In This Story
Little-known fact: Motorcycles are very cool. Old pickup trucks, similarly, are much cooler than their modern counterparts. Yet, while you’d think the two would go together like chocolate and peanut butter, seeing them actually mixed just feels wrong.
This Yamaha Road Star with a Ford F-100 sidecar should, by all the math in the world, be one of the coolest things ever forged by human hands. It’s a modified motorcycle in the best automotive color and it has a quirky aesthetic, and yet it just doesn’t appeal. Why not?
Maybe it’s because the bike isn’t unique. Sure, the F-100 on the side is something you may never see again, but look at the bike it’s attached to: A bagger with a 26-inch front wheel. That’s a formula that’s played out by this point, something we’ve seen time and time again. It doesn’t innovate.
Or, maybe, the issue with this bike goes deeper than that. See, there’s one feature on this Road Star that takes it from honoring automotive days gone by to pandering towards an older generation that actually lived through those days: It has a reverse camera.
That combination of flashy-yet-dated aesthetics and modern practicality, especially when the modern amenities are as tacked-on as they seem here (there’s no real coherent way to work a backup camera screen into the styling of a motorcycle with no front fairing), always comes out feeling like a restomodded ‘50s or ‘60s coupe. It wants the style of yore, but it’s built for folks with aching backs and stiff necks who require the comforts of modernity. What could be a cool tribute to days gone by becomes a mid-life crisis, desperately attempting to capture a time that can never come again.
The F-100 sidecar is a cool idea. On another bike, it might be the best motorcycle mod you ever did see. Here, though, there’s something that just comes across a little bit sad.