BSA Motorcycles Then And Now: What Happened?

Yahoo

31-01-2025

BSA Motorcycles are on the verge of a comeback, reviving the heritage of the brand's 1960s heyday — by 1969, the conglomerate of BSA and Triumph made up 80 percent of Britain's overseas motorcycle sales. Yet, by 1971 the company was deeply in debt, and by 1973 production stopped altogether. What happened?
BSA's website certainly won't say, only stating 'the Group found themselves with a trading loss of £3m, despite all their success.' Other histories of the company similarly jump straight from smashing success to crushing defeat. With enough searching, though, narratives start to form.
BSA's first commercial motorcycle hit the market in 1910, after a scattered few one-off projects prior. In 1953, the Birmingham Small Arms Company decided that this whole motorcycle business was best spun off from the company's other endeavors, and started up BSA Motorcycles as an independent business — a business that included the BSA, Ariel, and Triumph marquees under one roof.
At this point, BSA was on top of the world. It was winning races, selling one in four bikes globally — the company could do no wrong. Until, that is, new competition arrived. Street bikes from Japan, dirt bikes and enduros from Europe, suddenly the BSA brands found themselves treading water, just trying to keep their heads above the surf — and, predictably, floundering a bit in the process. WebBikeWorld has details:
With the BSA A7 (500) and A10 (650) vertical twins doing well, they decided to completely redesign them into the 'new' unit construction mold, like Triumph had done with its 500 twin in 1959. So, in 1962, BSA introduced its all new BSA A50 (500) & A65 (650) unit-construction twins. Everyone yawned. They were ugly, had vibration problems like never before & they never sold well again (one year later, Triumph went unit-construction with its 650 twin & it was a major hit). Then, in 1963, BSA killed off its best-seller, the Gold Star, without a suitable replacement. It spent the rest of the 1960s struggling with an out-of-touch product line & never really addressed the problems.
BSA, Triumph, and Ariel were competing with each other and with this sudden and strong foreign competition. They didn't have much in the way of new bikes to use in that competition, and what investment the company did make into new product went unrecovered — the Ariel 3, a scooter somewhere between a Honda Cub and a Big Wheel, wasn't exactly a smash hit. Much like declining Harley-Davidson sales today, the fall of the BSA brands meant the fall of the British motorcycle market with it — taking a profitable industry away form the island. This, Downing Street decided, would not do.
A government loan revitalized BSA in 1973, merging it with Norton Villiers to create Norton Villiers Triumph — a patchwork of fading motorcycle brands with too many factories to its too many names. NVT executives tried to shutter one of these factories, the Triumph plant in Meriden, and ended up facing a worker strike so powerful that the workers ended up owning Triumph by the end. Let no one say workers don't have power.
While Triumph's workers were seizing the means of production, BSA didn't fare quite as well. Norton Villiers Triumph closed its doors in 1978, and the BSA name didn't grace another street bike name until a very short run of 400cc bikes in the late '90s.
With any luck, the latest iteration of BSA — this time run by Mahindra — will be immune to the poor planning and lack of preparedness that felled prior versions of the company. The new Gold Star 650 looks to be perfect competition for Royal Enfield's 650 line of bikes: Vintage styling, modern engineering, a heritage name, and a reasonable cost of entry. Plus, coming from Mahindra, we can always count on it for character.
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