Sunday, August 8, 2010

Motorcycles enter design fray

Motorcycles enter design fray
Britain has a new motorcycle brand. At a time when most manufacturers are floundering to just stay afloat, a collaboration between one of the UK’s leading motorcycle design studios, Xenophya Design and product designer Ellis Pitt has created a new British motorcycle company, Mac Motorcycles.

Pitt has collaborated with the cracking design team at Xenophya for the past 9 months to create a small range of lightweight, air-cooled singles. All models use a tubular backbone frame and are powered by the 500cc Buell “Blast” motor, a pity as there are better options from Japan, Austria and Germany available.

“Between us we’d designed, modified, built and ridden all sorts of motorcycles over the last 30 years and thought it was time to produce a motorcycle that reflected our philosophy,” says Pitt.

“Our influences have been diverse and we’ve made unusual connections between genres of motorcycles such as choppers, Italian singles from the 1950s, flat-trackers and competition specials. What underpins Mac Motorcycles’ philosophy though is the belief that the riding experience and the stories that go with motorcycle journeys seem to have been hijacked by technology and plastic.”

The company has created four different models: “Spud” for dossing about on, “Ruby”, the motorcycle equivalent of the girl-next-door, “Peashooter” for squirting to your favourite pub and gassing with your mates and the “‘Roarer”, a modern-day dinosaur-chaser.

Based in the small English town of Upton-Upon-Severn in Worcestershire, Mac Motorcycles plans to market this unique new range of motorcycles throughout the world. The company’s initial plans are to produce a few hundred bikes in small batches increasing production as appropriate. Bikes will be made in small batches for markets in the UK, North America and Japan, with customers in France and Australia in-mind too.

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