The Cruisers

THE CRUISERS

THESE ARE MOTORCYCLES THE way motorcycles are supposed to be. We call them cruisers, other people call them customs or specials; but no matter what name you give them, they are America's bikes. Fully 60 percent of all motorcycles sold in this country during 1987 will be cruisers.

And for good reason. These are straightforward, just-the-factsma’am machines. They look like real motorcycles, not like slicked-down roadracers or gawky-looking dirt bikes. Their fenders are real steel, not plastic. Chrome? By the bushel basket. Their engines are on display like the ferris wheel on a midway, not hidden behind trendy, all-enclosing bodywork.

And what engines! Hairy-chested V-Twins, each and every one. Not so many years ago, engines of this type were teetering on the precipice of extinction, little more than lumbering mechanical dinosaurs. But 1987 is a landmark year for V-Twins: For the first time, all four Japanese manufacturers—and Harley-Davidson, of course—have big V-Twins in their lineups.

To find out how these big V-cruisers compare with one another, we gathered them all together—six machines from five manufacturers—and let them strut their stuff. From Honda came the Shadow 1100, restyled after being introduced in 1985. Yamaha provided its Virago 1 100, a bike voted Best Cruiser in CYCLE WORLD’S 1986 Ten Best awards. Next came the Intruder 1400, which Suzuki hopes will meet with the same critical acclaim and sales success as the Intruder 700. The newest Japanese cruiser is the Kawasaki Vulcan 88, the largest-displacement V-Twin of recent times. And we chose two Harley-Davidsons for this comparison. The Softail Custom was an obvious choice; for it’s a cruiser with a capital C. From the opposite end of the spectrum came the the FXRS Sport, perhaps the most mainstream Harley in decades.

In addition to our regular cruiserbike testing regimen, we also threw some soft luggage on all of these machines and pointed them toward the deserts and mountains of the Southwest, all in an effort to find the best big V-Twin cruiser in America.

In alphabetical order, the contenders are . . .

It's the year of the V-Twin, and these are the stars