If BMW made a motocross bike, would you buy it?

X2. I was involved with the Rip-It Energy Aprilia Supermoto team back in 2006/2007, and those bikes are trick! Probably too wide/heavy for my tastes, but not much more than a standard 450. 

EDIT: It was 2007/2008. My friend Benny Carlson won the Supermoto Unlimited championship on one.... I think it was '07. 

🤢🤮 zero chance I'd buy a BMW...ever

1. Could they? Of course.

2.When would they? When an attractive business case exists.

3. Will they? See 2. above.

I'm one of the few who had a "chance" to ride the G450X BMW (and several times at that), so no.

Triumph did it the right way. They built a regular motocross bike without any fluff.

Both Aprillia and BMW tried to hard to implement tech from the road side and re-invent the wheel again. So if BMW would just try to build a normal bike instead of a space ship, they could probably do a good job since they are a large company with a lot of money.

But would i buy one? Nah…

If they weren't the most efficient or reliable off road bikes on the planet, at least the Aprilias were really fun to ride...

Not the BMW.

It's a thin line.

The downside to Triumph's approach is that the TF X lacks the strong brand personality most of their street models have... Just a "me too" product, in the marketing sense of the expression.

I'd also have expected a Ducati not to look like an ugly CRF knockoff...

Homestly no, at least at first. I had 3 of the husky 449's. All 3 tried to kill me. One the clutch went replaced it then threw a rod over the big back table top at speedworld  in az let go right at the middle of the face. Lluckily rolled out and jjust bruised up. They gave me all the parts to rebuild a whole new motor. I put one of crank works rods in it thay fit the spec of BMW from the prototypes we were building. 

2nd time something with the cam on the downhill triple at canyon raceway again hhurting for a wweek or 2 bUT nnothing bbroken. 

3rd ttime they gAve me a whole new bIke. That one lasted the llongest at around 24 hours and jjust shut off on the step on step off in the bqck at motoland. 

Dealer gave me my old bikes back as they held onto them.and gAve me my money back aND wiped it clean.

So no not until year 3 when there's no issues.

Loved the hhusky 250 at that time rreally ddidn't want to give it back.

I belive that if you deliver a good product, you don’t need any image around it.A reliable bike with good race results goes a long way.

 Then it depend’s if you want to bea niche brand like TM that hand build the bikes with some exotic parts or if you want to be a brand that compete with the big 3 Japanese and the 3 different ktm brands regarding bike sales.

Keep BMW away from motocross. They make absolute garbage products.

I'm not sure they'll be back. They got spanked. Humiliated. The bike was ill-conceived by people who obviously had no clue what offroad was. It didn't sell. The journalists didn't like it (and some abunduntly made fun of it). Their own factory pilots hated it (and one of them was, as usual, very vocal about his discontent). That G450X turned two of the worlds best enduro racers into midpack guys. 

And things didn't get any better with the TC 449...

I love ATKs obviously . But the only things made here were the frame an swingarm . They were parts bin bikes .

Street version was really fun too. 

Having a 3 year 36k mile warranty is hard to beat. BMW dominated Dakar for many years. If they dropped enough money in it I'm sure the bike would be great. I worked at a BMW dealership for 22 years, would have loved to see them make a real dirt bike. The GS is the world's #1 adventure bike so the GS owners who many own a KTM dirt bike, might just shift over.. Especially with KTM china taking over production instead of the bikes from Austria. The euros screwed themselves cutting off from Russian natural gas. Energy prices are going to drag the EU down for years. 

Oh, I wasn’t aware of that. I didn’t know a whole lot about them. 

No. Because I’d break off cylinders in rutted corners and that would get old etc.

No, I am more of a Mercedes type.I like more comfort

I’m pretty sure Danny raced the CagivaDuc after he raced the Beemer. 

 

The title of this thread reminds me of a saying we had back in the day….if Harley made a plane would you fly it?….lol, I don’t think I would. 

S1000RR? Redefined the liter bike market year one.  

At this stage of the game,definitely not.

SMXV 450.  5 speed conversion,  DLC coated internals, special intake and filter, no 450 could live with it in a straight line, and not many round the corners, limiting factor was the pilot, This day was a 9th in the British Elite Championship, 2010, had a full factory Arrow Ti  exhaust for it , but it was too fragile and would have been destroyed in a crash, so i asked my sponsor to leave the stock ones on, as i could not affford to break them. 

And this is an Ex Mauno Hermunen Factory Husqvarna 449, that he raced in 2010, which had the BMW engine in it , we had it for the 2012 season, and it was seriously fast, was the only thing that i ever rode that was remotely close to the SMXV, it had forks and brakes that normal folk couldnt buy, i still have the forks, in my current racebike, 

But i would never buy a BMW. 

I will buy a 450 Triumph , if it has a 5 speed box, and those forks will go in it. 

COBRA 

BMW motocrosser?  Didn’t BMW design its enduro bike to have a countershaft concentric with the swingarm pivot?  Anybody who knows about bikes, especially dirt bikes, could see that wouldn’t work. That takes away all anti squat, and with it the ability to stiffen up the rear suspension by gassing it, such as when landing from jumps.   

I’ve never owned a BMW but they certainly do seem to have their own way of doing things. As a buddy of mine used to say, they come up with complicated engineering solutions to problems that never existed to start with. 

So I’d wait to see if what they came up with was any good, meaning not “creative”.

Having studiously copied the Suzuki GSX-R1000 K5/K6!