Decline and fall
Most motorcycle manufacturers have come and gone. Pick your favorite defunct moto brand, google it, and surely you will find that someone has written a book all about the reasons no one is making them anymore. But really, every motorcycle brand failure can be attributed to two reasons, people lost interest in buying them and or their makers lost interest in building them. When it comes to why consumers buy motorcycles, this too can be broken down to two reasons, they want affordable basic transportation or they want a motorcycle for fun. Because most motorcycles are road legal, motorcyclists can combine practical transportation and fun, or at least that is what they tell their wives, mothers, husbands... There is a (much) smaller market of motorcycles for commercial, police, or military use. Motorcycles started out with the marriage of the safety bicycle invented in 1883, with the high speed small gasoline engine, invented only a few years later. It is es...