• Hi everyone,

    As you all know, Coffee (Dean) passed away a couple of years ago. I am Dean's ex-wife's husband and happen to have spent my career in tech. Over the years, I occasionally helped Dean with various tech issues.

    When he passed, I worked with his kids to gather the necessary credentials to keep this site running. Since then (and for however long they worked with Coffee), Woodschick and Dirtdame have been maintaining the site and covering the costs. Without their hard work and financial support, CafeHusky would have been lost.

    Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been working to migrate the site to a free cloud compute instance so that Woodschick and Dirtdame no longer have to fund it. At the same time, I’ve updated the site to a current version of XenForo (the discussion software it runs on). The previous version was outdated and no longer supported.

    Unfortunately, the new software version doesn’t support importing the old site’s styles, so for now, you’ll see the XenForo default style. This may change over time.

    Coffee didn’t document the work he did on the site, so I’ve been digging through the old setup to understand how everything was running. There may still be things I’ve missed. One known issue is that email functionality is not yet working on the new site, but I hope to resolve this over time.

    Thanks for your patience and support!

Actual news on the KTM purchase of Husqvarna

I'm also considering a 1-2-5, may sell the 09WR300 & pick one up for a practice bike. The handling would be closer to the TXC......
hmmmm.....
 
sabortooth said:
I'm betting that this is as good as it will ever get pricewise. Look for 2014 and beyond to have a pricepoint equal or above ktm.
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You mean paying a realistic price for a new bike rather than waiting for last year's leftovers? If that's what it takes to get innovative and well developed technology then we've all got to pony up. I can't think of a more effective way to bankrupt an industry than to dump thousands of cut price (and possibly obsolete) bikes on to an already depressed market.
 
My comment
I am the end user of most bikes I buy. Thought I made a good call on the Husky but with this price drop I feel I have been had.
 
7point62 said:
You mean paying a realistic price for a new bike rather than waiting for last year's leftovers? If that's what it takes to get innovative and well developed technology then we've all got to pony up. I can't think of a more effective way to bankrupt an industry than to dump thousands of cut price (and possibly obsolete) bikes on to an already depressed market.
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Good point, I guess since 2005 there has been a massive oversupply in the market, just like the auto industry I figure it is time for a big shake up, manufacturers can't stay in business selling bikes at huge factory discounts, they need to make a profit, somehow ktm have managed it, but I think they are a bit off topic with the free ride and e-bikes, there can't be any money in that. The adventure and trail rider market is where the sales are right now,
 
DTX915 said:
My comment
I am the end user of most bikes I buy. Thought I made a good call on the Husky but with this price drop I feel I have been had.
Click to expand...

I didn't mean anything personal by my comment. I just hear people talk about resale value of a bike often and it just doesn't make sense. The value of any bike drops quite a bit the moment you buy it. Sure, in this case it's more severe. The buyout and inventory has created a buying opportunity. And anyone buying before that happened is certainly going to feel bad. It's like not timing the stock market well. Whacha gonna do? Stuff happens?

Don't dwell on that. Or at least try to. What you DO have is a great bike. Go enjoy it!
 
silverpilen said:
Good point, I guess since 2005 there has been a massive oversupply in the market, just like the auto industry I figure it is time for a big shake up, manufacturers can't stay in business selling bikes at huge factory discounts, they need to make a profit, somehow ktm have managed it, but I think they are a bit off topic with the free ride and e-bikes, there can't be any money in that. The adventure and trail rider market is where the sales are right now,
Click to expand...

I reckon that the Freeride was a good concept, but the more I think about it, the more it seems that it was just built to shift a few more units of the motor that KTM had spent a ton of money developing. It's no low-maintenance thumper, but thanks to all the gubbins that's required to make it road-ready it's no screamer either. Right bike, wrong motor imo. That aside, I think KTM have managed to come out on top because their products are perceived to have value. You can make great product, but if the perceived value is low you're not going to make a cent. KTM don't tend to do fire sales (because they don't need to), nor do they use price as their main selling point. It requires a steady nerve and good market strategy, but it's working for them (even though it can be argued that some of their bikes are pretty unremarkable). Here in the UK, Honda has also managed to cultivate an image of high perceived value. They've always tended to take care with the details on their flagship roadbikes and so the whole of the brand has benefitted as a result - despite the fact that landfill sites the world over are full of knackered CRF cylinder heads. ;)

Regarding resale prices: This is another thing that hits a brand's image of perceived value. It's also natural to feel burned when you've just bought a product at list price and it's been devalued by a discount that you missed out on by a week. If you've bought a bike to race then it's fair enough fo expect to throw it away after a couple of seasons, but most people here are leisure riders and you only have to read through the posts and look at the picture threads to see that most folks lavish a huge amount of care on their bikes. There's no reason why a well cared for play bike should depreciate that much more than a road bike (which has possibly spent most of it's life with the throttle against the stop), except that we're stuck in that loop of low perceived value, fire sales, excess supply and the like.

The industry does need some kind of shake-up, for sure. I don't know what it will take, but it will be painful. Something's got to happen though, or the nearest our kids will get to a dirtbike is watching SX on television: jump, turn, whoops, turn, repeat...
 
Anyone who bought a new Husky in the last 15 years, with high resale value in the back of their mind, was not fully informed on their purchase..... Husky has heavily discounted bikes for years and US retail prices were a third less than the rest of the world. Racers who trade every year or two, made up for low resale with Husky Bucks contingency payments. Most other Husky riders would usually ride their bike, until the market value would stabilize with other bikes. In my case I hardly ever sell them, just keep them forever.... probably shouldn't, but I do!

You guys who say the industry needs a shake up.... you are witnessing it as you type!
 
Regarding discounts, does anyone else remember the pre-bmw Husqvarna era? Maybe 2005-2007?

Every single year it seemed Hienins (sp?) would *severely* discount the bikes on ebay - below 1/2 price for the TCs as I recall. Discounting Husqvarna bikes is nothing new.
 
From what I was told today my dealer has all he can get as the warehouse is empty. He got some of his order and is still owed 9 more bikes the may not come. He is doing the 2500$ off and a dealer discount of 500$.
Had some 449 and a pile of 310 with one new wr125 and a lone cr125. Everything else is gone.

What he had to say is Husky is going to sell bikes at a discount for the next few years then slowly move the price back up. This is to build a customer base and dealer network. From what I was told KTM has done this in the past but unlike KTM at that time the Husky product is much better this time. He was also offered a few burgs, but if they are going to kill off burg why bother.
Every time the dealer tells me something it turns out to be true so lets hope I can still get a 310 at 5000ish next year. The price we kicked around today.
 
KTM has a choice of either moving all these Huskies in the warehouse in the next few months by discounting them or destroy them/part them all out. They are going to want to start with a clean slate with the 2014 models. If you spread these bikes over all the dealers across the world it isn't that many bikes. Interesting dilemma for SP.
 
wallybean said:
KTM has a choice of either moving all these Huskies in the warehouse in the next few months by discounting them or destroy them/part them all out. They are going to want to start with a clean slate with the 2014 models. If you spread these bikes over all the dealers across the world it isn't that many bikes. Interesting dilemma for SP.
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Now how did you come up with destroy them or part them all out ? Why start with a clean slate as they have good bikes. Looks to me like SP has no dilemma as he has charted a course and taken action in the U.S.
Any dealers want to chime in ?
 
DTX915 said:
Now how did you come up with destroy them or part them all out ? Why start with a clean slate as they have good bikes. Looks to me like SP has no dilemma as he has charted a course and taken action in the U.S.
Any dealers want to chime in ?
Click to expand...
SP wants to start producing 2014 Husky's/Husabergs. Having a pile of "old" bikes in a warehouse doesn't help that cause. He has to move them or "destroy" them. He has nothing invested in those bikes and promoting models that are going to cease to be produced doesn't make a lot of sense. I hope he allows them to be sold and this is all a short term transition sale to clear the way for the 2014 models. I am sure we will all know the out come of these bikes in the very near future. I am sure that your dealer like all the others has no information about what is going to happen beyond the immediate future.
 
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