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As we all know, Victory Motorcycles was tragically killed off by its parent company Polaris early in 2017. We hate to see it go because it was an American cruiser brand that offered something quite different than the competition. Victory made cool, muscular, high-performance bikes, but it just made more sense from a business perspective for Polaris to keep and grow the Indian brand than to keep two cruiser motorcycle brands in their corporate portfolio.
Right now we’re seeing bike brands unveil their 2018 lineups, but for the aforementioned reason, Victory will have no such unveiling. According to Motorcycle.com, Polaris had three names they trademarked or tried to trademark, but haven’t been turned into real models. All three sure sound like names that belong on Victory motorcycles, so let’s speculate what they could have been.
The first name, which we know was supposed to be a Victory, is “Charger” which was filed back in 2015. For fairly obvious reasons, Polaris had a hard time trademarking the name “Charger” because of a certain muscle car that has a history with the name. What was supposed to be the Victory Charger became the Victory Empulse TT, the brand’s electric bike formerly built by Brammo.
Another name is “Rogue.” Rogue sounds like it would make sense on a smaller bike. You know, kind of like the Honda Rebel. This could have been a Victory version of the Indian Scout Sixty, the smallest bike in the Indian lineup. The Victory Octane came out in 2017 as a reskinned Indian Scout with a little more power, the Victory Rogue could have been a smaller companion to the Octane.
Finally, the third trademarked name is “Fatty.” We can’t say for sure, but we’re strongly guessing the Fatty was supposed to be a large motorcycle. The obvious segment to put it in would be a cruiser to compete with the Harley-Davidson Fatboy, but Victory already had several of those in its lineup. Perhaps the Fatty was just intended to be an addition or replacement in Victory’s lineup of big cruisers.
In case you’re still having a hard time coping with the loss of Victory, here’s a 104-horsepower Victory Octane breaking the record for longest burnout ever performed on a motorcycle (at the time).
