The most ubiquitous engine in the world…

Ubiquitous.  I love that word.

The dictionary tells us it means existing or being everywhere, especially at the same time, and folks, that pretty much summarizes the Honda CG clone engine. I first heard the term used by a Harley dealer when he was describing that little thumper, and did he ever get it right. You see these engines everywhere.   I know.   To quote Mr. Cash, I’ve been everywhere, man, and I’ve seen these engines there.   Everywhere, that is.

When I first hooked up with CSC 10 years ago, the CSC Mustang replicas used a CG clone motor. I didn’t know anything about it at the time, although I am a well-traveled fellow with the frequent flier miles to prove it. I’d seen the engine everywhere; I just didn’t know (at the time) what I was looking at.  Then I had my first trip to Zongshen, and I saw that they were using variations of the CG clone in many different motorcycles. You want a 110, no problem. A 125?  No problem.  A 150? Same answer.  How about a 250? Yeah, we got those, too.  You want 4 speeds or 5 speeds?  Counterbalancer, or no counterbalance?  Black? Silver?  Some other color? No problem.  Whatever, there’s a CG clone to fit your needs and wants and the budgets of your intended markets. And it isn’t just Zongshen making these engines. There are companies all over Asia (and elsewhere) doing it. It is an engine that is, in a word, ubiquitous.

Take, for example, the CSC TT250. That bike came about as the result of my being in an RX3 meeting, in Chongqing, in one of the Zong’s many conference rooms. It was hard for me to pay attention in that meeting because Zongshen had a white scrambler on display outside the conference room, and my gaze kept turning to it. I told the Zongsters it would be cool if we (i.e., CSC at that time) could get the bike as a 250. No problem, they said, and the rest is history. Same story on the CSC San Gabriel…it was presented to CSC as a 150, we asked to get it as a 250, and, well, you know the rest. I’d say they were selling like hot cakes, but hot cakes couldn’t keep up with the San Gabriel’s sales pace.

So I travel a lot, and after my exposure to the Mustang replicas, I started noticing bikes in China, Thailand, Singapore, the Middle East, Mexico, Colombia, and elsewhere, and the overwhelmingly dominant engine was (you guessed it) the CG clone.

I’ve written about the CG engine when I used to write the CSC blog, and you might want to look at a couple of those stories, too.  They are here and here.

So you might be wondering…what’s the story behind this engine and why is it so reliable? The Reader’s Digest version goes like this: Honda was building bikes in Brazil a few years ago, and those Brazilians just wouldn’t take care of their motorcycles. Honda was getting clobbered with maintenance issues and folks badmouthing their bikes. You might be thinking hey, how can you blame Honda if the people buying their bikes weren’t maintaining them, but if you have that thought, maybe you don’t know as much about the motorcycle business as you thought you did. When folks bitch, it doesn’t have to be rational, and the most of the time the bitcher doesn’t care if the bitchee is at fault.   If you’re the manufacturer, you can’t afford to have people bitching for any reason, and Honda realized this.

Honda recognized this well before the Internet came along.  The CG engine development happened back in the 1970s, when Honda set about designing an engine that could, like the old Timex ad used to say, take a licking and keep on ticking. That’s what the CG engine was all about…it was designed to be an engine that could survive with little maintenance. Like I said, that’s the Reader’s Digest version. If you want the straight skinny, this article does as good a job as I’ve ever seen on this subject. You should read it.

You might be wondering:  Who all makes these engines, where do they go, and how is it the other companies can make an engine originally designed by Honda?   The answers, as best I can tell, are everyone, everywhere, and beats me.  Zongshen is but one company in one country that makes the CG engine, and to put this into perspective, Zongshen manufactures 4,000 engines a day.   They’re not all CG motors, but a lot of them are.  The Zong motors are used in their bikes, and they ship a whole bunch to other motorcycle manufacturers.  Every day.  All over the world.

So are the engines reliable?  In a word, yes. If you are following the CSC 150 Cabo story here on the ExNotes blog, you know my friends and I rode the little 150s to Cabo and back, in super oppressive heat, and we absolutely flogged the things.  They just kept on going.  The TT250 is wonderfully reliable.   Are they super fast?   Nope.  But they just keep on keeping on.  It’s a tortoise and the hare story.   You’ll get there, while the hypersports are waiting for desmodromic shims.

CG motors are also made by several other manufacturers in China, at least one in South America, another one in Taiwan, and who knows where else.   Maybe it’s easier to say who isn’t making them.  That would be us, here in the USA.  It sure would be nice to see someone set up a plant here to do so.  It’s a simple engine.  We could do it.

And there’s that last question:  How can other companies build a Honda design?   As near as I can tell, I don’t know.  When I ask the folks in China about this, they just sort of smile.  I imagine whatever patents there are must have expired, or maybe Honda just feels okay with other people doing this.   The short answer is that I don’t know.   But it’s a worldwide phenomenon, and I imagine if it was illegal, Big Red would have done something about it a long time ago.

So there you have it:  The CG clone engine story.  The ultimate ubiquitous motorcycle engine.