Yes - pretty much everybody got to copy the DKW 125, including Harley Davidson (hummer) and BSA (Bantam). The natural sucessor of DKW was MZ in East Germany where Ernst Degner worked before defecting to Suzuki.
The above was the BSA version where the drawings were 'mirrored' to make the bike more 'British'. I restored this one back in the 1990s......
It's tradional for motorcycle companies to 'borrow' a few details from other factories but the Meguro went a little bit too far, in my opinion. In fact Kawasaki, until recently, had a better Bonneville replacement than Triumph.
G
Nick wrote:Indeed they did.
Yamaha was no different. They copied the DKW for their first bike, the YC-1. In fact, it was Honda that inspired Nippon Gakki to start producing motorcycles. By the time the war ended, Nippon Gakki's factory (soon to spin off a company called Yamaha) was completely destroyed. However, the machines and tooling they'd been using to produce propellors and airplane drop tanks for the military survived, having been moved to the nearby countryside.
It was a visit to Honda's Hamamatsu factory that inspired the president and executives of Nippon Gakki to start manufacturing motorcycles. The DKW 125 provided the basis for their first machine.
Even today, when you visit the inner sanctums of any of the Japanese factories it is quite common to see the latest Harleys, KTMs and other competing machines there for comparison and ..... 'inspection'.
Kawasaki's first bike, the W-1, was a copy of the Meguro 650 which Meguro copied from BSA!
And anyone who hasn't read the sordid history of Suzuki and MV and Ernst Degner should do so.
Truly, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.