To put that in perspective, a University graduate with a good career lined up could expect to make ¥10,000 per year at the time.īasing their design on the DKW RT125 from Germany, it came with a 123cc two-stroke single, but the designers had improved upon that blueprint bike in every way they could. The risk came with the price of the YA-1, as competitor Honda was coming out with their inexpensive Super Cub, but the YA-1 was almost twice the price, at ¥138,000 in 1955. Yamaha needed to succeed, as the musical instrument side of the company was still rebuilding its factories after the war, and they also had a lot of industrial production tools in their hands from making parts for the Zero fighter aircraft. When Yamaha released the YA-1 in 1955, it was a calculated but still risky gamble. So, for your consideration, here are what we feel, in our highly subjective opinion, are the 9 best Yamaha motorcycles ever made, up to 2023 at least. With so many bikes in their history to choose from, we did debate our selections for this list for a while, but after a while we narrowed it down to our favorites. When your parent company is renowned for making some of the best musical instruments in the world, bringing a sound engineer over once or twice during a bikes development to tune the exhaust isn't as rare a thing as you'd think. That year, they went racing with their first bike, the YA-1, and in their second event won overall.Įver since then, Yamaha has been at the forefront of a lot of racing innovations, and trickling them down to their consumer bikes quite rapidly, sometimes even in the same year! They have had multiple world champion riders in almost all disciplines on their machinery, and keep pushing the envelope of what their bikes can do every year.Īs they are still a subsidiary of Yamaha proper, it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone as to why their bikes all sound so great either. Yamaha Motors, the motorcycle division of the company, was spun out in 1955 as a fully owned subsidiary that would use all the tools and industrial equipment that they had been using to make parts for Zero fighters during World War Two to produce motorcycles instead. It surprises many people when they are told that Yamaha started way back in the late 19th century as a maker of musical instruments.
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