Velocette Vogue
This 1964 Velocette Vogue shows how pretty they were. Their fiberglass bodies were well-made and fit well. Removable panels allowed for engine maintenance.
Velocette Vogue Background & History
The Velocette Vogue was in production from 1962 through the 1968 model year. It was a product of a trend that took place mostly in Britain in the 1950s best described as ‘the enclosed motorcycle’. Britain is known for its bad weather, and in the years following World War 2 their economy was still recovering, so times were hard for many Britons. Cars were in short supply for the few who could afford them, and most couldn’t afford them, so commuter motorcycles became a common solution. Legions of Brits rode their bikes to work rain or shine, and wiping them down after every ride was routine. Water, mud, fog and grime coated their bikes and led quickly to rust if they weren’t kept clean. In 1954, Vincent wrapped its 1000cc V-Twin Rapide in a shapeless fiberglass body to create the Vincent Black Prince. It took a few years for the rest of the industry to catch on, but soon Triumph, Ariel, Norton and Velocette all had enclosed machines. The Velocette Vogue was one of them.
The Velocette Vogue had two headlights. The added electrical draw required an 80-amp generator.
Velocette Vogue Design
Using the tiny engine from the Velocette LE probably wasn’t a good idea in a motorcycle fully clad in bodywork. In the LE MkII horizontally-opposed twin-cylinder engine was a flathead (aka side-valve) design known for their low performance, and it displaced just 200cc, making all of 8 hp at 5000 rpm. Instead of using the LE’s stamped-aluminum monocoque chassis, Velocette designed a whole new tube frame and some shapely fiberglass bodywork for the Velocette Vogue. Unfortunately the little engine that was already underpowered in the stripped-down LE was even more overworked in the bloated Vogue. They were too slow and too small for most motorcycle buyers.
The Velocette Vogue was meant to feel like more than just a motorcycle, more like a car.
Velocette had missed out on the vertical twin boom that kicked off with the 500cc 1938 Triumph 5T Speed Twin and continued through the late 1940s when BSA, Ariel, Matchless/AJS and Royal Enfield all fielded their own twins, and through the 1950s as they all enlarged them to 650cc or better. Velocette couldn’t afford to join the party and so soldiered on doing what it always did: building big, powerful singles that looked like they were from the 1930s. Vertical twins rendered high performance singles obsolete. Singles were now viewed as low-cost commuter bikes. Velocette’s biggest market niche was fading fast. It was a bold decision on their part to enter a whole new market segment for them, and with an engine and frame that had no connection to its past, or the rich storehouse of knowledge their engineers had accumulated over the years. Unfortunately, the LE was poorly planned and executed, and as was so often the case, sales projections were wildly optimistic. And many of these flawed plans needed big sales numbers to make them pencil out. The Velocette LE and it’s stablemate the Velocette Vogue were good examples of this.
The Velocette Vogue's full body protected not just the bike. Rider was shielded from the wind and weather with huge fenders, the windscreen and the leg guards.
Velocette Vogue Optimized for Production
Velocette chairman Eugene Goodman (son of the founder) admired the massive economies of scale achieved in America by Henry Ford and General Motors, but acknowledged that Velocette’s lineup did not lend itself to modern mass production techniques. This thinking colored the LE’s radical design. The frame wasn’t made out of bent tubing and brazed lugs, it was stamped out of sheets of aluminum, like those done in an instant by massive dies on the production line in Ford’s factories. But the radical new thinking didn’t end there. With smooth, quiet operation as an imperative, the engine was made small, water-cooled, horizontally opposed and with side-valves instead of more modern overhead valves (OHV). What they ended up with was 6 horsepower. Where the rest of the world was shifting motorcycle gearboxes with their feet, Goodman envisioned a well-dressed rider who would be wearing nice shoes and wouldn’t want to mar them with the shifter. Therefore, the first two Marks of the Velocette LE were hand-shifted. This sort of thinking doomed the project from the start and unfortunately the Velocette Vogue was built on the bones of the LE. Instead of the pressed aluminum frame however, there was a whole new welded tube chassis, but the same old 200cc opposed twin to deliver it’s now 8 hp.
This is a 1968 Velocette Vogue, the last year of production.
The End of the Velocette Vogue
This entire market segment, including enclosed bikes like the Velocette Vogue, the Ariel Leader, the Norton Navigator DeLuxe and the Triumph bathtub bikes, and cheap commuters like the BSA Bantam and the Velocette LE all relied on the assumption that there was no better alternative when it came to low-cost transportation. Then, the 1959 Mini was launched, a 4-passenger car that was almost as cheap as a motorcycle and the whole commuter bike market took a major hit. And on top of it all, the Velocette Vogue was expensive in a market that was supposed to be aimed at the frugal buyer. In 1964 a new Vogue ran £246 base price, £272 with optional windscreen, panniers (saddle bags) and turn signal indicators. The Ariel Leader, a very comparable rival, sold for just £225 and performed better.
But in the end the Velocette Vogue, like virtually every classic British motorcycle of the day, was a victim of changing times. The vertical twins were just the beginning. In the early 1960s cheap, reliable, fun bikes from Japan started to arrive. At first, none of the big established players were worried about these odd upstarts. But before long, Japanese metal was snatching huge swaths of market share right out of the mouths of these storied British brands. And Japan didn’t hesitate to throw everything but the kitchen sink into their bikes, in the name of modernity. Overhead cams, Dual overhead cams, disc brakes, multiple cylinders, die cast engines, electric starters, 5-speed gearboxes, 6-speed gearboxes, reliable electrics, and oil-tight engines. And of course the Japanese embraced the very latest production technologies while the British, bathed in tradition, preferred to stick with Old World artisans practically hand-building their machines. Velocette didn’t have near the money to fix the problem, and other than maybe BSA for a while, none of the others did either. The last Vogue was built in 1968, and Velocette slowly slipped into insolvency, filing a voluntary receivership in 1971.
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