Once upon a time, nearly every motorcycle manufacturer in the land carried middleweight bikes at the core of its lineup. When the class was created back in 1985 with Yamaha's Virago 1100, anything in that range was thought to be plenty powerful-and in many segments of the motorcycle market literbikes are still widely considered to be the big guns. It's the cruiser market that's changed. With many machines now displacing well over 1500cc, a not-as-glamorous "middleweight" tag on a cruiser usually signifies around 1 liter of displacement-still nothing to sneeze at.

If you want to make a motorcycle tester nervous about your new touring bike, tell him that your highest priority when designing the bike was styling. It's not that we have anything against good looks, but full-dress tourers require truckloads of engineering. They need to be comfortable, carry substantial amounts of gear, offer great range, provide enough power to make it all work at speed, still be manageable at low speed and in corners, and offer a raft of amenities. The problem is that style often gets in the way of all those functional requirements.

"Say, that's a pretty nice rig. The low saddle and the way the v-twin is framed- beautiful. But i'm not sure it's really a cruiser . . . "

Time waits for no motorcycle: One day you're king of the class, the next you're just a lowly back-marker. So it is with this pair of baggers, the 2008 Harley-Davidson Road King and the 2008 Star Royal Star Tour Deluxe. When they last butted bags on these pages (Aug. '05), the Tour Deluxe won the crown. The testers cited it for a snappy engine, best bags, best comfort and nice wind protection. But they also dinged the Star for its long handlebars (unfriendly for tight turns), poor ground clearance and poor gas mileage (33.5 mpg). The Road King got positive marks for its quickly removable windscreen (a feature also found on the Star), gas mileage (37.7 mpg) and smooth fuel injection. The Harley, on the other hand, was chastised for its riding position (feet forward and too high), handlebar location (forward and too low) and less-than-impressive mill. Both were rapped for lackluster brakes.

What do you call a cruiser larger than 1000cc but smaller than the horsepower-happy two-liter behemoths? The market has struggled to pin the right label on this evolving class for years, settling (rather lazily) on the catchall designation "middleweight." If you believe the spin, this includes everything from 600cc on up to 1300cc-quite an overwhelming mix of machinery.

People frequently describe motorcycles as having "attitude," but everybody probably has a different idea about what that means. Webster's defines attitude as "a feeling or emotion toward a fact or state."

It's easy to understand why Suzuki's Boulevard C50 outsold all other metric cruisers last year. The 750 to 900cc cruiser category has hit a sweet spot for many motorcycle buyers. The bikes in this displacement range are big enough to be taken seriously, even for long-distance travel. And they strike an appealing balance of size, style, comfort and price. Virtually every major motorcycle manufacturer has one (we won't step into the debate about whether the Star V-Star 650 fits in this class) and sees strong sales.

The PR folks at Star Motorcycles (the manufacturer formerly known as Yamaha) sure know how to launch a new cruiser. International motojournalists have been lucky enough to travel to some of the preeminent riding locations in the world to sample new Star cruisers. This fall, the exotic locale to which the majority of the motorcycle magazines in the world would travel to obtain photos and riding impressions of the new V Star 1300 was Asheville, North Carolina. People who weren't fortunate enough to visit Asheville back in the days when it hosted the Hoot are probably wondering why the heck Star would choose rural North Carolina instead of some place really cool.

FirstRide

U.S. 6 East, Provincetown, MA, 3205 Miles." That sign, on the outskirts of Bishop, California, reads like an invitation. And with Harley's new Street Glide waiting to go for a ride, I decided to accept it. Being a Westerner, I needed a map to learn that Provincetown was at the tip of Cape Cod.

Big performance is hardly the first thing you think of when you think about cruisers. Even the so-called "performance cruisers" are hard-pressed to crack the 12-second barrier in the quarter-mile in their slow-revving, overweight, factory-tuned state, never mind standard cruisers, most of which have a difficult time outrunning the neighbor kid's poorly muffled Honda Civic. The horror

What In The World?Let's face it-we motorcyclists have a pretty dismal opinion of diesel engines, usually derived from the painful consequences of encountering a road surface coated with oil carelessly dropped by a truck, or even one of the increasing numbers of cars powered by Rudolf Diesel's compression-ignition motor invented back in the 1890s. Since then, the diesel engine has become a mainstay of marine, locomotive, urban transport, road haulage and stationary use-indeed, any application where its inherent benefits of 30 percent lower fuel consumption, cleaner emissions and longer life, as compared to an equivalent internal combustion petrol engine employing the Otto principle (i.e., using a spark plug to light the fire), can sufficiently offset its disadvantages of increased noise, vibration, higher manufacturing costs, and greater weight and bulk. While permitting the use of cheaper, non-fossil fuels (Rudi ran his early engines on peanut oil!), diesel engines require a heavier, more robust construction, until now making them unsuitable for certain applications such as aircraft and motorcycles.

The last to throw its hat into the mega-twin ring, Suzuki has also brought the smallest-caliber weapon to bear. But, if it needs to be said again, size isn't everything, and in this case the smallest gun packs the biggest wallop. Instead of simply pursuing big-twin power the old-fashioned way, with cubic inches, Suzuki turned to technology and efficiency, which, after all, is how the Japanese achieved success in the first place.

No puny 1700s here. We're playing with the big boys. If you aren't packing more than 1700cc in your V-twin, you don't need to show up. Only four bikes qualify at this rarified displacement level. Kawasaki's Vulcan 2000, the biggest of the big, brings 2053cc to bear. Yamaha's new Star Roadliner weighs in at second with 1854cc. It's followed by the original MegaTwin, the Honda VTX1800, boasting 1795cc. And the final and most recent entry into this elite group is the 1783cc Suzuki Boulevard M109R.

I recently did a quick 200 miles the new-for-2007 Tour Version of the Victory Kingpin. Victory calls this version of the Kingpin motorcycle a "soft tourer." It offers a medium-sized windshield — low enough for me (five-foot-ten) to see over — and clear plastic lowers alongside the fork legs for wind protection. The windshield, lowers, and the smallish, leather-covered, lockable hard saddlebags were offered last year as an accessory package that turned the Kingpin into the Kingpin Deluxe, although that bike was never considered an official model.

It came as a bit of a surprise when the head honcho of the Polaris Victory Motorcycles division, Mark Blackwell, introduced the company's new 2006 model, the Vegas Jackpot, as "a bike for bikers rather than motorcyclists." We like to flog our rides, so that phrase didn't really sweeten the 'Pot for us (as it were), but it certainly brought the bike's focus into sharp relief. The Jackpot was being positioned as a see-me cruiser clearly aimed at the recreational boulevard enthusiast rather than canyon-carving performance monkeys — or open-road wanderers. That was over six months ago, and we've since managed to snare a good deal of seat time on this latest twist of the Vegas platform — a Ness version, no less. Is the Jackpot less showy and more go-ey than its appearance (and marketing folk) would have you believe? Let's just say it won't win any awards for Commuter of the Year...

Let's face it—we motorcyclists have a pretty dismal opinion of diesel engines, usually derived from the painful consequences of encountering a road surface coated with oil carelessly dropped by a truck or even one of the increasing numbers of cars powered by Rudolf Diesel's compression-ignition motor invented back in the 1890s. Since then, the diesel engine has become a mainstay of marine, locomotive, urban transport, road haulage and stationary use—indeed, any application where its inherent benefits of 30 percent lower fuel consumption, cleaner emissions and longer life, as compared to an equivalent internal combustion petrol engine employing the Otto principle (i.e., using a spark plug to light the fire), can sufficiently offset its disadvantages of increased noise, vibration, higher manufacturing costs, and greater weight and bulk. While permitting the use of cheaper, non-fossil fuels (Rudi ran his early engines on peanut oil!), diesel engines require a heavier, more robust construction, until now making them unsuitable for certain applications such as aircraft and motorcycles.

For years, the Harley-Davidson Wide Glide has been the Dyna with attitude. Its kicked out, wide-set front fork legs and near-ape-hanger handlebar took it about as close to a real chopper as a factory-built motorcycle dares go. But even bad-ass choppers must eventually heed the march of progress, and for 2006, the FXDWG joined the rest of Harley's Dyna family in series of major upgrades. The headline change is the standard "Cruise Drive" six-speed transmission, which debuts in the Dyna line, while the rest of Harley's motorcycles continue to get by with five gearbox cogs.

At less than 1800cc, Suzuki's new Boulevard M109R big twin won't set any records for displacement among the recent entries into the big twin motorcycle class, but the sleek new 109-cubic-incg Boulevard could be the strongest of the big twins. A glance will tell you of its performance intent, but you'll have to look deeper to find out how it makes its more than 120 horsepower.

At less than 1800cc, Suzuki's new Boulevard M109R big twin won't set any records for displacement among the recent entries into the big twin motorcycle class, but the sleek new 109-cubic-incg Boulevard could be the strongest of the big twins. A glance will tell you of its performance intent, but you'll have to look deeper to find out how it makes its more than 120 horsepower.

Just when it looked like competition among big-inch cruisers was turning into a battle of wretched excess, Yamaha has returned to sanity with a big twin that delivers more of everything without crossing the line between "enough" and "too much." The new Star Roadliner is big, elegant and almost luxuriously comfortable but also easy to manage, responsive and more powerful than other members of the 100-cubic-inch club.

Suzuki's big single, the bike that became the Boulevard S40, arrived 20 years ago, in 1986. It was just in time to catch the very end of the last heyday for big single-cylinder street motorcycles. Back then, before the company renamed all it cruisers as Boulevards and gave them model designations based on cubic inches, the 652cc single was called the Savage and was priced at $1999. The Savage 650 sported the clean cruiser styling introduced at the same time on Suzuki's first Intruders.

Although it will probably be mid March before we get a chance to ride them, we were interested in getting a closer look at Kawasaki's new 2006 903cc V-twins, the Vulcan 900 Classic and its touring-oriented stablemate, the Vulcan 900 Classic LT. So when we learned that the Kawasaki had prototype production versions of both bikes in the country, we arranged to take some pictures and poke around the bikes a bit.

One nice thing about working for a motorcycle magazine is that you have an almost endless selection of motorcycles to choose from. The world may not be your oyster, but it is your garage. As I prepared for my ride up US Highway 395 in a nostalgic frame of mind, I decided I wanted to ride something that reminded me of the bikes I saw out on the roads in the 1950s. I considered a Harley-Davidson Road King, Kawasaki Vulcan Nomad or Yamaha Royal Star Tour Deluxe. However, we have ridden and written about them all recently. The full-dress tourers were too modern. However, theHarley-Davidson FLHTI Electra Glide Standard—the base model of the Electra Glide series, devoid of radio, trunk, fairing lowers or other modern folderol—seemed perfect. The batwing fairing provides a bit more wind protection and quiet than the windshields of those other bikes, but it was otherwise a similar genre. And we have never tested one.

Below are the acceleration-performance figures for the Yamaha Star Roadliner that we tested for the February 2006 issue of Motorcycle Cruiser magazine. The performance figures have all been corrected to sea-level standard conditions.