I know. “I told you so” is not a good look.
Better to be gracious in both defeat and victory, because we’ll all end up on both sides plenty of times in life. But indulge me a little this time, because this one was just too easy.
About a year and a half ago, I wrote a post titled “Four reasons the new BMW R 18 cruiser will be a sales flop.” I won’t repeat my arguments, because you can go back and read them for yourself if you’re interested, but to sum it up in a single sentence: The R 18 is a different kind of cruiser motorcycle built for a globally niche market that’s dying off, and cruiser buyers have proven time and again that they don’t want something different. The R 18, I concluded, “flies into the headwinds of all the trends in the industry.”
So where are we now? I didn’t even think to revisit my old argument until comments about R 18s being deeply discounted started popping up on my radar. So I took a closer look.
First of all, BMW is offering incentives on new 2021 R 18s and R 18 Classics. BMW will give you a 60-month loan at 0.9 percent interest and will make your first six months of payments for you, up to $2,000. Dealers seem kind of desperate to unload R 18s, as well. I did a quick search on Cycle Trader and saw more than two dozen R 18s for sale under $14,000. True, many of those were demo models, usually with between 350 to 500 miles on them. But some were brand new. Extend the price cap up to $15,000 and a few dozen more popped up, many of them new.
The original R 18 base price was $17,495, but as we know, finding a BMW motorcycle in a dealership at base price is a rare occurrence, since BMW mostly imports models with some of their premium packages already added. The price of an R 18 First Edition, a more common model, was $19,870.
Dealers are desperate to move R 18s. This was supposed to be an $18,000 motorcycle when it was just 315 miles newer.
No matter how you slice it, the bottom line is that there are literally a couple of hundred R 18s listed on Cycle Trader for below MSRP. And this is at a time when many motorcycle dealers are short on inventory and prices of used motorcycles are shockingly high in general.
In that post a year and a half ago, I wrote, “Considering how much has been invested in this concept already and how hard BMW has promoted it, those executives must be quite confident they have a winner here. I’m equally confident it will be an epic sales flop. One of us has to be wrong. I’m putting this on the record now so I can come back in a couple of years and either crow or eat crow.”
If I can somehow say this as mildly and with the least braggadocio possible, cock a doodle do.
The r18 was such a baffling decision.
Harley’s foray into ADV makes sense – it’s a growing market where consumers are more concerned about the bike itself rather than the brand (though ofc there’s massive brand loyalty to BMW, I think a good chunk of that is based on it just being a REALLY good product).
BMW going into cruisers was just.. it’s a market that’s only decreasing and you’re not bringing anything new to the table – anyway im just rehashing what you and everyone have said. It just makes me so mad that they would make a whole new giant engine to make a bad (but gorgeous) bike when they could’ve just taken the r9t engine and made a semi-cruiser out of that and get air-cooled cachet on top of everything.
why bmw, whyyyy, this was so obviously going to happen it was such a huge gamble, whyyyyyyyy
My feelings exactly.
I thought the various R nineT models did a good job of drawing on a little of BMW’s true heritage, adding some unique styling to attract new customers (of all ages) and maintaining many of the characteristics that made the boxer engine so enduringly popular. But the R 18 accomplished none of those things.