Golden era for sidecar bikes

Bloomberg

This month in England, H&H Auctions will sell more than 100 vintage motorcycles taken from one of the biggest collections in the country. Among the lot are four sidecar motorcycles that are as notable for their rarity as for their quirky design style and ride personalities. There will be a 1924 AJS Model D Combo, a 1932 BSA G12 Combo used by the Bath City Police, a 1930 BSA Sloper Combo, and a 1925 Quadrant Combo.
Mark Bryan, the head motorcycle specialist for H&H, found them covered in dust and bird droppings tucked away in a large barn in rural Gloucestershire. It was the proverbial family barn-find, yes, but it was also more unusual than your average dusty discovery. “It’s very unusual for me to come across somebody who collects multiple of these bikes—sidecars take up a lot of space,” Bryan said. “They are not easy to just hide out of the way.”
Sidecar motorcycles require special considerations both on the road and in storage. They’re three-wheeled machines with complicated—and unwieldy—components. You can’t just stack them against each other in a shed as with regular two-wheel motorbikes. What’s more, many early ones were made with cloth covers and wooden frames, so they have largely decayed since the height of their popularity in the 1930s and ‘40s. That was the age of one-car families, when sidecars were used as an essential and highly practical alternative form of family transpiration.
“This is a specialized item—quirky,” Bryan said. Sidecar-style bicycles emerged in the late 1800s, when a motorized “safety” bicycle with a light sidecar earned a patent; by 1914, even Harley-Davidson had cataloged a three-wheeled motorized sidecar bike. During World War I, Western Front soldiers used them for dispatch duties. After the war, cars became much less expensive, and many sidecar companies disappeared. A few brands, such as Ural and Harley, continued to make bikes for people devoted to their eccentric style: “They’re not generally as nice to ride as a regular motorcycle,” Bryan said. “There is a group of people who love them, but it’s a specialized group.”
The real appeal, for many devotees, is to access the history and design of the old models. According to Jonathan Klinger, the head specialist at Hagerty, a company that insures high-value and collectable cars and motorcycles, vintage motorbikes make up 5 percent of all vehicles offered at North American collector car auctions. That number has been fairly consistent for the last four years, he said.
“In terms of the overall collector-vehicle market, vintage motorcycles are the second most active in terms of year-over-year activity during the past five years,” Klinger said. “To put that into perspective, they are behind vintage pickups/SUVs but ahead of traditional collector cars, in terms of increased activity.”
But they are increasingly popular as new-vehicle purchases. Last year people in the United States bought more than 500,000 motorcycles, a 3.55 percent increase over 2014. Sidecars represent less than 5 percent of that total, though their number has remained relatively steady, according to Matt Trigaux, the spokesman for Seattle-based Ural Sidecar Motorcycles. What’s more, the worldwide market for motorcycles is forecast to grow by 7.2 percent annually, to 134.5 million units, by the end of 2016, and industry revenues are expected to rise 8.7 percent per year, to $90.1 billion, according to a report from RNRMarketResearch. Statistics on sidecar growth are not compiled separately from those for two-wheeled motorcycles, though Trigaux said he expects it to remain steady.
More specifically, Trigaux said that since the 75-year-old Ural brand entered the US market 10 years ago, the volume and price of sidecar bikes being sold have risen dramatically. Sales last year hit roughly 2,000, up from 1,200 two years ago and double what they were when Ural first came to the US 10 years ago; the majority went to US buyers. “We used to see a lot more camo,” Trigaux said. “It was much more utilitarian before, but now it’s a bigger lifestyle thing.”
Where the original Ural customers were typically white, male hunters and DIY-type campers, more Ural buyers are now women and people who use the bikes to carry their dog (or brother or daughter, say) down the street to get coffee. What’s more, the median age of buyers has dropped by 10 years during the past two years, Trigaux said. While the initial price of the Ural bikes was less than $15,000, the majority now sell for more than $20,000.