#future

It’s bad enough our fellow human beings find us seemingly irresistible to run into, and now it appears they may have sent their machines after us too.

Give A Shift is the punny name given to an initiative intended to forward the cause of motorcycling in the U.S. market, which is showing signs of shrinkage due to a variety of reasons: demographic, cultural, and systemic.

“There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

Watching the motorcycle business of Polaris Industries evolve over the past few years has been compelling, and, as the corporation balances how Victory Motorcycles coexists with Indian Motorcycle, it’s now well on its way to becoming fascinating.

It’s a cute, fuzzy lil’ harbinger of the end of Life as we Know it: the Google self-driving car. Seriously. Right now you may think of it as a curiosity, a gimmick, but it could alter the physical, economic and cultural landscape of America in a way we haven’t seen since … well … the invention of the car in the first place. But what will that do to poor little us on our motorcycles?