DKW is a German car and motorcycle marque. DKW was one of the four companies that formed Auto Union in 1932 and is hence an ancestor of the modern day Audi company.
Motorenwerke Zschopau GmbH, former MZ Motorrad- und Zweiradwerk GmbH is a German motorcycle manufacturer located in Zschopau, Saxony. The acronym MZ since 1956 stands for Motorenwerke Zschopau GmbH. From 1992 to 1999 the company was called MuZ, an acronym for Motorrad und Zweiradwerk.
A straight-three engine, also known as an inline-triple, or inline-three, is a reciprocating piston internal combustion engine with three cylinders arranged in a straight line or plane, side by side.
Suzuki Motor Corporation is a Japanese multinational corporation headquartered in Minami-ku, Hamamatsu. Suzuki manufactures automobiles, four-wheel drive vehicles, motorcycles, all-terrain vehicles (ATVs), outboard marine engines, wheelchairs and a variety of other small internal combustion engines. In 2016, Suzuki was the eleventh biggest automaker by production worldwide. Suzuki has over 45,000 employees and has 35 production facilities in 23 countries, and 133 distributors in 192 countries. The worldwide sales volume of automobiles is the world's tenth largest, while domestic sales volume is the third largest in the country.
NSU Motorenwerke AG, or NSU, was a German manufacturer of automobiles, motorcycles and pedal cycles, founded in 1873. Acquired by Volkswagen Group in 1969, VW merged NSU with Auto Union, creating Audi NSU Auto Union AG, ultimately Audi. The name NSU originated as an abbreviation of "Neckarsulm", the city where NSU was located.
Singer Motors Limited was a British motor vehicle manufacturing business, originally a bicycle manufacturer founded as Singer & Co by George Singer, in 1874 in Coventry, England. Singer & Co's bicycle manufacture continued. From 1901 George Singer's Singer Motor Co made cars and commercial vehicles.
Motobécane was a French manufacturer of bicycles, mopeds, motorcycles, and other small vehicles, established in 1923. "Motobécane" is a compound of "moto", short for motorcycle; "bécane" is slang for "bike."
A motorized bicycle is a bicycle with an attached motor or engine and transmission used either to power the vehicle unassisted, or to assist with pedalling. Since it always retains both pedals and a discrete connected drive for rider-powered propulsion, the motorised bicycle is in technical terms a true bicycle, albeit a power-assisted one. However, for purposes of governmental licensing and registration requirements, the type may be legally defined as a motor vehicle, motorbike, moped, or a separate class of hybrid vehicle. Powered by a variety of engine types and designs, the motorised bicycle formed the prototype for what would later become the motorbike.
The Killinger and Freund Motorcycle was an attempt in 1935 by a group of five German engineers from Munich to design a more streamlined and modified version of the German Megola front-wheel drive motorcycle. The work took three years to complete but the result was impressive. The engine displacement stayed the same as the Megola at 600 cc but was much lighter and more simplified than a standard 100 cc motorcycle of the time.
The Suzuki GSX-R1000 is a sport bike from Suzuki's GSX-R series of motorcycles. It was introduced in 2001 to replace the GSX-R1100 and is powered by a liquid-cooled 999 cc (61.0 cu in) inline four-cylinder, four-stroke engine.
The Ner-A-Car was a type of feet forwards motorcycle designed by Carl Neracher in 1918. It used an unusual steel-channel chassis, much like an automobile, and hub-center steering at the front wheel, making it 'nearly a car' in design. The Ner-A-Car was the most successful hub-center steering motorcycle ever produced, with sales far eclipsing earlier or later examples of this design, such as the Yamaha GTS1000 or Bimota Tesi. About 10,000 Neracars were manufactured in the United States by the Ner-A-Car Corporation, while around 6,500 are believed to have been produced in England under licence by the Sheffield-Simplex company between 1921 and 1926 under the Ner-A-Car name.
Ariel Motorcycles was a British maker of bicycles and then motorcycles in Bournbrook, Birmingham. It was an innovator in British motorcycling, part of the Ariel marque. The company was sold to BSA in 1951 but the brand survived until 1967. Influential Ariel designers included Val Page and Edward Turner. The last motorcycle-type vehicle to carry the Ariel name was a short-lived three-wheel tilting moped in 1970.
The history of the motorcycle begins in the second half of the 19th century. Motorcycles are descended from the "safety bicycle," a bicycle with front and rear wheels of the same size and a pedal crank mechanism to drive the rear wheel. Despite some early landmarks in its development, the motorcycle lacks a rigid pedigree that can be traced back to a single idea or machine. Instead, the idea seems to have occurred to numerous engineers and inventors around Europe at around the same time.
The NS motorcycle, made by Narazo Shimazu in 1909, was the first motorcycle to be designed, built and sold in Japan. Shimazu created the Nihon Motorcycle Company (NMC) to manufacture the NS. In 1926 he then produced another new motorcycle design, the Arrow First. The earliest motorcycle that the Society of Automotive Engineers of Japan (in Japanese) includes on its list of the 240 Landmarks of Japanese Automotive Technology is the 1909 NS.
The Cleveland Motorcycle Manufacturing Company, sometimes called Cleveland Motorcycle, was a motorcycle manufacturer in Cleveland, Ohio from 1902 to 1905 and again from 1915 to 1929.
The Suzuki FB engine is a series of two- and three-cylinder two-stroke engines that was produced by the Suzuki Motor Corporation from October 1961 until November 1987. They were used in a number of Kei-class automobiles and light trucks. From the original air-cooled 359 cc (21.9 cu in) straight-twin version the FB series developed through a number of different models having different names, ending with the water-cooled, three-cylinder LJ50. The names used for various versions of this engine often refer to the chassis code of the cars in which they were introduced, until Suzuki changed their engine naming system sometime in the first half of the 1970s.
The FN Four was the world's first production inline-4 motorcycle, manufactured in Liége by Fabrique Nationale from 1905 until 1923. It was also, at 40 miles per hour (64 km/h), the world's fastest production motorcycle from 1911 until 1912.
William Chadeayne was an early long-distance motorcyclist from Buffalo, New York. He set a transcontinental record for North America in 1905, going from New York City to San Francisco in 47 and a half days. He was an officer of the Thomas Auto-Bi company and rode one of their motorcycles on the transcontinental record-setting trip.
