The future of Ural is always a good topic for discussion. Personally, I see Ural and its uniqueness as having a lot of opportunity to grow and become a stable, globally well-known brand in the motorcycle marketplace. Ural will be facing some real and tough challenges to get there, mainly in securing more capital (which is a long story in and of itself), but the company’s new CEO, Rick Clark, sounds like just the person to help the company get the money and growth they need to succeed:

Siberian bike’s allure draws investor | TheNewsTribune.com | Tacoma, WA

As the article points out, Clark is optimistic, and I’m glad to see that. He has good cause:

“There’s something unique about this bike that people get passionate about,” he said. “People love this bike. At shows, people take pictures of the bike, they sit in the sidecar. There’s something visceral about this. Of all of the consumer products I’ve been involved with, none comes close to the passion these owners exhibit.”

I’m curious, and excited, to see where the next few years take Ural. With the company’s unique position in the motorcycle industry — offering nothing but sidecar rigs, and with a rich history of doing so — I think they’re going to stabilize and grow.

While 2004 and 2005 models were pretty decent, Ural has made leaps and bounds in quality during the 2006, 2007 and 2008 model years. Ural Northwest has a side-by-side comparison of the year-over-year Ural improvements, very handy to anyone considering a Ural motorcycle, or just wondering how their reliability is nowadays:

Ural Yearly Changes from 2006-2008

After much pleading and begging many requests and lots of sidecar posts in other forums, the venerable Adventure Rider Motorcycle Forum has opened the Hacks - ADVrider forum. The ADV folks have also moved all the old sidecar-related posts to this forum.

At the time of this typing, there are about 9 pages worth of threads in Hacks, dating all the way back to 2002. I’ve spent a lot of weekend reading up on these; ADV not having a sidecar-specific forum actually kept me away from it for quite a while. No knock on them, it’s a great forum, I just didn’t have time to go scouring everywhere for Ural and sidecar posts. Now they’ve made it all easy.

I was going to highlight a few threads anyone and everyone should check out, but there’s too much variety to try to pin down a few. So just hop over and start reading for yourself:

Hacks - ADVrider »

The Ural Tourist and Gear-Up models are expected to be available for fun
sale in Australia in early 2008. IMZ Ural Australia is posting regular updates to their site on testing, passing Aussie moto regulations, and anticipated arrival dates for the first batch of Ural sidecar rigs into the Australia market

34 bikes are expected in the first shipment, which could be ready for sale in the Australian market by March.

In the meantime, get some sidecar training in Australia with Ural of Oz or in Oregon with Vernon Wade’s Adventure Sidecar.