* Harley-Davidson Dyna Street Bob
* Star Midnight Warrior
* Suzuki Boulevard M109R Limited Edition
* Victory Kingpin 8-Ball
Any dyed-in-the-wool motorcyclist can tell you that cruisers are as much about attitude as anything else. But as our segment has mushroomed with the rest of the industry over the last 15 years, so has the "performance" level of some cruisers. The resulting trends have birthed bikes that are no longer just visually cool, but powerful, functional runners as well. As a result, we now have more 'serious' subcategories than we know what to do with. But what about the fringe bikes that cover more than one subset?
After our last musclebike test (The Great Musclebike Brawl, May '09), we found ourselves left with several such candidates. A few didn't make it into that test because of scheduling, and the others simply couldn't be pigeonholed in the first place. We came up with the odd muscle bike here, a boulevard troller there. This one had apes; that one had a solo seat. One, frankly, could have come from a sci-fi movie. But all had character-in spades.
Initially, we planned to call this roundup "The Lucky 13s" because the bikes retail for around $13,000 in stock form. That grand scheme went up in smoke when some of the manufacturers started pimping their higher-priced limited editions on us, eclipsing the $13,000 limit. Denied our simple categorization, we ended up dubbing it The 'Tude Test: bikes whose most common denominator is a healthy dose of attitude. The stock versions still fell within $500 of the 13K mark, but "Attitude Bikes" just had a better ring to it.