Sad Day - Buell
 

http://www.buell.com/en_us/

I owned a XB9S for several years and it was by far the most fun motorcycle I've ever owned.

No more American made sportbikes.

they have some cool innovations, but have been plagued with reliability problems. They should've went to the rotax motors earlier.

It took grossly favorable rules for them to be able to win this years american sportbike championship like being allowed nearly double the engine size of their competitors.

There are other american sportbike companies out there, but they are more boutique in nature kinda like buell before selling out majority interest to HD.

I always liked them. But not enough to ever own one. It sucks that yet another American company is going down. But they did it to themselves. They were never competitive in pricing or performance. It was only a matter of time. Erik Buell will continue on in the motorsports world somehow. I wish him luck.

As much as I liked my XB, the engine was the weak point for Buell in general. I was excited to see their new 1125R had a Rotax engine and not the old Sportster based engine. to you point, they were just priced too high. I bought my XB used and got a pretty good deal, but the new prices were way too high.

I agree. I got my ZX 636 used with 1200 miles and one year old. Perfect. It was half the cost (actually less than half) of a new 1125R and smokes it too. The only place the bigger bike had any advantage was from a dead stop up to about 50mph. From that point on it was pretty even. And I can hang the corners a little better on the smaller bike. I know it's apples and oranges, but they were trying to compete in the sportbike market. If a manufacturer can not keep up EVERY year they will fall off the map pretty quick. I like that Buell tried to make it happen, but in the end they just were not up to speed (no pun intended) with the Japanese and Euro bikes.

Wow.......I used to be a manager for Folsom/Rocklin HD & Buell. We also ran a NHRA Pro Stock Buell out of there. I wonder how this is going to effect that. Can you run in Pro Stock classes with the Buell name if they are out of business?

I would think so, at least for a while still. There are new bikes in showrooms right now. And the warantee issues will be honored by HD so it makes sense to let 'em run. I don't know how long they can do that though. Maybe a set number of years after production stops? It would be easy enough to rebody them in that form though. HD label and good to go, right?:D

There are still American made sportbikes:

http://www.motoczysz.com/main.php?area=home

I personally hate the bikes I have owned 3 honda cbr's and have loved them

Dec 13 is their last Day At Buell just going to shut doors not for sale, At a Meeting 2 months ago said buell never made any Money and why do we have it? They also have for sale MV Agusta motorcycles , A lot of good people at Buell