Honda Honda Shadow

I just rode two motorcycles with fork gaiters within a one-week period. Nooo, they weren’t vintage 2-stroke MXers. Both were 2024 models, street bikes, cruisers at that. The first was Kawasaki’s new Eliminator, and the second was Honda’s reworked (I refuse to use “updated” and “fork gaiters” in the same paragraph) Shadow Phantom.

Honda’s Shadow line of cruisers has been around since 1983 and has featured models displacing as much as 1100cc, but now the Shadow line consists of just four 745cc V-Twin motorcycles. Priced at only $10 per cc, all four models start from the same basic chassis and engine before being outfit with various combinations of wheels and bodywork designed to appeal to different cruiser riders. For this test, we decided to go over to the Dark Side with the Shadow Phantom, which embraces the blacked-out theme trending these days. Its MSRP was reduced from $8,240 for 2014 to match its Shadow brothers.