You make a good point about offering platforms open to personalization and the means to do so. Don’t know about an industry shakeup… you might be hoping for too much. I really don’t think excellence sells all that well unless it’s couched in obvious concretistic values (”Mine’s faster”, et al)… no, mediocrity served up in nice packaging with fancy wrap and ribbons rules, I believe.
AND if you suspect sounding jaded, from my experience it comes with the territory.

I was expecting a design contest but so far it just looks like a social engineering experiment. Maybe as it approaches the deadline there will be some actual design ideas submitted.

Modular and “hackable out of the box” will be the wave of the future.

I think the industry shakeup is going to come as electrics gain viability. Most of the established marques don’t make much in the way of electric motors or batteries at this point. Nor do most of the small electric bike startups. Pretty much everyone gets their stuff from battery companies and companies that make electric motors. So aside from physical size, a motor is a motor. A swap is going to require some wiring changes, mounting changes, and perhaps some machining of output shafts or drive inputs. Swapping batteries should be even easier than that.

But let’s leave aside the generalistations that young people can’t do hardware and old people can’t do software.

I’m not a bmw rider but I have certainly been interested in their approach to do engineering in their own way. BMW’s opportunity is to make motorcyle platforms that are modular and hackable out of the box. They should make platform tools available with their bikes and the same tools the engineers and dealerships get should be vastly improved and also made available to the end user. Of course those tools need to be open designs that can be improved upon because that is what a modern approach demands.

Call me jaded but I just don’t think any of the traditional manufacturers are going to be able to deliver this kind of future minded thinking. There’s definately an industry shakeup coming.

Considering the present young adult generation of riders, Let’s see…
Many can’t even change their own oil, believe luggage is best carried in a backpack, insist on wearing inane oversized apparel items flapping away madly at highway speeds, think mounting a GPS is a major mod (and need it to find their way around anywhere besides their own neighborhood), Hmmm…

I shudder to think.