Honda’s new motorcycle mega-factory, built on its huge Kumamoto Site in Japan, is already producing bikes, indeed that’s where the new VFR1200, unveiled in UK February 14th, is being built.
But Honda has announced to its US Dealers that production of GoldWings will not start at Kumamoto until 2011 and that the GoldWings to be made there will be designated a 2012 Model – indicating that the (presumed) new design is unlikely to be unveiled before late 2011.
Quite what this means for UK Wingers remains to be seen because although it is now virtually certain that a new model GoldWing will be on sale somewhere in the world for the 2012 Model Year, it may not be available in Europe until a year or so later, so 2013 – or maybe not at all.
Meanwhile HondaUK has a stock of 200 or so GL1800s in UK, all of which were manufactured at Maryville Ohio before that Factory closed in March 2009, which it will use to fill what will hopefully be a gap rather than the end of a UK model line. These stockpiled GL1800s include some in a new colour (or at least new for UK) called “Pearl Glacier White”. These white bikes were scheduled for release as part of the UK 2010 range but last I heard they were being held back and Dealers were not allowed to order them. Only red, silver and blue bikes are currently listed as options on HondaUK’s website, same as last year. Pearl Arctic White was offered in the US for the 2008 Model Year and this may well be the same colour.
But note that Knutsford Honda’s new Website shows a white GL1800, so maybe they’re more up to date that HondaUK with their information and maybe they can supply GL1800s in fresh colours. Knutsford Honda are also listing two other “new” colours for 2010, one of which is called Mosquito Brown Metallic.
I suppose it’s difficult to think of an attractive name for brown as a colour for a GoldWing and adult mosquitos are brownish in colour – but they feed on blood, carry diseases and and have a very short life, so it’s a strange choice. Maybe they were thinking of the de Havilland Mosquito, a WW2 aircraft made out of wood and canvas, but that had a short life too. Fortunately, since the colour is probably being offered throughout Europe, there was also a German WW2 aircraft called the Focke-Wulf Ta 154 Moskito. A colour called Challenger Brown Metallic was offered for the 2006 and 2008 Model Years in the US, so this “new” UK colour could be the same one.
The final colour listed by Knutsford Honda for 2010 is Nebulous Black Metallic which sounds, well, a bit nebulous. I wonder if Honda were aware that Nebulous is the name of a Radio 4 show by Baby Cow Productions set in the year 2099 and parodying Dr Who. Black is hardly a new colour for UK GoldWings but maybe this one is genuinely different. nebullous Metallic Black was offered in the US for the Model Year 2007.
Honda has in the past used different names for the same colour in different markets, for example Durango Red in the US was the same colour (and had the same Paint Code Number) as Candy Red in the UK. So, Pearl Glacier White as HondaUK’s “new” colour for 2010 (or 2011 or even 2012!) may turn out to be the same as Pearl White, as used for the 2008 Model Year in the US. Mosquito Brown Metallic and Nebulous Black Metallic are probably the same as a colours previously sold in the US too.
The GL1800s currently being offered as new bikes in UK do not have the additional features which appeared in the US for the 2009 Model Year. For example they don’t have remote tyre pressure monitoring, which the 2009 Model Year US GoldWings all have. And the maps on the Navi system of these “new” UK bikes are, until proved otherwise, Garmin’s Version 2008 – which is already way out of date. Garmin, who made the Navi system for Honda, are now on Version 2010 maps for their current range and 2009 Model Year GL1800s, which I saw in the Showrooms over there last Spring, were being shipped with Version 2009 maps.
It’s easy to check which mapset a GL1800 Navi system has; there is a label on the Memory Card on which they are stored and this is accessible under a flap on the Navi system unit in the Trunk. Just lift the flap, pull out the Card (with the ignition off) and read the label. If HondaUK’s 2010 GoldWings have maps on a Compact Flash card labelled “V2008″ they are 2008 Model Year bikes. If they have smaller SD cards with a label saying “V2009″ they are 2009 Model year bikes. My bet is that HondaUK’s stock are all 2008 Model Year bikes with out of date 2008 Navi maps.
Incidentally Garmin have stopped supporting the 2 dimensional mapping used by the Navi System, so Version 2009 is the last one anyone will be able to update to, even unofficially. Officially there is no updating facility for the Navi Systems of UK Spec GL1800s at all, but talk to your GoldWing Dealer, he may be able to help.
So one way and another it looks very much like HondaUK’s stockpile of GL1800s are all 2008 Model Year versions. This is probably true of the yet-to-be-released Glacier Pearl White and the Mosquito Brown Metallic ones too. Yet the List Price of a GL1800 in UK is now a staggering £22,121.
So between now and 2012, or maybe 2013, UK customers are being offered only stockpiled 2008 Model GoldWings and at a price which has gone up by over £3,000 since 2008. HondaUK have also made it very clear that they are no longer interested in supporting the UK GoldWing Club scene at all, although of course to be fair they were very supportive of the 2008 Blackpool Light Parade.
But one way and another UK Wingers might be wondering whether Honda is really interested in a future market for GoldWings in UK. Strategic decisions get made in Naples (HQ of Honda Europe) or in Japan rather than UK. Has a decision been made to neglect GoldWings in UK, unless and until a new model appears or – even worse – for the foreseeable future?
Fortunately at least two UK Honda Dealers are continuing to support both the model and the Club scene to some extent. Knutsford Honda ensured that there was a worthwhile official presence at the 2009 Blackpool Light Parade, by bringing along a HondaUK Exhibition truck and several other attractions but that was more or less it for 2009 and no franchised Honda Dealer was present at the 2009 British Treffen at all. Of course HondaUK are likely to be trying to get all their Dealers to shift some of their remaining GL1800s and they do still have about 200 of them. Given that it’s an open secret that a new GoldWing is on its way, putting the price of leftover two-year old models up by £3,000 seems a funny way of going about shifting them.
Based on the way they’ve done things in the past, Honda is unlikely to release any detail about the specification of the next GoldWing until its public unveiling, so all the rumours you might have been hearing about the nature of the new Wing are just that – rumours. It may indeed turn out to have a 2000cc flat six engine, which someone has claimed to have spotted on a bench testing rig, and it may also look much like a development of the GL1800 in overall shape (described as looking like a GL1800 on steroids) rather than something radically different, but we’ll have to wait and see.
A dual clutch gearbox of the sort the new VFR1200 has is a fairly safe bet but even that isn’t a certainty. There are likely to be plenty of fancy electronics – but will UK Wingers get proper, built-in bike to bike communications at last, which so far we’ve always been denied?
There is lots more information about the new Factory on the internet if you care to search, not least because Honda has been trumpeting its green credentials and the step forward it represents in terms of working conditions for employees. The Factory has special roofing to maximise daylight and minimise the use of artificial lighting and they make use of solar energy too.
There are three main (i.e. mass production) lines and the new VFR is reported to be coming off one of these every 90 seconds. The Factory is capable, if and when its full design capacity is achieved, of making 500,000 bikes per year. Since the Honda motorcycle range extends across far more than three models, Kumamoto’s three mass production lines are presumably time-shared during the production year across various models. There are still other Honda motorcycle factories around the world, notably in India where vast numbers of small motorcycles are made, but except for market-related production facilities like these, Kumamoto seems destined to be Honda’s main motorcycle production site from now on.
GoldWing production in Marysville Ohio was around 8,000 units per year, so if Kumamoto can make the new GoldWing at the same rate as its making VFRs, a full year’s quota of GoldWings will take only 200 hours to complete and the UK’s annual requirement (of 120 or so) could be built in 3 hours! Maybe the Kamamoto workers will be allowed a little longer than 90 seconds to put a GoldWing together.
There are also 15 “Cell Production Lines” at Kumamoto, in which a small team of as few as two workers build motorcycles on the spot, from start to finish. These “Cells” are used for specialised products or specialist variants of production bikes such as police bikes.
If you would like to see something of what goes on at Kumamoto, you can watch a video of the production of the new VFR1200 by clicking here.
In summary Honda is not rushing to start production of GoldWings in its new Japanese factory and there will be a gap of at least two years during which not a single new production GoldWing will have been built anywhere in the world. They have told their US Dealers, for whom the GoldWing is a more important part of the model range than in UK, that this period was needed to transfer the tooling and supplier arrangements from Ohio to Japan.
Meanwhile only stockpiled 2008 model GoldWings are being offered for sale by Honda in UK and the price has gone up spectacularly. As well as putting the price up without explanation, HondaUK are also keeping quiet about the extent to which these stockpiled bikes have out of date Navi systems which they are offering no means of updating. They have also withdrawn from supporting the UK GoldWing Club scene altogether.
While it’s clear that a new GoldWing model is under development for the 2012 Model Year in the US, it remains to be seen whether and when a new GoldWing will be offered in UK. Maybe HondaUK are hoping that Wingers who want to replace their bikes with something more modern will buy the new, shaft-drive VFR1200 instead.
[...] Member Stuart Ormerod has placed a very interesting article on his personal Goldwing Blog commenting on the future of the new 2012 Honda Goldwing and Honda’s new production plant at Kumamoto Japan. Read the full article here [...]
Knutsford does NOT show white as an option, just a picture of a white Wing.
True but I’m not sure that makes things any clearer.
The 2010 GL1800 is shown as a white bike on Knutsford Hionda’s website and you can view it by pasting this url into your browser:
/www.knutsfordhonda.co.uk/content/pages/honda/honda_motorcycles/touring.htm
But when you click on this white bike’s image to look at the 2010 specification and then click on “Available Colours” only Mosquito Brown Metallic and Nebulous Black are shown.
It might be just that the white colour option was missed off the 2010 listing of available colours by the website programmer; i.e. a programming cock up. Knutsford Honda are more likely to have used a ready-made marketing chunk of website provided by HondaUK than to have written this section and taken pictures on their own, so it would be HondaUK’s programmers.
Or it could mean that Pearl Glacier White (which we have known for some time that HondaUK have definitely got among their stockpile of GL1800s) is now being held back even longer, so they’ve got something “new” to introduce for 2011.
That would be an odd thing for Honda UK to do now that the cat’s out of the bag that they have got white ones in the pipeline; white is a popular GoldWing colour and Wingers who are currently thinking of changing would perhaps be inclined to delay their purchase to get a white one.
I have made some further enquiries and apparently HondaUK are keen to shift their unsold Monterey Blue GL1800s before they release any more colours to their Dealers, so in practical terms, apart from any other 2008/2009 colours which are still unsold, you can curremtly buy any colour of GL1800 you like as long as it’s Monterey Blue.
Now that the cat’s out of the bag about what are almost certainly all the colour options which will ever be sold in UK before the new model comes out in 2012 or 2013 to replace the GL1800, you would think HondaUK would accept that it’s a fait accompli and release them all so they can get on with selling them. Maybe someone in Naples or Japan is pulling the strings as usual and HondaUK are just doing as they’re told.
If you are in the market for a new GL1800 it might be sensible to go to Knutsford Honda’s Chrome Crazy Days this coming weekend and ask Sean Davis for yourself what he can supply and when.
Man its so hard to figure Big Red. I just heard from my local rep at a GW meeting that HIS HONDA rep said the “new” models will be in his showroom this June. I asked him if he asked the rep if he meant the “new” models that are the “old” models with revisions or the completely restyled “new” model. He was like DUHHHHH gee I didn’t ask him that.
Look for an early release of the 2012 in 2011! If they stop selling Wings in the UK I would look at the Triumph 2300. I guess they are sold there.
Even Honda Motorcycle dealers that I’ve talk to don’t understand that’s going on with the new Goldwing Model. I’ve had 5 GoldWings. It may be at a time when most of us are hurting, the rich are richer than ever and sales of Bentley and luxury cars are through the roof.
So, Honda may be looking at that market and saying that no one is going to be able to afford a £20,000 GoldWing who is not high income. So, that large-scale GoldWing market has no future and they’re going to come out with a 2013 £55,000 to £70,000 state of the art GoldWing. They’ll produce them only on special custom order and we will only have used ones and those that are stock piled.
It would be a logical way to deal with the irreversible decline of the middle class in the US and most of the world. This isn’t the dreamy illusion and picture and fantasy about the future GoldWing that most are thinking of; it is a look at the economic realities that world business leaders will see on a level that we don’t have access to.
That’s a very gloomy outlook but you have a point. GoldWings have been produced for the high end of the mass market and historically it’s only the even higher end market (Cartrier, Bentley etc) which does reasonably well in a recession. Maybe Honda will feel that the demand for new GoldWings in the next few years will be too small to justify putting the new model into mass production. Marysville was making over 8,000 GoldWings per year and maybe that gives some idea of the volumes they would be aiming for. The Eastern European and Far East markets are of course an expanding opportunity, so it’s not all gloom in the global market. There will presumably be a minimum predicted global market which is necessary to make GoldWing production worthwhile.
So Honda might already have either delayed things by a year or two or even pulled the plug on the new model altogether. We’ll have to wait and see. The new model will have been under development for some years and as recently as a year ago they were clearly stilling planning to start producing it in 2011 for release late 2011. It therefore would be an expensive cancellation even if it was taken nearly a year ago.
I don’t think Honda would go for a £50,000+ GoldWing as a bespoke, low volume, ultra high end GoldWing. I think we’ll either see release of another £20,000+ bike in late 2011 as planned, or a delay for a year or two or complete cancellation – and hopefully not that.
What in the heck is going on with the 2012′s?? I need to know something before the 2010′s are all gone … if that’s the best deal. Will Honda really change the look of the 2012′s? Will it be a 6 speed transmission? Hey … Hey!! Does anybody know??? Dan
I fear than no one other than the select few Honda employees who need to know for Honda’s purposes will have much of a clue. It was unusual for Honda to brief their US Dealers so far ahead of a release date, as they did a year or so ago.
Hi and sorry for my English,
I need to renew my motorcycle taxi fleet, currently Honda Goldwing 1800 of 2009.
Can you tell me more about the component output of a new model in France?
Renewal Date: March 2011.
Thank you very much,
Christophe Escoffier
Manager
This is driving me nuts. I have been bikeless since summer 2009. I wish they let me at least see what the bike will look like. It better be worth the wait!!! I want all the amenities. Bluetooth, better heated seats/grips, more powerful stereo, auto kickstand, and auto windshield. I hope they don’t disappoint!!! Cost doesnt matter to me, I just want the bike to be the best out there!
Hi Christophe, I can’t help you I’m afraid. I assume that you are interested in what the new GoldWing will have in the way of features but Honda are, as usual, being very secretive.
I owned a GoldWing and have wanted to buy one for the past 4 years but the technology nor style has been what I wanted. I’d see a CB Radio as an addition for $1,000.00 including the Ant. but it has no iPOD dock. Talk about dated! Honda needs to offer a lot more. As someone who likes to ride cross country I want features that offer a smoother ride and a better seating position that allows for floor boards for the driver with gear and brake access. I don’t want a trailer but a lot of us have tents and sleeping bags. I think the finish on the GoldWings is not meant to to take a beating. ON long trips alot of road stuff jumps up. Also, I’d like to see engine guards. They save the bike and rider. The standard seat has not been padded enough for cross country. Honda needs to think of our butts. Navigation should better as well as an integrated communication system with cell phone, CB, bluetooth and rider. The cheap plastic controls for the rider should be made of a much better quality. When driving a Vet I liked the headsup display as you can keep your eyes on the road at all times. We’ll need better battery storage, When driving in 110 degrees I’d like options that cool me off. IN the winter let the engine heat work to keep me warm. I want to be seen at every angle from drivers around me. Iwant my blind spots covered with optics or technology. At night, I want to seen even from the side to on coming traffic. When driving through deer country I’d like a system that makes me aware of such dangers. I’ll be glad to pay for all these features. two adults about 300 lbs and fully packed luggage and things stapped to the bike another 100lbs, tent, sleeping bages, axe, pots and pans, tools. Need to pull this gear without strain up steep hills and dirt roads. Also at times you’re on STEEP declines so the bike must have good balance even with two people and fully loaded. At times I felt that the front of the bike was too light. The weight in the faring should be better
Honda have aimed previous GoldWing models primarily at the North American “highway tourer” market which your wish list perhaps reflects, although the GL1800 was certainly a step change towards a higher performance and more versatile grand tourer, which suits me. It will be interesting to see if the new model, which has been designed and is hopefully now being built in Japan, will provide a further step in that direction – and therefore have more European appeal and be able to compete with the BMW K1600GT. Of course if you personally are prepared to pay for exactly what you want Honda might design, build and prove a bike to meet your precise needs. A few hundred million dollars should cover it!
If Honda does not let us know some thing pretty quick. They bare going to start losing customers. We were told there would be a 2012 release in April 2011, and no one knows a cotton picking thing. Every bike I have ever owned has been a Honda and now it looks like I might be going to the dark side.
Well Honda has the red ribbon for secret keeping but still cannont fess up to reality on some issues with the Wing, as in no satellite radio signal when travelling south easterly in the midwest and central USA.
So don’t expect too much from them when it comes to customer satisfaction.
I think I’ll hang on to my bike for a while – its got all the ’2012′ bits already fitted – iPod interface, Proper GPS (660), upgraded suspension, coated wheels, etc and at the moment I thinl it looks nicer than the 2012 does
Cheers,
Ian.