VOL. 53 ISSUE 1 JANUARY 12, 2016 P85
BY ALAN CATHCART
PHOTOGRAPHY BY PHIL HAWKINS
T
he first American four-cylinder
streetbike in the past 70 years
since the end of WWII has
now reached the marketplace. Doz-
ens of series production examples
of the Motus MST and higher-per-
formance MST-R sport tourers have
already been delivered to the first of
over 400 customers who'd placed
deposits with the start-up company
based in Birmingham, Alabama, to
purchase a bike whose patient de-
velopment since 2008 has resulted
in a literally unique motorcycle that's
all-American in every way—without
being a V-twin.
There's nothing on wheels more
typically Yankee than a lazy-revving,
large cube V8 motor, as attested by
the hundreds of millions of vehicles
built by GM, Ford and Chrysler over
the past century powered by such
engines. Contrary to what some
seduced by spec sheets may think,
there's nothing low rent about using
pushrods, or sticking with OHV
rather than OHC, so long as you
do it right—and Detroit's engineers
are past masters at this, as the men
making the Motus Sports Tourers
(MST) aim to prove.
American to the
core—the Motus
MTS-R sports some
very tasty hardware
in its arsenal.
