA aerial 3 tricycle moped thing now this bike was an utter failure for the company at a time when failure was not an option for any British company the British motorcycle industry was dying being forced to innovate or basically get out of the way and unfortunately many of the Great marks decided to go this kind of Route this thing cost over 2 million pounds for BSA to develop and I'm just struggling to see where all of that money went power on this bike was made at only one of the two rear wheels not really sure what's up there and the brakes while there was only a break on one of the rear wheels so you've got power going to one and a break going to the other and of course the front wheel has a drum brake as well but yeah the whole thing is just very odd it has no rear suspension so in the end it's almost more like one of those Vehicles you could get at Walmart you know if you need assistance it was powered by a 50 CCC two-stroke motor I mean the list goes on it was a complete failure due to just its sheer weirdness and not goodness don't crack my grammar it's all good but they also didn't Market it well people talk about the British industry dying at this point and people just like to point to you know companies like Honda with having you know just better options but obviously that was part of it but it was more than that you know dropping two million pounds on a piece of junk like this really does not help you when you're trying to survive industry changes like what happened in the 70s so yeah this weird thing with three wheels is definitely the weirdest BSA I can think of now for Suzuki the obvious choice for me is the sw1 this is without a doubt the oddest motorcycle in my opinion on the entire list because this motorcycle this old looking British bathtub styled bike is actually a Japanese bike from Suzuki released the year of my birth 1992. listen 1992 was a long time ago but it wasn't that long ago the main gimmick of this bike is that British bathtub styling but that's a styling that went out of style in like the late 50s and it never came back into style ever again there was no indication that this would be cool from Suzuki so I have no idea what they were thinking with this retro was starting to work at that time especially in the automotive world but also you know this is sort of the beginning of so many retro motorcycles but this way of doing it was just destined to fail this was not something that people liked about old British bikes what people liked were the sort of classic Roadster looks of the 60s and this bathtub Bodywork was just the antithesis to that it was Heavy this bike was slow it didn't even have wire wheels which looks so weird with this styling and it's just ugly and horrible and I'm gonna finish this section because I don't want to look it anymore fermoto Gucci it would be easy to include the bike we looked at in the most expensive motorcycle video which is the mg01 and as it truly is one of the least Gucci Gucci's ever produced but that would be lame I don't want to talk about it again and for me actually the strangest Moto Goosey ever made personally is the grizo now the grizo it has a terrible name but it's more than that it's not that it's a bad bike overall or in terms of design that crazy you know strange can be good and that's certainly the case for many grizo owners they think that this bike is cool obviously or they wouldn't buy it I think what's odd for me about the grizo besides you know the usual Gucci foibles it's not that it is a weird Gucci because Gucci's are weird what's odd about the grizo is just its unique styling it's hard to pin down what the grizo is it's this big heavy lumpy machine so it's hard not to want to put it in some sort of Cruiser or maybe power Cruiser segment but then it's got a very Sleek sort of naked Japanese bike look while also still having that classic Gucci retro styling cues so I think some people view it as a retro bike other people view it as a power Cruiser and then other people view it as a just a normal Naked Bike so I guess I Gotta Give it to Gucci for being able to make a bike that doesn't fit a mold and obviously that's true of a lot of their bikes but the toughest part is just understanding what this bike is and I think for that reason it hasn't been massively successful for Moto Guzzi but yeah it's a weird one definitely a weird one now much like Honda due to an ongoing desire to innovate and push the boundaries Yamaha has had their fair share of weird motorcycles I mean you can make an entire video on weird Yamahas just like you could for Honda and I'm actually going to exclude the Nikon right now I think that's how you say that just because I have no desire to talk about that thing no for me the strangest Yamaha motorcycle is one you've probably never heard of the sdr200 now I want you to look at this bike and think what does this bike remind you of well if you guessed a Ducati Monster you would be right this thing looks like Ducati Monsters ugly younger brother ah but this bike came out in 1986 and the monster wasn't released until 1993 and the bikes have so little in common yet they seem as though they're related in some way one has to wonder if for some reason Ducati looked at this bike that nobody liked and saw some sort of potential and then they went on to make you know one of the best bikes ducati's ever made in the monster but you've got this paint Scheme the trellis frame the three spoke wheels the round headlight all of it packaged together this way and it just is so similar to a monster but that is really where it stops I mean the bike rocked a 200 cc water cooled two-stroke single it was made for pretty much one year nobody wanted it the style was not very Yamaha hardly anybody bought it but who knew it would weirdly predict where Ducati would end up going with their naked lineup so this bike is strange to me not just because of what it is for Yamaha but because of a potential influence that it had on Ducati very odd without a doubt the boldest attempt at Innovation from Harley came about in the 70s under Project Nova now I would love to make an entire video about this endeavor and maybe I will at some point but the Nova project would not come to production or completion it did result in some pretty strange machines mainly the project was in collaboration with Porsche and this would lead to a double overhead cam liquid cooled V-Twin and also V4 engine the engines themselves really were truly Innovative but the design of the bikes overall are just a bit off they were certainly unlike anything that Harley had done but still in my opinion not really what Harley needed but you do have to remember this was all the way back in the 70s when AMF owned Harley so this would have been way ahead of its time but the project was cut short about two years short of what it needed to reach production so maybe it's a cop-out to include what is essentially a prototype but I figured you guys would enjoy seeing this strange Harley but not very hardly machine and you know maybe down the road we could do a deeper dive into Project Nova and what it was all about for Kawasaki I have to give it to the av50 somehow in production from 1983 through 1990 and in the spirit of mini bikes from the 60s and 70s this was actually like a mini chopper or mini Cruiser take on that formula of making a mini bike and it worked for some reason I think the reason people like this bike over some of the other tiny 50cc mini bike options in this class is that it felt much more like a proper motorcycle I mean you know you look at it you look at that cockpit it looks like a proper big bike the av-50 is double weird for me in that it is basically a Japanese Cruiser you know that's the thing in and of itself that is it's not my favorite but then you also have the fact that it's a miniature version of this it would be like Harley making a sport bike and then making a mini sport bike so bit odd for me but pretty cool also at the same time now for Indian we have to give it to the papoose developed in the 40s after its predecessor the Corgi and well bike this was essentially a civilianized version of a foldable military parachute scooter Indian didn't really make this bike they basically got the rights to it and slapped an Indian badge on it regardless this odd little machine that was then made road legal is pretty awesome and holds a top speed of about 30 miles per hour on a good day these are incredibly rare though they were produced in large numbers but yeah I just love the idea of people cruising around on these in like the 40s and 50s at 30 miles per hour and I've ridden an e-scooter and let me tell you going fast on a little scooter like this really is it feels fast this obviously has bigger Wheels than an e-scooter and you're sitting a little bit differently I'm sure it would feel more stable but it's essentially the same concept just you know 60 70 years prior I talked about one of the weirdest Aprilia motorcycles in my video on ugly motorcycles which was the Aprilia Moto 6.5 and a lot of people didn't like that I included that and you know I would agree it's not that ugly of a bike that bike is though pretty weird but for variety's sake I want to look at a different Aprilia which is the Mojito or haban depending on where you were pretty weird having a Italian company name their scooter the Mojito or Habana I guess it's Havana I don't know this scooter thing has been in a previous lineup in various forms here in the US we got it in 2004 in the form of the Mojito and it's meant to be sort of a retro Italian scooter hearkening back to sort of early Vespas at least that's how I see it the handlebars are so odd to me though they do look vespa-ish you know like first generation Vespas but it also weirdly looks like a cruiser scooter and has some motorcycle cues but you know being owned by Piaggio this bike came in multiple forms powered by 50 and 150cc engine it's not the worst looking scooter but it's always weird for me when a performance-based Italian company like Aprilia makes something like this it you know would be like Ferrari releasing you know a smart car it's just weird for KTM it's Again difficult all KTMs are inherently strange but I feel the recent e-scooter attempt from KTM and then also its apparent demise has to be the oddest thing we've seen from KTM in quite a while now this looked like it was going to come to production KTM had been teasing this new electric scooter moped e-bike thing that was apparently going to bridge the gap between motorcycle and scooter riders by I guess being more aggressive than your average scooter for me it's the way KTM took the design language of say the Duke and just sort of slapped it on a moped it's just so weird and it just looks like some sort of fake render you would see going around Instagram but no this really was a scooter they were gonna make sadly KTM must have realized that making an electric scooter that sort of had their you know Duke design integrated into it yeah that wouldn't actually do anything to bridge the gap between scooter and motorcycle enthusiasts nobody has figured that one out there's a hard line it seems between scooter riders at least the sort of average scooter rider and the average motorcyclist neither are really all that interested in each other's products so I don't get why we're always trying to bridge this Gap but this was definitely not going to solve the problem now for Triumph I have to go with the Tigress the rare attempt at a scooter from the Great British Mark and a failed attempt at that much like bsa's tricycle moped thing this was the British companies basically trying to either adapt or survive much like Harley making mini bikes and mopeds in the 60s and 70s Triumph partnered with BSA to make the Tigris to attempt to compete in the scooter segment against the big European companies that were just popping up all over the place and taking over but these rather large 250cc and 175 cc scooters repped two-stroke engines essentially developed out of the BSA Bantam engine but there were internal struggles Within These companies and this meant that these scooters just never had a chance many at Triumph felt that Triumph sort of Macho identity as a roadster building manufacturer just didn't fit with this kind of product and that's why these were often not promoted well plus the British companies were really playing catch-up and you know that rarely works the Tigers was discontinued shortly after its release in 1964 and Triumph would then go on to double down on just making bigger faster bikes I mean you see this with so many companies whether it's Triumph whether it's Harley you know in the end they try they make all these different bikes and then in the end their identity is what matters and they just go back to making big bikes and that's why you don't see a 50cc Harley and you never will see one it's because Harley has figured out that this just doesn't work for Royal Enfield I want to point out a bike that came and went during their recent rise to success and that is the bullet trials version a bike meant to sort of laud the old trial success of the company but from my own personal experience seeing these quite a bit when I was sort of interested in potentially getting a Royal Enfield a long time ago yeah these bikes were just so weird and it's no surprise that they discontinued them if you know anything about trials or even if you don't you just look at a trials bike from back in the day and then look at this bike you would have no idea that they're connected you might just think this is some sort of Miss guided weird paint Scheme but even if you do learn about trials in Royal enfield's success off-road you realize how misguided this model was and just how odd it was the classic 500 was already such a stubby thick bike so you have a bike that is then painted to sort of look like a trials bike but it doesn't really have any of the identity there of that old trials bikes I mean trials bikes were stripped down made to be light made to be nimble and that just doesn't at all fit with this weird paint Scheme these bikes were just odd they were weird nobody wanted them and so Roy lenfield discontinued them definitely a weird bike from Royal Enfield alright last on our list we have Envy Augusta and without a doubt the weirdest Envy Augusta ever made has to go to the rush 1000 now I know many believe this bike to be beautiful exotic I get that it's a bold design for sure but I personally just hate the look of it the brutale isn't great either like both of these bikes are a little too ridiculous looking for me but the ride just like creeps me out it looks like a monster a real monster not a Ducati Monster it doesn't look like something a major manufacturer would make and I'll give that to them you know they've created something that looks very custom and it costs you know cost as much as a custom bike but it embodies the stark contrast in Envy Augusta's design language right now it's just not consistent to me their bikes aren't consistent you've got these Sleek flowing beautiful bikes like the F3 and the super veloce and then you've got these naked bikes which are so angular and edgy and sharp I don't know for me there's a lack of consistency in the rush really just epitomizes almost that cartoonish level of ridiculousness it's so smushed looking I'm not a fan of it personally I just find this bike to be weird looking mechanically obviously it's awesome it's got Envy Augusta's big inline four and that's such a raw cool engine but the bike itself in terms of design though I love many of the other bikes that have been designed I Believe by Adrian Morton yeah this one just doesn't do it for me as always guys thanks for watching this video let us know your thoughts Below in the comments hopefully you guys enjoyed this and be sure to check out my other videos in this series as well we'll see you guys in the next video ride safe

Channel: bart

Views: 436,663

Keywords: bart, motorcycle, motorcycles, classic, triumph, top 10, top, best, funniest, worst, moto, bike, motorbike, weirdest motorcycles of all time, crazy, crazy motorcycles, ducati, honda, kawasaki, yamaha, suzuki, bmw, mv agusta, aprilia, royal enfield, norton, bsa, harley davidson, indian, worst motorcycles, the weirdest motorcycles from every manufacturer, manufacturer

Id: X8a3mN6-BVI

Length: 22min 21sec (1341 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 20 2023