http://www.allpar.com/cars/concepts/tomahawk.html
"Since 1969, there never have been any Harleys at the top of the performance heap,but that doesn't keep our friends of the Harleyreligion from spending thousands of bucks tomake their twenty grand motorcycles go faster.How do you justify spending twenty large on abike that will get dusted in a straight line bythe average, box-stock Japanese 600, and don'teven think about what happens when the roadturns. It's sort of like the old joke about theBaptists and Heaven: you just pretend there'sno one else out there."
Note though, that there's a very good chance that old Harlety will still be running 5 years down the line, or a decade, or 5 decades or more. It's hardly unusual to see 20 and 30-year old Harleys out, but you don't often see the old Jap bikes with any particular advanced years of the road behind them.
And when that box-stock 600cc Japanese bike gets used for riding double, or for making weekend runs of a thousand miles out on Friday night/Saturday morning and a thousand back home starting Sunday afternoon, once or twice a month, and getting the rider back for work on Monday, the picture looks a little better for those big Harleys...and now, the big Indians again, too.
It's a different way of doing things. But the Japanese have no domestic market for really long distance tourers, and haven't quite got the picture yet. They can copy the features, and come up with retro styling to sell to those without much of a clue, but the best bikes they build are not the Dammfast Sammamabichis....
-archy-/- -archy-/-
http://www.allpar.com/cars/concepts/tomahawk.html