I ride with the local section of the Can. Vintage Motorcycle Group (
www.CVMG.org) and one of our members had a 2012 <I think> Ural sidecar rig that he really liked. About 2 months ago he traded it in on a brand new 2022 Ural rig and he says the new one is virtually identical from 5 feet away, but a
MUCH better bike up close with much better electrics and EFI as well.
He isn't too concerned about parts as the mechanical bits are old BMW for the most part and the new electrical stuff are (I think) generic Japanese or Chinese components. Both of his Urals were olive drab and had the optional shovel (
entrenching tool?), spare wheel and two-wheel drive (but no machine gun mount on the side car).
I will admit that he took a fair bit of teasing about its origins at our last coffee hour a week ago though....
Interestingly, another member of our group has a Chinese sidecar rig called a
Chang Jiang (we call it a
Chop Suey) that is virtually identical to the Ural - having been a development of the same 1938 BMW R71 748cc German military bikes which were provided to Russia during the brief honeymoon with Hitler prior to WW-2. Apparently, Stalin gave Mao a set of Ural M-72 tooling way back in the 1940s-50s and they are still cranking them out.
The bike was brought back from China by a Canadian diplomat some years ago and it looks very smart with a bright red paint job and gold pinstriping which is much more appealing than the military scheme of the Urals. It looks just about exactly the same as the one in the photo below including the odd handlebar levers that hinge at their
outboard ends.
Pete
);
