Hot on the heels of EICMA 2021 comes the U.K.’s biggest motorcycle show of the year—Motorcycle Live. It runs from December 4 through 12, 2021, at the NEC Birmingham—short for National Exhibit Centre—in England. For anyone wondering when the revived BSA Motorcycles would finally debut its first new model in decades, that location is no coincidence. After all, the brand started life as the Birmingham Small Arms Company, so it’s a fitting way to go back to its roots.
What can we expect from the new BSA? According to the company’s official announcement, it’s bringing just one new, as-yet-unnamed model to the show. In previous interviews, Mahindra has talked about developing both combustion and at least one electric BSA model in the U.K., where it’s been busy setting up a dedicated research and development facility in Coventry, England.
Officially, the revived BSA has set up all the things you’d expect. There’s a new official website, as well as YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter presences. All the social media accounts are broadcasting a handful of vintage BSA advertising to get fans excited about the brand, and BSA also set up a Facebook event for the Motorcycle Live unveiling that you can sign up for.
A visit to the new BSA website at BSAcompany.co.uk yields a countdown clock to the Motorcycle Live show, as well as a clickable button where you can sign up for future news notifications about the brand. However, finding your way to a 404 Error page on the new BSA website yields some additional interesting information as well.
A dropdown menu at the top of the screen reveals the names of several classic BSA models from the past. At first, you might think they’re linked in alphabetical order, but they’re not. Whether you read them from left to right, or column by column, it soon becomes clear that alphabetization did not play a role in their organization. Going column by column, they are: A65, Golden Flash, Bantam, Gold Star, Blazer, Lightning, Silver Star, and Spitfire.
BSACompany.co.uk screenshot, captured November 25, 2021.
For those unfamiliar, BSA’s revival will nestle neatly under the Classic Legends umbrella, alongside fellow revived vintage marques Jawa and Yezdi. Meanwhile, the might of Indian motor vehicle manufacturing giant Mahindra and Mahindra backs the retro-modern motorcycle specialists at Classic Legends.
At this point, we must caution that everything we say here is nothing but speculation on our part, based primarily on what we’ve observed from how Classic Legends has behaved with its Jawa and Yezdi revivals. Then again, it also makes a whole bunch of very basic sense. After all, why revive a marque like BSA if you aren’t going to also revive a bunch of its classic model names for your modern machines?
None of those model names is clickable from the menu. We clearly can’t say at this point whether they’re just placeholders, or whether the new BSA has definite plans at some stage of development for the revival of each of these models. Additional digging into what’s publicly available on the new BSA webpage yields more questions than answers.
BSACompany.co.uk screenshot, captured November 25, 2021.
Sadly, a look at a blog template with entries dated from 2019 reveals nothing further of interest in the actual entries themselves. They’re all hold placeholder Lorem Ipsum text, of the sort that anyone setting up a new webpage and using some type of existing template might see until they replace it with their own information. However, a glance down at the footer of the blog shows something else that could maybe mean something, or else might mean nothing at all.
Information is organized into three columns in the footer: Quick Links, Our Bikes, and Contact Us. Our Bikes lists just five models: Bantam, Blazer, Lightning, Silver Star, and Golden Flash. However, under Quick Links, you’ll see Our Legacy, Motorcycles, BSA Store, Silver Star, and Contact Us. Does the fact that “Silver Star” is the only model name to appear both under “Our Bikes” and “Quick Links” indicate that it will be the first model out of the gate—or, we must ask again, is it merely a placeholder? As with the previous dropdown menu, none of these links goes anywhere as of November 25, 2021.
BSACompany.co.uk screenshot, captured November 25, 2021.
BSAMotorcycles.co.uk homepage screenshot, captured November 25, 2021.
Here’s another bit of strangeness to consider: BSA’s listed “Contact Us” email address is “enquiries at bsamotorcycles.co.uk.” Now, your mind might not immediately perceive the slight difference, but the revived BSA domain name is actually “BSACompany.co.uk,” not “BSAMotorcycles.co.uk.”
Currently, BSAMotorcycles.co.uk appears to belong to a dedicated BSA fan site for the classic brand and its heritage, and the homepage explicitly states that it is not the official BSA Motorcycles webpage. We can only imagine that Classic Legends would probably love to have that domain name for itself, and may even be working behind the scenes to try to obtain it—but again, we must stress that’s purely speculation on our parts.
BSACompany.co.uk screenshot, captured November 25, 2021.
The only two links from the top menu on the 404 Error page that are currently active are the Home page, which sends you back out to the Motorcycle Live Countdown—and the Store page. A glance at the Store page shows a theoretical pair of BSA Gloves, along with an image of said gloves in red and black. There’s even a single three-star Lorem Ipsum-type customer review of the gloves, which are listed at a price of £80.00 (or approximately $107).
Whether any of this amounts to anything in the future will, of course, remain to be seen. However, even if all those model names are just placeholders at the moment, they certainly weren’t chosen at random. Also, as we’ve seen from other retro-modern name revivals, names alone aren’t necessarily indicative of what kinds of bikes they’ll end up being. As ever, we’ll just have to wait and see what BSA eventually shows us regarding any or all of these revived model names in the future.
