INDIAN SCOUT - channels its sporty heritage and takes it onto Main Street

INDIAN SCOUT - channels its sporty heritage and takes it onto Main Street

A motorcycle is never just a motorcycle, and the all-new 2015 Indian Scout takes that truth to its extreme. The Sturgis Rally started 74 years ago, during the last moments of the original-lineage Indian Scout’s production. This year, after waiting nearly all of those seven decades, the rally was reunited with this sporty old friend. Sounds romantic, doesn’t it? But it’s complicated.

Until last year, the mud and clay and gravel the Indian name has been dragged through for fully half of its history had been caked on thickly. Polaris, Indian’s newest owner, has done an excellent job of hosing the brand clean and giving it the fresh start it deserved. The Chief and its Chiefy siblings did that by being a new old that’s an updated reflection of the last Springfield design, using a flat-head look for its fully modern air-/oil-cooled, pushrod, OHV, 49-degree V-twin engine, with those big fenders and much chrome. But it’s not news that heritage American iron is a hot seller.

Taking a bolder route, the new Scout desires to be the potential future of a past that never happened, looking for an acceptable narrative to span back to the bike’s far-off beginnings. So does this Scout convincingly carry the Indian heritage forward, and is it functionally a motorcycle you’d want to ride?