At the risk of contradicting myself, sometimes I think our speculations are too much driven by market logic. Back in its heyday, Honda offered an amazing number of different models, and introduced new models each year at a rate that defied the imperative of profit alone. It was so dominant in the marketplace that it COULD experiment. Some auto companies, like Lotus, have always been motivated more by a quest to see what could be done with good engineering than by a bottom line. The CB1100 seems like a prestige project for Honda--an homage to its own history and motorcycling's past, a testament to its brilliant designers and engineers, a statement of sorts about what a modern-day retro bike can be. If you listen to the people on the original team, pride in taking up such a challenge and doing it well seems to have been a driver. Who in their right mind would propose a project for a fairly expensive, heavy, air- and -oil cooled I4, one that needed its own new factory and castings, in the face of impending Euro regulations? I've never seen sales figures for the bike, let alone a comparison of North American sales vs the world, but the fact that a re-design even happened suggests the project was not a total loss, nor, as we've surmised, all that popular. But I don't think either iteration was because of consumers and their demands alone. The fly-on-the-wall that Pdedse would like to have been probably witnessed the engineers and designers arguing in furious Japanese with the money people, sales figures in hand. We're just lucky that the money people didn't kill the project on the drawing board.
