Having fewer cylinders doesn’t tnake it faster or lighter or better handling, necessarily. Having gone through a dozen years of Twins being replaced by better Fours, it’s surprising to find a Twin that’s superior to a Four.
What makes it a better bike is the engine. It is, in sum, a better bike than the Seca. It is a bike that can be ridden leisurely or at racing speeds and it can make its rider happy at either extreme. It’s bigger but faster with more power produced at every engine, speed. Putting together all the textbook tools of good engine design on a 70° V-Twin of 552cc has produced a machine that isn’t like the 550 Seca. Yamaha was a leader in using four valves per cylinder with the TX500, a biksr that also had a counterbalancer shaft to control vibration, all this a decade ago. There was the V-Four prototype shown to ' the press several years ago, much like the Vision but with two more cylinders tacked on. Look far enough into Yamaha’s past and all of the Vision’s features pop up. They provide no clues to the Vision’s design. Last year seemed more designed by marketing demands than engineering ideas, though they work well enough. The results of their efforts have been marvelous inline Fours, air cooled, with narrow engines because of auxiliary shafts and clever designs making the engines compact. Yamaha engineers explained during introductions of the XJ-series of four cylinder machines that they didn’t need four valve heads to make plenty of power, that two valves per cylinder works just fine, thank you.
There are no liquid-cooled Yamaha street bikes in this country. Look at the existing Yamaha line of street bikes and the Vision seems out of place. It requires a close look at the insides of the unusual engine and, finally, it requires riding the bike to have any idea why Yamaha would make such a machine. So why did this 550 Twin weigh more than the 550 Four? All the numbers did was confuse.įinding out the why and the how of this motorcycle requires more than a quick look at simple numbers. It would be faster than the Seca 550, a bike that could run through the standing-start quarter-mile in the 12-sec. It could be a 500 or a 750 it was within that range. There were no clues to the size of the machine, except it didn't look tiny and it didn't look huge. Yet there, on display at Yamaha's new model show, was the Vision, also known as the XZ55ORJ, though the name on the side of the bike only said Vision.
#Yamaha xz 550 how to#
Besides the question of why try to beat the Seca 550, there was the question of how to beat the Seca 550. At first it didn't make sense, why Yamaha would produce another fast, sporting 550cc street bike when the company already makes one of the fastest and best 550 sports machines.
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