American motorcycle manufacturer ATK branching out onto the street

Despite the fact that America is a huge market for motorcycles, there are relatively few American brands in most segments of the industry. Sure, Harley-Davidson and the many custom-bike companies are big both here in the States and abroad, but there is a distinct lack of American brands available to sportbike and dirtbike enthusiasts, and the choices that are available are often not competitive with machines from other countries. ATK has long been offering an American option to dirtbike riders, but has rarely fielded a truly comparable product, or comparable prices, to the dirtbike market mostly owned by the Japanese and KTM. A few years back, ATK purchased the tooling for Cannondale's misguided 450cc 4-stroke dirtbike, and it has been improving on that design since then. This year at the Dealer Expo in Indianapolis, it was showing off some new machinery using engines designed by Highland, a Swedish manufacturer of complete bikes and engines. Highland specializes in making light, compact and powerful engines and ATK is planning on making these engines available to American consumers for the first time, wrapped in sportbike, dirtbike and supermoto style frames. This sounds like a huge undertaking, but we'd love to see ATK pull it off.

[Source: Cycle World]