Remember when Harley-Davidson stopped production of the EVO Sportster, and China started production of a carbon copy immediately afterwards? Well, the Chinese factories are doing something similar again, but now they’re going even deeper into history, building a copy of BMW’s 247-series airhead engine.
This news comes out of Europe, where several moto-mags are reporting on CBNMotor’s interesting exhibit at the Beijing International Motorcycle Exhibition. CBN, also known as Crystalburn introduced a new motorcycle with a flat twin engine at the Beijing show. Looking at that engine, it’s very familiar. See it in the Instagram post below:
View this post on Instagram
While this isn’t a carbon copy of the airhead 247, it appears to be very, very close. It reportedly has 900 cc capacity, with two valves per head. It’s obviously air-cooled; an oil cooler is a likely addition on any production machine, though. Electronic fuel injection is also likely, as carburetors would be hard to pass through emissions tests anywhere in 2025.
The motorcycle built around this engine is supposedly going to be called the Retro 900. It appears to be only one of a few similar retro-styled bikes from CBNMotor, which is a new company itself, according to China’s moto-media. The other bikes appear to mostly be gaudy, ill-conceived cruisers with parallel twin or single-cylinder engines.
Would the BMW purists buy one of these airhead clones, if they came to the West? Probably not (depending, of course, on the price). Jeep enthusiasts didn’t flock to the Mahindra Roxor. But in the billions-strong Asian market, maybe we’d see quite a bit of interest from buyers who aren’t concerned whether their boxer twin is German-built.
