- Thu Feb 23, 2017 3:48 pm
#66268
Nigelphoto: Dave Woods Racing is the dealer from whom I bought my C5 in September 2015. His main business is tuning bikes on a dyno; he was a very successful racer a while ago. His son is now racing. When he took on RE he told me he had seen Guy Martin's programme on India and had liked the look and sound of the Bullet he was riding. As he already had a sideline in selling some of the better Chinese scooters imported by MotoGB, when he realised that they now did REs he decided to sell them. The last time I looked in his shop some of the original line-up (ie 2015 stuff) was still there, together with an unsold blue LE Despatch (I bought his green one). He has now taken on Husqvarna, though I wonder whether he'll have more luck with those niche bikes. As for the twin it'll be deja vu methinks - too little too late. Given the burgeoning range of the highly successful current Triumph twins the RE twin will have to be something special, assuming the market isn't saturated by the time it is launched. Also, they won't get away with overpricing the twin because it is bound to be at a higher price point than the singles and that will put it up against really desirable bikes (from the market viewpoint, not necessarily my own) like the Ducati Scambler range and various Japanese offerings. I suspect that most buyers of the current models except the CGT are old timers who are predisposed to that sort of bike - a shrinking market especially as bigger bikes become too heavy. The CGT is more of a fashionable urban chic type of bike that is likely to be bought by younger people. The twin will need to be more like that IMHO, otherwise it'll only sell to existing RE owners trading up. Unless RE radically alters its strategy I doubt they'll ever be a big player in Europe, even though their total production is higher than many of the more mainstream manufacturers.