Seriously, what's to discontinue for worn out tooling? All we're talking about here is a couple of plastic parts, some vender supplied wiring and brackets along with other low bid incidentals. The rest of the scooter is pure run of the mill touring bike.
And any redesign of the fairing as far as styling or ergonomics would not take a model year.
RG sales are good even though volume is low, so dealers have to be really balking at this. It's rare to find a leftover RG in this area, and used are almost nonexistent at the dealers.
I'm thinking of three possibilities.
They reworked the shark nose so as to make the inner fairing common to the rest of the touring line. And the year off is to let people get used to the look. Lowers costs and increases profits.
They redid the whole scooter so as to look more like the custom built RG's with the ass dragen bags and raked big wheel front ends that have been so popular in the last couple of years. It would be in keeping with maximizing profits and creating high end scooter demand.
Or, this is it and as predicted by some, the RG will be the first water cooled tourer, with the rads built into the fairing. In this instance we should see some leaks from emissions certs as well as some glimpses of road tests by late next summer.
The MoCo has to have noticed that Honda has taken a shot at the RG Custom segment. And this could be a reaction to that. It could also be that they want to do something that will increase the profit per unit on the RG. Based on pricing, they would seem to be the lowest profits among baggers. And a year off would limit the shock and resistance among buyers. Or perhaps, by chance, for some unexplained reason, they have finally taken note of the heat and performance complaints from their bagger customers and decided that it was time to stop putting off the need to address these problems.
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Topic: No Roadglide for 2014 (Read 23321 times)