Too Much Government Is In Our Future
TOO MUCH GOVERNMENT IS IN OUR FUTURE
Lane Campbell
In CYCLE WORLD for June, 1977, Fred Gregory summed up his survey of the federal government's plans for noise and emissions regulations for motorcycles. In brief Gregory predicted not much interference andfew harmful effects from federal influence.
Lane Campbell, a member of the staff of Motorcycle Product News and a qualified observer of industry vs government, disagreed with Gregory's conclusions. The other side of the question deserves publication, Campbell said. We agree. Here's another look at what governmental regulation may mean to motorcycling.
Yes. relations between the Feds and the motorcycle industry (such as it is) are harmonious compared to the Car Wars, but is that a thing to be praised or regretted? More to the point, what can you. as rider and motorcycle buyer, expect out of the tightening web of government regulation?
Let’s go deeper into the apparent harmony that exists. Take, for example, the rule-making that led to emission standards for motorcycles. As early as 1974, representatives of the major motorcycle manufacturers actually asked the Environmental Protection Agency for emission standards before the Feds had begun to think seriously of it. The rationale was then (and still is) that if we waited for the Feds to think of it, and let them create standards without our participation, the end result would be fatal.
In a sense, the top four sellers had little choice. Representatives of the EPA rulemaking apparatus were sharp, toughminded 30-ish veterans of infighting with GM, Ford and friends. Having given the nation’s biggest corporate giants their lumps, the EPA troops came with an aura of invincibility, especially when viewed through the eyes of Americans hired to represent an offshore industry.
How do you fight when a bureaucrat asks you a question and you can’t answer it until you’ve consulted with a management structure 7000 miles away? Our people were just as bright as the ones from the EPA, but they were forced to play from a busted flush. I watched a typical scenario during a hearing on California’s separate standards. The EPA types batted our people about like tennis balls. It was pathetic. It’s a tribute to the skill and adroit footwork of the industry reps in this country that, despite the built-in handicaps, they managed to pull off the series of compromises they have. All of us who have been dragged backward through the knothole by the various government agencies know it could have been worse.
Gregory’s article gave a good broad overview of the agencies and issues involved in the current hodge-podge of compromises, but fell short on showing the practical consequences. Most of DOT’s standards are, as stated, innocuous—with one glaring exception. That is the left-shift standardization in the rule on motorcycle controls. OK, theoretically now, any idiot can get on a motorcycle, stomp the footshift, and expect to get the same result. What did we pay for it? First, we got wholesale discrimination against the products of England, Italy and Spain. The Italians, for example, aren’t too eager to order up special runs of left-shift motorcycles; in fact, it gives them a perfect excuse to keep the supply to the U.S. market arbitrarily tight, with resultant exotic prices. It also saddled us with a shifting configuration that is virtually useless in our uniquely American form of dirt track racing. Now all Class C dirt track machinery has to be painstakingly re-converted back to right shift.
One more exotic footnote to the left/ right shift flap. The Laverda 1000 Triple, that 140-mph road-wrinkler. was designed originally for right shift. This placed the huge, protruding generator cover on the right, where, on the right-shift models, the short shift lever just cleared it comfortably. On the left-shift conversions, the rear brake lever has to be shortened dramatically to clear the dyno cover. You guessed it; anyone who tests a U.S. model Laverda 1000 complains that the rear brake is barely there, requiring too much pedal pressure. On the few bikes which astute owners have converted back to right shift, the feel and power of the rear brake is primo, because the disc brake hydraulics were designed for the input from the substantially longer left foot pedal.
Granted, if Laverda was more serious about the U.S. market, it could have come up with a better fix. But if there was a procedure for exempting small, low-volume makes/models (as there is in the car world); or if Laverda’s importers had cared to fight for an exemption, the problem need never have occurred! I've belabored a point which is of interest only to flaming Italophiles; what about the rest of us? For the 95 percent or so who buy a Japanese mass-market brand, the EPA’s emission regs (combined with proposed noise limits) mean a slow, creeping degradation in performance, along with the sudden demise of all two-stroke street bikes over 170cc.
Taking that by the numbers;
Honda is sitting fat. Its entire four-stroke street bike line and four-stroke dirt thumpers already comply with the 1978-'79 standards. Honda’s two-stroke specialty bikes, the MRs and CRs, were created from scratch as off-roaders and will continue largely unchanged and unaffected. By 1980 the blanket standard of 5 grams/ kilometer of hydrocarbons might force a slight reduction in horsepower output for the larger models. The 1983 stándard of 1 gm/km, if it goes into effect, will mean substantial detail redesign of carburetion and ignition (with the possibility of one or more models using Honda’s patented CVCC head configuration). Taken alone, Honda might pull it off, but combined with possible noise standards being considered for 1983, it’s difficult to predict that Honda can comply without degrading performance.
Yamaha has a fairly comprehensive line of four-stroke street machinery ready for 1978 which will easily comply through model year 1979. All are good, acceptable state-of-the-art motorcycles. If Yamaha is able to make the RD4Ö0 two-stroke comply with the 1978 standards, it deserves some sort of award. Expect 1977's unsold inventory to be the last of them; along with the last RD250s and (possibly) the last RD200s. Also expect 1977 to be the only year you’ll see Yamaha’s monoshock street-legal DT series Enduros offered; it's a virtual certainty that none of them can be made to comply without super-tall road gearing and extensive engine mods.
Kawasaki has a full four-stroke road bike lineup, highlighted by a couple of sparkling performers. The company is in good shape through 1979; then the screws start to tighten on them, also. If, as Kawasaki claimed, it could make a production KZ900 that emitted 3.0 gm/km or less, it should remain in good shape with the 1980 standards. By 1983, however, riders will begin to notice the differences, both in the seat of the pants and in the pocketbook.
Suzuki has done the most visible job of crisis engineering in bringing out the DOHC GS series of street four-strokes. If. as expected, the GS-type head configuration is transferred to one or more street/ dirt Singles. Suzuki will have a viable highperformance motorcycle line through 1982. Then like the others, it will feel the performance pinch in 1983.
One side-issue should be of special interest to off-roaders. Yamaha and Suzuki are fielding sophisticated dirt/street twostrokes in the 1977 model year. It seems strange, especially for Yamaha, to bring monoshock technology all down the line for one year only. What gives?
The answer is volume. If a manufacturer uses one engine family (as do Yamaha and Suzuki) to power both street-legal dualpurpose bikes and off-road competition bikes, it faces a substantial reduction in sales volume if the Streeters can no longer be sold. This reduction could range from 25 percent to almost 50 percent for those engine families, according to recent MIC import figures.
Now it’s a plain fact of economics that certain types of costs are fixed and have to be spread out over an entire production run. On a unit cost basis (which is used, eventually, for setting retail prices) this is figured as total fixed cost divided by total number of units produced. The more units produced, the lower the unit fixed cost— and vice versa. Unit fixed cost added to the other, more easily calculated unit costs (like labor and raw materials) determines total cost, which with a little cumshaw for the middleman becomes the price you pay for the bike.
Begin to make the connection? Suddenly chop off 25 to 50 percent of your sales volume for a given engine family, and the unit cost of that family has got to go up. Yamaha apparently is working on a kind of multi-year plan (five-year plan maybe?) for costs; so offering the DT-series twostrokes for even one year increases the total engine production run for the multi-year planning period. What Yamaha is trying to do is cushion the blow, soften the impact of losing the street-legal two-strokes, and delay the ultimate day of reckoning when the retail price of the remaining off-roaders has got to go up.
This is also going to have a horrendous effect on the European specialty makers like Bultaco, Ossa, Montesa, KTM and Husqvarna. Why? Because in the East an awful lot of street-legal and quasi-legal enduro bikes are sold. Seriously, in this one arena, East/West are two different worlds. In Eastern states where there are no giant tracts of public land, enduro bikes have to be street legal just so organizers can throw together a decent loop. Things have gone on in a condition of more-or-less benign neglect, with many of the rural states licensing anything with a rudimentary muffler, lights and a horn. Under the impetus of federal emission and noise standards which the states will be expected to help enforce, these sanctuaries will rapidly vanish (are vanishing, to look at pending legislation in various statehouses). So expect the price of European off-roaders, already high, to go higher. And you Easterners, figure to add the price of a van and/ or trailer to the cost of being competitive.
That’s just the foreseeable outcome as it affects the existing product mix. Yet it only scratches the surface. It is praiseworthy that Honda, Yamaha, Kawasaki and Suzuki have all managed to come out with some fine high-performance road bikes in the face of the coming regs. Given freedom of choice, there would always have been a good market for just such machines. Honda has proven that. But the arbitrary sacrifice of the two-stroke roadster on the altar of clean air has not only taken away our freedom of choice, it has chopped the cutting edge off future performance bike development.
I’m not saying the KZ650, the GS750 and their ilk aren’t neat. So are the Ducati V-Twin, the Morini (special soft spot there) and the Laverdas. Four-strokes all. But have we forgotten the lost potential? How about Can-Am’s watercooled, 340-lb. 500cc two-strokeTwin? Died in the womb, so to speak. How about the measured futility of Yankee bringing the Ossa 500 Twin over for the latter half of a single year? Just those two existing designs promised a whole quantum jump in speed potential and handling capability over comparable displacement four-stroke Multis.
But did you think two-stroke development was going to stand still, given a free market? Try to visualize a common-crankcase two-stroke V-Twin of (say) 500cc displacement, with case-width about Wi in. wider than a comparable single in a 320-lb. street-legal package. Or how about a common-crankcase opposed Twin, shaft drive, narrower, lighter than any BMW with about double the specific power output and exactly the same uncanny opposedTwin perfect balance.
Common crankcase two-stroke Multis are no myth; the only thing that’s held them back is the fact that their crankshafts are harder to design and build. Yet they exist. Mercury racing outboards have used double cylinders on common two-throw crankcases for almost 20 years. The König racing sidecar engine is a watercooled flat Four that is actually a pair of commoncrankcase flat Twins—with rotary valves. Imagine designing your ersatz Gold Wing around that baby.
No more—finito.
Finito also the backyard builder who wanted to put together limited numbers of street/clubman racers built around existing two-stroke Singles (which up to now have been cheap and plentiful building blocks for a budget blitzer). Wave bye-bye.
On the noise front, things are at a standoff. On the one side are the politicians playing one-upmanship to see who can be “toughest on noise.” On the other side are the riders and the Motorcycle Industry Council. The latter has done a tremendous job in the area of noise standards, coming up with comprehensive research and test methods for a model noise control program. In California, MIC proved to the legislators, with actual sound-test run throughs, that they were creating standards to outlaw motorcycles which did not make objectionable noise.
Will the lesson stick? Can it be communicated nationwide? Who knows?
Considering each set of standards alone is one thing. It’s how they interact that can be maddening. Emission controls force the high performance two-stroke off the street; at the same time land closures thwart riders and discourage buyers of off-road equipment. So the screws tighten from two directions. Current standards for noise can be met without serious performance losses. The 1978—’79 emission standards can also be met by most of the industry. But what happens when noise and emission controls start to interact?
Want to see numbers? On hydrocarbon emissions we have stepwise federal standards: sliding-scale 5-14 gm/km for 1978— ’79, 5 gm/km blanket for 1980—’82, 1.0 gm/km for 1983 and beyond. For noise, one proposal being circulated in EPA-ville has standards of 86 dbA for starters, then 83, then 80, finally 75 by about 1987. Now play them together. Does it come out sounding like “Killing Me Softly?”
Motorcycling as we know it is hedged on all sides with tightening boundaries. It’s like looking at an enclosed, gradually shrinking circle and knowing that we, with all the values we hold dear, are being squeezed in the middle.
It is being done so slowly and with such little fanfare that it takes several hard looks to see it happening. That doesn’t change the end result. It just guarantees that only the old men will remember. 151
Motorcycling, as we know it, is hedged on all sides with tight ening boundaries.
