How Just One Bike Destroyed Every British Motorcycle

Comments · 23

• ME

  @MettleUK · 3 weeks ago · pinned

  The stories we tell here, written down properly. Read the first chapter free — no cost, no card: <a href="https://mettlehistory.co.uk/">https://mettlehistory.co.uk</a>

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• NO

  @NorfolkSceptic · 3 weeks ago

  This video could be adapted to describe most postwar manufacturing industries. I remember the working to rule, the demarcation disputes, and the inflexible working.

  7

• TH

  @The-yp7lr · 3 weeks ago

  I grew up in this generation, and my first motorcycle ride was on a 50cc Honda Cub. It was so much fun! We lived in a suburban neighborhood and my friends and I screamed around at stupid speeds. But: the bike was quiet and harmless looking so nobody noticed us or complained. Yeah, we all became motorcyclists from that experience and I don&apos;t think we would have otherwise. The first CB 750 I saw seemed ..strange. I was used to seeing British bikes and they were &nbsp;noisy, shaking, clunking, and covered with caked dust where the oil was leaking. Riding it fast was smooth, electric - &nbsp;like the sensation of water-skiing. Trying to catch up with it on a Bonnie was like beating a horse to death galloping it over a rocky uphill road. Yeah, the Bonnie handled a lot better on tight roads, but in America that doesn&apos;t matter. Finally reliability: &nbsp;you could own a CB 750 for years and not even own a wrench. A Bonnie was a mechanic&apos;s apprenticeship.

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• TO

  @TonyCook-v9y · 3 weeks ago

  Speaking as a recently retired owner of my own small export led niche manufacturing business in Birmingham.<br>This is old news to me.<br>We went from being a typical &quot;Brummy Metal Basher&quot; with basic mechanical power presses, employing around 50 people, including part timers - to a total workforce of 6 people - including me - and two very efficient and very fast automatic robotic production lines.<br>But - none of my customers in the UK or overseas made similar levels of investment over the same period of time - and they are all now gone.<br>And I&apos;m talking about one or two big internationally known names, in my own field - not simply SME&apos;s.<br>As this video points out - too many bean counters in too many many boardrooms - and not enough engineers.

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• MI

  @michaelelwell7476 · 3 weeks ago

  My first bike in 1967 was a Honda dream that I bought by doing farm work. A year or so later I got a 1952 BSA Goldstar and what a contrast. I did a lot of work on the goldstar and adjusted the chain on the Honda. But what a hoot that old BSA was to ride. I also owned a BSA star fire,1968 BSA Victor, a 1968 Commando and a 1979 Bonneville. So I treated the British bikes as a mechanical hobby and expected to spend almost as much time working on them as riding. I really enjoyed those old bikes.

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• MI

  @michaeltb1358 · 3 weeks ago

  Most articles claim the Honda 750 was the breakthrough, but the CB450 established itself much earlier. With a smaller engine it had almost as much power as a 650 Bonneville, with a balanced high revving engine and electric start. plus other technical innovations. I owned one, and never forget sitting alongside a Norton 750 at a level crossing. My bike just ticked over smoothly while the Norton was visibly shaking.

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• ED

  @eddiehuman1 · 3 weeks ago

  Great story thanks, yes I got a restored 1970 T120 in showroom condition, a 1948 built custom, a 1979 T140.<br>A 1972 Honda 750 in showroom condition.<br>I ride mostly the Honda.<br>The triumph sound.

  1

• BI

  @billy-rayvalentine9763 · 3 weeks ago

  British managers destroyed the British motorcycle industry

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• 85

  @85waspnest · 2 weeks ago

  An excellent video. &nbsp;I had a 2004 Triumph Bonneville T100 with the 790cc carb engine. Very heavy for a twin with a gutless engine, a hard seat, didn&apos;t handle well, weak brakes, and always refused to start after a few months Winter hibernation. My present bike is a 2020 Honda CB1100RS, &nbsp;superb quality, fit and finish, silky smooth engine with lots of torque, &nbsp;a comfortable seat, handles beautifully and starts on the button at the end of Winter. &nbsp;I&apos;ve owned several Honda bikes from a 1966 S90 Sports, a 1974 CB250 K4 and a CX500, they never let me down.

• CM

  @cmw9876 · 3 weeks ago (edited)

  Honda workers built high quality machines - a hundred for every ten bikes from Britain. They did not leak oil. They had electric starters. Disc brakes. Four cylinders with overhead cams. Reliability was their signature. I first saw one parked while I was walking to work. Stopped. Walked around it. Here was a machine from another planet. Mates were still buying Norton Commandos. Exciting bikes but relatively old technology. I knew, looking at that first CB750, that I was looking at the future of motorcycles. It was. Other people still make bikes but Japan dominates in sales in the Western world. The British factories went to India which makes huge numbers of bikes for the home market. Japan has the world. There are good bikes from Germany and Italy but Japan has the world market by the short and curlys.<br><br>There&apos;s no shortage of very good British engineers who can design magnificent machines. Quality volume production and an affordable price? No.

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• RE

  @Ren-pb2xh · 3 weeks ago

  This history explains one of the great strategic miscalculations the West made when dealing with Japan. When Japanese industry became too competitive to defeat through engineering and manufacturing alone, the increasingly tempting response was political: lobby Congress, change the rules, raise regulatory barriers, and assume that Japan would be forced to slow down. <br>The irony is that adapting to new constraints is precisely where Japanese engineering has traditionally been strongest.There is a famous line often attributed to Soichiro Honda: <br>“When Congress passes new emission standards, we hire 50 more engineers and GM hires 50 more lawyers.” That sentence says almost everything. <br>Change the rules, and one side tries to fight the rules. The other starts redesigning the machine. And this points to something the outside world has repeatedly misunderstood about Japan. <br> <br>Visit Japan and look at ordinary Japanese people individually. Most will not strike you as extraordinary geniuses. Their excessive politeness, patience, procedural thinking, and almost stubborn seriousness can even look naïve or absurd to people raised in more confrontational societies. <br>That is precisely where the misunderstanding begins. Japan’s strength has rarely depended on every individual being exceptional. It comes from what happens when millions of ordinary people are shaped by a social environment that places enormous value on discipline, responsibility, repetition, improvement, and fulfilling one’s role. <br>One important difference is the traditional relationship between rights and obligations. Modern Western political thought naturally places enormous emphasis on rights people possess simply by being human. That achievement has immense value. But when the language of rights becomes detached from responsibility, duty and consequence, a society can eventually demand more and more from everyone else while asking less and less of itself. <br> <br>Traditional Japanese socialization often begins from almost the opposite direction: first learn your responsibilities toward other people, your family, your school, your workplace and society. As you mature, you gradually acquire greater freedom and autonomy. In simplified form: if you want the right to participate, first prove that you can carry the responsibility that comes with it. <br>Neither civilization is without flaws. Japan can become excessively conformist, while Western individualism can become excessively entitled. But the balance between rights and duties matters, and perhaps part of the current crisis of confidence in Western institutions comes from forgetting that rights cannot survive indefinitely without people willing to accept obligations. <br> <br>There is another factor that outsiders often underestimate: Japan’s natural environment. Imagine a relatively small island nation with limited room to retreat, repeatedly hit by earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, typhoons, torrential rain, floods, landslides, heavy snow and tsunamis. <br>How many developed societies have had to live with that combination, generation after generation? <br>That environment does something to a culture. It teaches people that destruction is not necessarily the end of the story. Your house can disappear. Your town can disappear. Your factory can disappear. <br>You rebuild. And then you rebuild again. <br>This does not make Japanese people biologically different from anyone else. Japanese people can be arrogant, jealous, selfish, cruel or foolish like people everywhere else. The difference is that Japan’s geography and history have repeatedly punished the illusion that human beings are completely in control. <br>Nature has a habit of humiliating arrogance. <br>Perhaps that is one reason Japanese culture developed such strong traditions of preparedness, maintenance, collective discipline, restraint and recovery. When disaster returns often enough, resilience stops being a slogan and becomes a social reflex. And that is why cornering Japan has so often produced unexpected results. <br> <br>There is an old underworld saying in Japan that can be paraphrased roughly as: “Do not torment a man too much. Once you force him to think, he becomes smarter. And the smarter he becomes, the more dangerous he becomes to you.” Crude wisdom, perhaps, but strategically useful. Push someone who has nowhere to escape and two things can happen: he breaks, or he learns. Japan has been broken many times. <br>The mistake outsiders keep making is assuming that broken means finished. <br> <br>Eventually, the United States seems to have learned something from its own industrial confrontation with Japan. Rather than treating Japan simply as an enemy to be contained, American manufacturers increasingly found reasons to cooperate with Japanese companies. And when China emerged as the next great industrial challenger, Washington clearly had no desire to repeat the Japanese experience. Hence the push particularly under Trump to reduce strategic dependence on China and relocate critical supply chains toward the United States and allied countries. <br>Europe, however, appears to have learned a very different lesson. <br>While America has been trying to reduce its exposure to China, much of European industry spent decades increasing its dependence on the Chinese market, Chinese manufacturing, Chinese supply chains and, in some cases, Chinese capital. <br>Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Volvo and other legendary European names still carry the prestige of European industrial history, but behind those badges the economic relationship with China has become extraordinarily deep. <br> <br>And that creates the final irony. The West once tried to defeat Japan by changing the rules. Japan answered with engineers. America eventually learned from the experience. Europe seems determined to test whether the same mistake can be repeated with China. <br>Perhaps the most dangerous moment for an industrial civilization is not when it loses a competition. It is when it sells the factory, transfers the know-how, becomes dependent on the competitor, and still believes that the logo on the hood means it remains in control.😁

• RA

  @RarityOnWheels · 2 weeks ago

  Interesting