Ah Buell. It's the Schrodinger's Cat of motorcycle brands, as you're never quite sure whether it's alive or dead. And, honestly, it depends on the day, hour, or even that very second, as the company's been independent, owned by Harley, sold, died, then back to independent, and, throughout it all, sort of in this limbo state of being within everyone's minds.
Maybe it truly is both alive and dead, depending on your vantage point? I wonder if physicists should start examining it on the atomic scale...
But right now, as of this writing, Buell is actually alive. More than that, it's finally ready to start delivering motorcycles to customers who've been waiting a while for the brand's Super Cruiser motorcycle, a motorcycle it debuted nearly three years ago. Why's it taken so long, you ask? Easy, Buell apparently had to get both CARB and the EPA's approval for the bike, and that's finally done.
"It’s exciting to be delivering the bikes to the customers," said Bill Melvin, CEO of Buell Motorcycle Co., adding, "It has been a journey re-growing Buell to this stage of production and now the customers can take their own journey on the Super Cruiser."
The deliveries finally began occurring, after the bike's original debut in 2023, as working through both federal and state-level emissions regulations is, well, a pain in the ass. CARB, especially so. For those not in the know, the California Air Resource Board (CARB), is basically California's own EPA, and regulates emissions after decades of smog issues. Despite what many will claim, CARB is a good thing, though the bureaucracy is second-to-none, which means it takes forever to get anything done.
By comparison, the federal EPA is a cakewalk. Again, both are important and good, as no one wants to choke on the air we're breathing. But bureaucracy is bureacracy, and there's a lot of redundancies that probably don't have to be there. See Jon Stewart and Ezra Klein's talk about the Inflation Reduction Act and how it failed a lot of folks with its bureacratic intricacies and idiocies.
Likewise, the every-present will-they, won't-they of Buell's own lifecycle has probably caused many a would-be customer consternation due to how long it took for the company to start delivering motorcycles. But they're real and they're fantastic, to borrow a line from Seinfeld. Fingers crossed it stays that way.
