The Worst Motorcycles Ever Made [2024 Edition]

Why We Picked It:

By 1997, two-stroke engines were on the very cusp of being replaced in all segments except motocross and some dirt bikes. They were oil-hungry, noisy, difficult to maintain if there was more than one cylinder involved, and while they did provide a lot of power, it couldn't compare to a fuel-injected four-stroke.

So, when Bimota annouced that they had made a clean-burning two-stroke V-twin, the V-Due, that used direct injection, people paid attention. They were promised reliability and greater fuel efficiency, without the need to burn as much oil, and a superb power output of 105 HP and 66 lbs-ft of torque.

Too bad, then, that the V-Due engine turned out to be a hot, steaming pile of garbage. The fuel injection system sometime worked, sometimes didn't, meaning the rider had no power, or suddenly all of the power, usually when trying to crank the wrist to get to the power. Since traction control on motorcycles wasn't even really a thing on cars at the time, many rear wheel spin-ups happened as the power suddenly came on.

Bimota tried to recover from the unmitigated disaster that was the V-Due, but after a few failed attempts to make it better, the costs of trying to make the engine work ended up bankrupting the company.

Why We Picked It:

Imagine the excitement when Suzuki announced plans to develop a proper superbike sporting one of the most advanced and powerful V-twins that the fabled Japanese company had ever made. What's not to like? Pre-orders were placed sight unseen, and in 1997, the TL1000S finally made it to customers eager hands.

Don't get us wrong, the bike was competent, the engine was powerful, and the engineering behind it was good... except for the rear swingarm. To fit the hefty 996cc V-twin, with 125 HP and 77 lbs-ft of torque, into the frame, the rear suspension could not go in its primary centerline position under the seat. Instead of just mounting a side shock, Suzuki instead decided to take an idea from 1990s F1 cars and use a right side mounted spring with a remote rotary-style damper that used a complicated set of spinning arms, some valves, and a couple drops of hydraulic fluid.

The result, however, was once that system was through the break in perior of about 600 miles, it simply did not work. Any major movement of the rear swingarm overheated the hydraulic fluid in the damper, and it became about as supportive as cloud. Pair that with a big, torque-monster V-twin putting power to a sagging rear wheel, and you had a bike that was about as steady and reliable as a drunk squirrel. The fact of the matter was it was too complicated, did not use enough fluid, and was not made of the same high peformance materials that F1 cars used, so the TL1000S was quietly shuffled off the market in 2001.

Why We Picked It:

BMW was riding a wave of good press, great reviews, and amazing bikes in the early 1990s. They had established two new classes of motorcycles, the sport adventure tourer and the off-road ready ADV. So, naturally, BMW had the brainwave of "What if we make a bike that is both?" To help design and market the bike, BMW joined forces with Aprilia and the two companies got to work.

The result was the F650 Funduro, which came in a variety of styles, including a Strada version for mostly on-road use, and a GS version for ADV enthusiasts. It was to be as light as an enduro, reliable as a sport adventure tourer, as rugged as an ADV, and be able to balance all of that perfectly. Here's a slight revelation: It didn't.

What customers instead received was an anemic, unreliable thing that had an extremely dangerous flaw: The head bearings were so poorly designed and manufactured that they could seize the engine midride. It also sported a rear mono-shock that had the damping capabilities of an inflatable bouncy castle, fuel injection that worked if it felt like it, and most of the weight lifted way up high to give it the ground clearance needed for off-roading. At 398 lbs wet, that made it very top heavy, which is the exact opposite of what you want off-road, as low-speed handling on dirt or gravel would send you face first into the road faster than you could blink.

It was very quickly evolved in 1995 to what we would call a "standard" F-series ADV today, but for those first couple of years, it was horrid.

Why We Picked It:

In the 1970s, "safety" was a word that was passed around sometimes, but was at about 10th or 15th on the list of what a motorcycle should do. Kawasaki had already released one disaster, the 500cc H1 Mach III that broke more bones than it did speed records, and thought "Nah, not powerful enough, give it a 750cc engine!"

That bike was the H2 Mach IV, with a 748cc two-stroke triple pushing out 74 HP and 57.1 lbs-ft of torque. That engine hung in almost the exact same frame that the H1 used, meaning that it would have been stiffer if the frame had been made out of rubber bands. It had a front fork with shocks so thin that they couldn't really support the weight of the bike, a single disc brake on the front wheel with a drum in the rear, neither of them sport-spec, and had its rear wheel too far forward, giving a very nasty rear weight bias.

Kawasaki's argument was that it was capable of an astonishing 125 MPH. What they didn't mention that once you went above 3,500 RPM there was a torque cliff as tall as El Capitan in Yosemite, and a spontaneous, unexpected wheelie was common. It weighed 420 lbs, so even if you wanted to prevent looping the bike, it was a 50/50 chance you would end up flat on your ass skidding down the road.

When even professional racing riders wouldn't touch the bike with a ten foot pole and wanted nothing to do with it, you know a bike is too dangerous to ride. Evolutions were quickly made for 1973 and 1974, but that disastrous first year in 1972 doomed the bike to low sales, and it was simply killed off in 1975.

Why We Picked It:

Brand loyalists don't really want to admit it, but from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, Harley-Davidson went through a very dark time. Union issues, tanking sales, reliability and quality control being buzzwords instead of policies... it was bad. Really bad.

The Sportster was still, by some miracle, selling, but just before the company was rescued by a group of investors lead by Willie G. Davidson himself, they released the single worst Sportster model to ever turn wheels on American roads. Selling at a whopping $5,867 in 1980, or $21,860 in 2023 money, it had a 61 cubic inch V-twin that put out an anemic 57 HP and 55 lbs-ft of torque, trying to motivate a bike weighing 540 lbs.

Engine bushings were an afterthought, so it wasn't even particularly surprising for one of these death traps to shake itself to pieces on the ride home from the dealership. It had the seating position and bars all wrong, and without that confident connection to the bike and road, riders couldn't actually feel how lethargic and cumbersome the bike was until they were already in the hedge at the side of the road.

It was also the first year without a kick-starter backup, using only electric starter motors, and they proved to be about as reliable as a house on fire around an unlit wood burning stove. Harley-Davidson was at most 24 months away from completely collapsing, and it was only through the last minute buyout by the investment group mentioned earlier that the company still exists today.

Why We Picked It:

Suzuki really is the company that will try everything once. They're the company that doesn't get invited to a buffet, because they'd need 17 plates to carry everything they want to sample. One of their most daring and, frankly, strange bikes was the 1974 RE5.

The name of the bike really does give it away, but for those that are not in the know, it stands for "Rotary Engine, Model 5." On paper, it seemed like a match made in heaven: A super-high revving Wankel rotary engine from NSU in Germany, mounted in a sporty frame, driving the bike forward at breakneck speed.

Many reviews praised the handling and confident road manners, but the disaster that was the RE5 always waited until the 12 month warranty expired. The thing about rotary engines in the 1970s was that the ceramic apex seals from the 1980s had simply not been invented yet, so if one of the seals failed just slightly, the engine would implode. Due to the complexity of the engine, you couldn't just change the rotor, you had to replace the entire thing. As well, once the novelty of the rotary had worn off, interest in the bike plummeted, and so in 1976, after only 48 months on the market, the RE5 ceased production.

Why We Picked It:

By this point, we are applauding Suzuki because if no one else did the weird, wacky, and crazy motorcycles, the world would be a much more boring place. The Suzuki B-King is probably the prime example of that, a bike that could have been great... had it not been delayed.

Originally shown at the Tokyo Motor Show as a concept variant of the Hayabusa, onlookers were drawn to the sport naked bike that promised 240 HP, made out of exotic materials, draped in carbon fiber, and it looked like Batman had styled it. It was to have a computer that could provide self-diagnostics, advanced track telemetry, GPS based weather and traffic warning systems, and all of this was to be displayed in a HUD inside the helmet that Suzuki proposed as an option to buy with the bike. It even was even started by a biometric ignition system, pressing your thumb against a scanner to unlock the bike and fire it up.

It seemed way too good to be true, and as the expected release date of 2004 came and went by without a peep, people started to wonder. It would take three more years, but the B-King was released in 2007, and absolutely nothing promised had made to the road except the looks. The fancy electronics? Replaced with a modified ECU from the Hayabusa. The power? 164 HP. The looks? Cutting edge in 2001, old hat by 2007.

It ended up overweight, had poor handling, lacked the promised power, and was overall just a bad bike that had been hyped up too much to ever really be able to meet the expectations that surrounded it.

Why We Picked It:

Yes, Ducati has actually made some pretty shockingly awful bikes, but none of them, not a single one, has ever been able to match the catastrophic Paso 750 from the mid-80s.

The challenge at the time was to produce a top-tier bike to challenge against the tidal wave of Japanese sport bikes that were stepping on Ducati's toes when they weren't even invited to the dance, at least as far as the Italians saw it. It was such a big project that they hired Massimo Tamburini, the same designer that penciled the unbelievably gorgeous lines of the Ducati 916 superbike.

His choice was to streamline a powerful 750cc L-twin engine in an aerodynamic body, using a fully enclosed fairing instead of just side fairings. He also turned the engine "backwards" so the horizontal cylinder of the L was firing towards the rear wheel instead of the front. Since this moved the engine forward, it encroached into the bottom of the gas tank, so part of the gas tank was below the carburetor, necessitating an auxiliary fuel pump, and necessitated replacing the seperate Dell'Oro carburetors with a single Webber one between the cylinders.

That, however, caused one sales-killing issue: The fuel pump often moved too much fuel, and the carburetor would flood, stalling the engine, especially in low speed running. The secondary issue this caused is that since the mechanical bits were fully enclosed, the carburetor would often overheat, and could get stuck in a choke open position even if the choke wasn't pulled.

Basically, the only thing the Paso 750 did right was look good. At basically every other step, it was catastrophically flawed.

Why We Picked It:

Even Honda has made a few bikes it wishes it hadn't, but in the 1970s, with the relative success of the CB450T sport model, the suits in the boardroom at HQ wanted to capitalize. So they sent down an order to modify the 450 engine to a 500cc model, and, oh, to do it as "cost efficiently" as possible.

The truth about the CB450T was that it had a lot of sympathetic vibrations through the frame, but it was just, just below the annoying or uncomfortable level. Because the Honda engineers weren't allowed to make an all new 500cc engine, they took the 450cc unit, stroked it out, replaced the roller bearings with big ball bearings to "extend" the life of the engine, and didn't even modify the head unit, using it bone stock from the 450.

Because of that, they had to drop the compression from 9:1 to 8.5:1, mostly to allow it to use the cheapest gas possible, as the oil crisis was just kicking into high gear in 1975. Oh, and there was no real need to change out the 32mm carburetors, they should be just fine.

Add to that the rubber bushings, rubber handlebars, and rubber seat mounts were all of the cheapest, nastiest grade rubber possible. As a result, the CB500T vibrated like it had 17 cups of coffee and was trying to make its molecules separate at the speed of light. Even a short ride on the bike was so uncomfortable, shaking so violently, that if you had any fillings, they'd have been knocked loose.

Because the boardroom dictated the engineers make the bike, but then tied both hands behind their back and made the design it with their feet, the bike failed. Miserably. All the bike needed to succeed was something that already existed, and with more freedom, the engineers could have installed it: A counter balancer on the crank.