Road Test - Feuling W3 Cruiser

Alternative engineering, the American way

- Alan Cathcart

California is crammed with can-do customisers, all competing to create the ultimate ultrabike or the absolute auto, each the product of a mind which asks ‘why not?’, rather than ‘why?’ So it’s no coincidence that so many major manufacturers of both two- and four-wheeled customer products maintain SoCal design studios and engineering shops - because Out West is where unorthodoxy reigns, where the improbable achieves reality, and where today’s alternative design becomes tomorrow’s convention. You couldn’t really imagine the Feuling W3 Cruiser which its 56-year old creator, Jim Feuling brought to the marketplace 20 years ago in February 2001, being built anywhere else....

However, it’s not exactly true to say that nobody ever produced a radial three-cylinder bike engine before Feuling’s creation - Moto Guzzi built just such a prototype in 1987, and there were a handful of such specials derived from radial aircraft engines back in the Vintage era. But you couldn’t ever buy a motorcycle powered by such an unconventional engine package until Jim Feuling decided to put into metal a what-if idea he’d had while working with Harley-Davidson on R&D of their Twin Cam 88 motor which debuted in 1996. After two years of R&D, the Feuling W3 Cruiser duly reached the marketplace in 2001, priced at a then-steep $40,000, with the late Dallas TV soap star Larry Hagman one of the first customers to acquire one of Jim Feuling’s improbable but innovative three-cylinder pushrod air-cooled Cruisers. Very unconventional, very cool - but very California.