I know the savage started in 86 i went to look at one at the time, my question is what were the dead years when no 650s were built.  Will 2012 or 13 be the end again?

Part of the dead years scenario was a heck of a deal that Suzuki put out in 1989/90 time frame on their large warehouse stocks of Savages to move the excess inventory into the dealer's warehouses.  

(Suzuki had overproduced the bike somewhat and got caught out by the real estate bust and oil embargo that caused economic stagnation for a few years in the US)

In 1991-1993 you could buy the bikes "last year's model" new for a very nice price as the dealers got pressured into buying up a stock of bikes at the reduced prices.   Suzuki America did not import any from Japan during the glut years, they just facilitated moving inventory from dealer to dealer as needed.

When the bike came back into new production, it had some cosmetic shifts and a greatly reduced number of them were offered -- you put in your dealer order in the winter and your whole stock for the year was delivered in the spring and that was it for the year.   This was an intentional decision by Suzuki to keep the model's base price up as they were greatly discounted before due to excess stocks sitting around for years and years.    

The Savage was their low end price point bike and they also didn't want it stealing sales from the higher margin bikes.

We may be headed for another set of "dead years" because the demand for scoots is way down right now .... world wide recession and all.

Plus, Suzuki will need some time to fuel inject everything they plan to keep for 2013, plus they need to rationalize their end game of the Suzuki/Kawasaki alliance non-merger that was formed in 2001 and ended in 2006 with some of the mixed bag inventory still hanging around in their sales pipelines clogging up the works.

Plus they need to sell off some excess inventory of the carburetor scoots as "last year's model".    Demand is there for smaller 250 scoots & bigger 900 & up scoots (middle size 650 scoots not so much).

The Savage is a niche bike, a  old fart newbie girly bike that has nothing really much going for it until it gets breathed on by our little bag of tricks.  

Once properly tweeked, a Savage is the terror of the mountain roads -- perfectly suited to roads that top out at 70-80 mph in the longest straight aways and that need some fast recovery heavy torque hp every stinkin'curvy-arsed where else.

I could see the FI'd 650 DR dirt bike engine eventually showing up in the Savage frame, or the DR FI package mebbe showing up on the Savage engine.  

Suzuki needs a short person scoot of some sort or they are throwing away market share (so we will trust they keep something in the line to do this job).

It is very possible that due to our restrictive new laws Suzuki continues to sell the carburetor based scoots overseas and officially has nothing at all to fill all the 2012 and 2013 niches in the USA other than some existing stocks of  warehoused 2011 year model bikes.  

Why?  

Special FI models just for a very small 2012-2013 USA "recession year" market would be very costly to make in such small numbers.

It might be cheaper to have suddenly found some existing warehouse stocks of 2011 carburetor equipped bikes that were brought in "grandfathered" and simply do nothing else than that for a few years until there is a more active market to make it all worth while .....

Interesting thread. So, if they keep making them they will have to switch to fuel injected?

Or go on quietly selling the 2011 carbed models from "existing" warehouse stocks as "the only available units".

You bring up a good point -- if they don't totally sell off the carbed models first and and they do bring out an FI model (even on paper with no US inventory on hand) then they are gonna have to discount the carbed model even more significantly.


I'm betting on a couple of dead years to flush out all existing inventory -- this way the carbed 2011's sell at a premium instead of a big discount ....