Take five motorcycles. All but one are V-Twins (10 years ago an endangered species, now one of the dominant motorcycle engines). All sized from 1100 to 1500cc, all weighing 550 or more. All with four or five gears, none with seat heights above 29 inches. They're painted different colors, but if you think that we can't tell them apart by anything other than the paint -- well, you're pleasantly wrong. How different can they be? That's the question non-cruiser aficionados always ask, and it's usually answered one way "If you have to ask, you don't understand."

Topping the firm's 2005 announcements is the Hammer, a 1634cc, six-speed power cruiser. Responding to the trend towards ever-bigger V-twins, Victory bored out is four-valve 1507cc overhead-cam 50-degree V-twin—already the performance king among mid-teen V-twins—by 4mm to 101mm, creating an engine which could cruise at a lower rpm and still provide no-downshift passing power.

Enter celebrated custom [motorcycle] builder Arlen Ness and his creative son, Corey, both partially responsible for the alluring styling of the Vegas, a [motorcycle] that is putting Victory on the map. Now with the visual appeal Victory has always needed, we wondered if the Vegas can go toe-to-toe with the benchmark in the custom cruiser segment, H-D’s FXSTD Softail Deuce.

The Savage does not feel as refined as some of the v-twins available out there, but to me that's part of it's appeal. There is a pronounced flywheel effect that gives the [Suzuki] an unmistakable charm (as a friend on the 'net recently put it, "you can actually *feel* the pull of each power stroke when taking a slow turn in third gear, and then just gradually roll on the power"). And there is a level of omnipresent vibration at all revs (not annoying, except perhaps on high-mileage excursions) that reminds you you're sitting on a motorcycle.

The Volusia Intruder is powered by the same tried-and-true 805cc 45-degree V-twin motivating the standard 800 Intruder. And although the engine boasts an identical 83.0 x 74.4mm bore and stroke, Suzuki has pumped up the Volusia powerplant's torque and low rpm power with a heavier generator rotor, and reversed the position of the rear cylinder head to adapt to the modified cradle frame. Styling variations also forced changes to the cylinder cooling fins, and cylinder head intakes for both jugs on the Volusia's V-twin are now positioned to breathe through a single, 34mm carburetor instead of the original's dual carb arrangement.

Honda doesn't build $27,000 "custom" motorcycles. Honda doesn't create a design study, stay strictly loyal to that design, and work "backwards" towards a production machine. Of course, all of this was true before the Rune. Now, it's not necessarily true. The Rune proves Honda can work this way.

Manufacturing motorcycles (or cars -- another thing Honda does) isn't entirely about making money on products that sell in large numbers (although, Honda is pretty good at that part, too). Part of it is about building a brand image.

The biggest news with the Aero is that Honda dropped the chain drive from the old 750's in favor of a quiet maintenance-free shaft drive. Now this 750 competes on a level playing field with the Suzuki Intruder and Volusia 800's, the Kawasaki Vulcan 750, and the Yamaha V-Star 650, which now may feel the pressure to bump up their displacement to the 750 range soon.

The surprise with the new Yamaha Road Star isn't that its engine has been updated and enlarged to 1670cc using components from the Warrior. We expected that. The surprises are how much more solid that extra 68cc makes the engine feel and the other changes Yamaha made to the [motorcycle] and some it didn't make.