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The Kneeslider

Doers Builders and Positive People

Motorcycle Design Competitions

By Paul Crowe

Hyanidetracked motorcycleWe need a good motorcycle design competiton. It should be pretty clear by now that any company, no matter how capable their design department, simply misses a lot of great ideas because relatively few designers are on staff. Occasionally, a design competition primarily for autos will get a few motorcycle entries, like the Hyanide and Baal, but for the most part, these competitions are limited to cars.

SAE, the Society of Automotive Engineers, has several competitions going on a regular basis in areas for cars, trucks, racing, off road, snowmobiles and even airplanes but no motorcycles. Why not? I noticed the other day Ferrari and Alcoa teamed up with a competition for designing the Ferrari of the Future. These sorts of things happen all the time but I haven’t noticed similar motorcycle competitions.

New motorcycle concepts are unveiled at shows and comments are then solicited but how about asking for a new design from scratch? Every manufacturer has a strong following and I bet a lot of those folks have pretty good ideas about what they would like to see. Instead of putting a new V-max design on a display stand, why doesn’t Yamaha ask for new V-max designs altogether? Harley Davidson may think the custom builders and shows give them all of the ideas they need but if someone had to design with an eye on production, their ideas might be very cool with possibilities even HD didn’t think of. The same goes for all of the other manufacturers, the more eyes and minds you have working on design, the more options and ideas you have to work with.

We’ve had previous posts on computer based designs from guys like Tim Cameron and Mark van der Kwaak, but there are many more great idea guys out there and a design challenge might get the competitive juices flowing. There are probably huge numbers of students who would jump at a chance to show their skill if given the opportunity. Maybe there are competitions already out there I’ve missed and, if so, please let me know so I can tell more people about them but if they exist, they’re flying under my radar.

There’s never been a time when more people could take a shot at something like this and I’d love to see what the results would be.

SAE competitions
Ferrari of the Future

The Kneeslider: Hyanide and Baal
The Kneeslider: Tim Cameron
The Kneeslider: Mark van der Kwaak

Posted on April 12, 2006 Filed Under: Motorcycle Design


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Comments

  1. Prester John says

    April 12, 2006 at 11:51 am

    I remember back in the late 1970s the SAE “Mini-Baja” engineering student competitions. The Japanese motorcycle companies’ ATVs of the time where three wheelers, and the creative, clean-sheet-of-paper student vehicles were nearly all four wheelers. At the regional competitons there would be polite, well dressed Japanese men with big Nikon cameras. By the mid-1980s, the majors’ ATVs were adding a fourth wheel as well.

    Design competitons. Yep.

    Tom

  2. hoyt says

    April 13, 2006 at 9:57 am

    what if the Kneeslider had a design competition online?

  3. Glynn says

    April 17, 2006 at 2:31 pm

    I’d have to disagree with you on the lack of bike design competitions. In fact, if anything, I’d have to say that there have perhaps been too many recently!

    We at the Motorcycle Design Association (www.motorcycledesign.com) were planning to hold one a couple of years ago, but backed down when it became clear that we’d be clashing with the Munich Intermot’s own competition, held in October 2004. I understand that the Köln IFMA will be running something similar at this year’s event, which replaces Munich for 2006. Then of course, there was the big Ducati competition a year or two ago, which was plastered all over the world’s biking and design press. Another came through MV Agusta, plus a whole bunch more. Can’t really see how all that lot got overlooked. But yes, why not a Kneeslider competition too? We’ll happily cover you on the MDA website.

    Cheers,

    Glynn Kerr, President
    The Motorcycle Design Association

  4. aaron says

    April 17, 2006 at 8:52 pm

    crap.

    so much for me fighting the locals for a scrap of attention in a small pond.

    looks like he might send a few ringers our way…two of Glynn’s bikes (the voxan/boxer sportbike and voxan scrambler) would show up on any list I made of “favorite bike designs” unless I was working with a really short list. the midual was very cool too, I was sad that never appeared in volume production.

  5. kneeslider says

    April 18, 2006 at 7:57 am

    Glynn,

    Very nice of you to stop by. I was waiting to see what kind of response we had before putting a lot of time into setting this up. The second post on this topic started to bring out a few contenders and if you will offer coverage then this will be a definite go.

    I will be setting up rules and other criteria soon. This will be interesting and I hope we see a lot of entries.

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