Yahoo Autos The 2017 Indian Chieftain Puts A Touchscreen In A Vintage Touring Bike
Running out of gas. It was nearly midnight, with a clouded moon above and not a single man-made light in the sky or on the road ahead. I was somewhere in eastern Idaho-or was it western Wyoming?-and I was still a couple of hours away from my destination. I'd seen a lone gas station off the freeway a few exits back, but in my insular ignorance regarding the West and the size of the open spaces between towns I'd let the rumbling 111-inch V-Twin beneath me just roll on past, holding a steady eighty-five miles per hour and swallowing fuel at a rate of about one gallon every twenty-five minutes.
I was under a quarter-tank of fuel-maybe a gallon and a half-and I had no clear idea when the next gas station would show up or if it would even be open. I remembered that the temperature was supposed to drop to near freezing overnight. But before I could work myself up into a further frenzy regarding wolves, desert scorpions, and the link, a message appeared on the eight-inch touchscreen ahead of me.
"You are low on fuel," it noted. "Would you like to find a gas station?"
Indian's Chieftain "bagger" is one of my all-time favorite motorcycles. I've spent about twenty days on various examples of the Chieftain and its touring-oriented sibling, the Indian Roadmaster, all at my own expense through the nationwide network of Eaglerider rental locations. I've been everywhere from West Palm Beach, FL to Palm Desert, CA on these massive but surprisingly agile bikes. But I've never had the chance to take a truly epic cross-country trip on one. So when Indian offered me a chance to ride their revised-for-2017 Chieftain to Sturgis Bike Week this past August, I wasted no time expanding the agenda a bit.
My slightly-too-ambitious plan called for me to leave Portland, OR on Saturday morning, arrive in Sturgis Monday night, and leave for Denver Wednesday morning to catch an afternoon flight. I'd be covering just short of two thousand miles in four days. And just to make things interesting, I convinced my wife, the infamous Danger Girl, to leave her Yamaha R3 at home so she could try life as a passenger on the Chieftain.
The Chieftain was new for 2014, as was its "Thunder Stroke" 111-cubic-inch V-Twin engine, so other than a few new colors the changes for 2017 are limited to the Ride Command system that lives in the fork-mounted fairing. There was really nothing wrong with the BMW-style orange LCD screen that you got with the Chieftain or Roadmaster prior to 2017, but it comes off as a trifle low-tech compared to the full-color touchscreen that arrived as part of Harley-Davidson's "Project Rushmore" revisions to its touring motorcycles in 2014.
You wouldn't think that customers for American V-Twin bikes would be terribly concerned with electronic convenience features, but at prices that start at $23,999 and just go up from there, Indian is clearly targeting the more well-heeled and white-collar buyers out there. And those buyers are well-acquainted with modern in-car telematics from their daily-driven Bimmers and Benzes and Escalades. In order to do business with those folks, Indian needed an in-dash system with luxury-brand features. It also had to work with thick leather gloves like the buffalo-hide Grifters that I wore for my Portland-to-Denver ride.
After multiple ten-hour days on the road, I can say that the Ride Command system does everything you'd expect, and more. It offered flawless integration with my Samsung S5 and Danger Girl's iPhone 6S. The 100-watt sound system is loud enough to be heard through your helmet on the open road. And the nav screen is visible in any kind of weather.
A couple of these new features really came in handy during the trip. The first one was frivolous: the Chieftain will show you the maximum altitude reached during a trip, as well as how high up you are at any given time. My route took me to the 9,850-foot mark; I never quite reached 10,000, even on the rain-slick mountain pass leading to Jackson, WY. The second one was the real-time tire-pressure monitoring. With two people and a full load of luggage running at close to triple-digit speeds in temperatures ranging from just below freezing in the mountains to 103 degrees on the plains west of Sturgis, I wanted to be very conscious of tire pressure. The last thing you want is to have a rear tire blowout due to heat and pressure, or to roll a front tire off the bead because it's underinflated in a thirty-degree morning. It was a relief to be able to flick from the nav to the Bluetooth audio screen to a quick check of TPMS with the handlebar-mounted switches.
There was one final surprise hidden in the Ride Command system. When Google Maps and the Indian's navigation system disagreed on the way through Wyoming, I decided to trust the bike, just this once. I was rewarded with a winding road that took us through a few tunnels cut into the mountains and down a long canyon with sparking water to our left and a sheer rock face to our right. From then on, I used the Indian's navigation system exclusively.
The rest of the Chieftain was pretty much what I expected. It's supremely comfortable for the rider; I've broken over ninety bones in my life, including a particularly nasty tibia snap in 2015 that resulted in some uncomfortable titanium screw heads right beneath the skin, and I didn't have much trouble, even during the 621-mile stretch on Sunday. Danger Girl was less comfortable as a passenger, even with the installation of a padded backrest, but she survived the trip in relatively good humor.
The Chieftain is stable in high winds, reassuring in tight corners, and strong enough in a straight line to keep sportbike fanatics like your humble author from being too sentimental about the power delivery of the best Japanese inline-fours. The biggest complaint I have about the bike is that the electric windscreen doesn't raise high enough for a short-legged, six-foot-two rider like me. This is something you can fix easily on your own bike; there are multiple windshields available.
The next motorcycle that I buy won't be a Chieftain; I'm about to turn forty-five and I think I have one more sportbike in me before I make the transition to the touring-bike lifestyle. When I do that, I'm probably going to buy an Indian Roadmaster. I think the extra passenger comfort and luggage space is worth the relatively minor tradeoff in weight and maneuverability. But the majority of the motorcycle buyers out there disagree with me. The "bagger" segment is the hottest thing out there right now. Not just the V-Twin market, mind you, the whole motorcycle market in these United States.
Baggers are such a big deal that even BMW is holding its nose and introducing one. You can get a bike in this form factor from nearly everybody now, including Indian's corporate cousins at Victory. But the Chieftain is probably the alpha bagger, whether you pick the two-tone vintage-looking high-end versions or the blacked-out, budget-priced "Dark Horse" spec. And the 2017 changes make a big difference in long-distance usability. If you don't ride your bagger much past the local Bike Night or nightclub, there's no reason not to seek out a deal on last year's model. But if you want to try riding from the sea to the Mile High City, make sure you hold out for the 2017 model. The Sons of Anarchy might not dig the new features, but for the children of the tech age, they are utterly essential.
Born in Brooklyn but banished to Ohio, Jack Baruth has won races on four different kinds of bicycles and in seven different kinds of cars. Everything he writes should probably come with a trigger warning. His column, Avoidable Contact, runs twice a week.
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