SWM bikes have their roots pretty deep in the dirt, having arisen simply out of a desire to have a competitive four-stroke off-road bike.
They were an underdog in the 70’s as pretty much all the leading brands chose to develop two-strokes, especially in the small displacement categories. They were surprisingly competitive with their small Sachs engines, well tuned and optimized for the chassis built around the engines. They then started manufacturing larger bikes with Rotax drive with improved torque and relatively light weight, making it more competitive, especially in trials competition.
Unfortunately, like most small companies, their success was short-lived and shut down in the mid-’80s, only to be revived 30 years later in 2014, thanks in no small part to their old rival Husqvarna.
The competition days of the SWM
Pretty much the only reason SWM started was for competition. Other Italian bikes were slowly lagging behind and to keep up with the overseas bikes they literally had to take matters into their own hands.
They designed and built three models in the early years to compete in the 100cc and 125cc classes. They also made a 50cc two-stroke minicycle (which was made by Morini). The 100 cc and 125 cc engines were originally supplied by Sachs and were mostly competition engines. They started well but decided to switch suppliers and opted for a wider range of engines from Rotax. These would go on to become their most famous and popular bikes, carried her to several victories and establishing SWM as the perennial brave underdog.
Sales slumped in the 1980’s and the small business simply could not keep up with the rapidly advancing and improving competition, and by 1984 they were gone.
A new era for SWM
Husqvarna bought from KTM bmw, they left a perfectly capable, well-equipped factory in Italy, a holdover from Husqvarna’s Cagiva days.
It gave the Shineray group an opportunity to revive the SWM brand, although as you can imagine they probably could have picked any of the many dead Italian brands, this shoe was a particularly good fit. SWM had always been 100% focused on their dirt bikes and with all the tooling they had at their disposal for the old Husqvarna dirt and enduro bikes, it was a smart move in terms of marketing.
Despite being fully owned by the Chinese company, everything is still made and engineered in Italy. All of the current bikes are effectively redesigned Husqvana bikes from about a decade ago, which isn’t a bad thing at all.
Affordable quality
Ironically, if you want the most original new Husqvarna on the market today, these SWM bikes are just what you might want.
Same factory, same workers, just under new management and obviously some necessary emissions-related adjustments. We don’t take anything away from you the new Husqvarna wheels, but in truth the only thing they have left is the name, everything else is now history, these Italian-made bikes were originally designed Huskies for a while. With incredibly competitive prices, a high level of quality and some decent components, these old designs still hold up pretty well. They’re obviously far from perfect, but if you wanted to be perfect you wouldn’t buy anything Italian at all.
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