Ask MO Anything: How Much Does It Cost the Manufacturer to Add Cruise Control?
You know you want it
Regular readers may have noticed that I’m partial to cruise control, to the point where I may have stated I wouldn’t buy a new motorcycle without it. Cruise control, in fact, is one of the best things the new Aprilia Tuono 660 in our lead photo has going for it. When I complained that the new Ducati Monster doesn’t offer the magic button in our May First Ride, I suffered the slings and arrows in the Comments section. The new Monster is now a ride-by-wire affair, and I’d heard from various knowledgeable sources that when ride-by-wire is already present – ie, the throttle is controlled by the ECU instead of the rider’s wrist – it’s a simple affair to add cc, mostly a matter of just adding the button and switchgear.
Born to Ride took me to task, as usual, pointing out that adding cruise control to any vehicle is way more complicated and expensive than that, in a torrent of officious comments that forced me to seek expert advice.
So we got hold of Stuart Wood, Chief Engineer at Triumph Motorcycles, who informs us:
Ride by wire is an enabler for cruise control but is not the only cost. If you have to write and develop cruise control software there is a lot of detail work, development and prove-off testing to do. If you already have cruise control software written and in production, it may be a case of developing and tuning it for a new application. But even this is time consuming and costly: You have to ensure that all functions work correctly for a particular bike with its individual combination of electrical and electronic components. The way the bike sets, cancels and resumes cruise control is critical and is thoroughly developed, tested and validated.
Every feature that is added to a new model is subjected to the same degree of rigour and diligence in the design, development and prove-off process. I can’t give you numbers but there are real costs involved in adding any feature to a new model.
Hope that helps,
Best regards,
Stuart
I hate it when other people are right, but I suppose I should just be happy it so seldom happens. Anyway, since cruise control seems to be increasingly common on new bikes, I’m just going to start complaining about the ones that don’t have the adaptive variety.
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AskMoAnything@motorcycle.com. If we can’t answer them, we’ll at least make you feel temporarily better by thinking you’re talking to somebody who knows what they’re talking about and cares, even if we don’t. Usually we can track down a person who actually does know. It’s the thought that counts.
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Seems to me like Mr. Wood was overplaying the cost aspect, except this part.
"If you already have cruise control software written and in production, it may be a case of developing and tuning it for a new application."
Since CC is available on almost every Triumph platform, it would be relatively easy/inexpensive to tweak it for each model in that platform. R-b-W simply gets told what to do according to the speed set.
Ducati has other bikes that already have cruise control. Adding cc to the Monster, compared to implementing ride-by-wire, is almost as simple as adding a button (yes, there is a little tuning, but in the big picture of redesigning the Monster, the cost difference is a rounding error to the second decimal). So... Burns had the cost about right. Problem is that cc is something that's not really all that useful on a naked bike that's supposedly more at home in the twisties and urban environment than on the highway. And since the Monster is probably not meant to steal market from HD, Ducati felt that 90% of their customer base won't care about cc.
The bottom line is: Burns set the trap and we all fell for it. Few really care that much about CC yet they spent many hours (collectively) typing something about it.