The issue I see here stems from local or regional sales markets. First off, Yamaha is not going to stop production. If the factory isn’t churning, they aren’t making money. Now, you have two issues working against Yamaha.
1) Too many leftover 2008 bikes
2) A poor world economy and horrendous credit markets.
The leftovers are a problem, but it can be overlooked if the 2009s are selling. What is happening is the 2009’s aren’t selling. The economy is bad. Dealers want, and in some cases need, to get maximum profit from all of their bikes (not such the “hottest bike on the block”) to improve their chance to weather the storm. Some dealers are holding strong at MSRP because they either need to or they have convinced themselves that they have to. It seems that in most of the high volume markets, this is the case.
You do have a few dealers that are pricing to move to get any form of income in. But these are few and far between.
It’s hard to get credit right now. A factor of market economics is who will be purchasing these bikes. The people buying these bikes are not the same type of people going out and buying Jaguars, BMWs, and Mercedes Benz. The majority of them tend to reside in the middle to lower income and credit brackets. These people are having a tremendously hard time getting credit.
So you have dealers who are staunch on MSRP (which is driving away a percentage of the buying population) and the credit markets on the fritz (which is driving away another percentage of the population). These factors are indicating that if Yamaha floods the market with the same number of ‘09’s as they did the ‘08’s they will be left with two years of high volume leftovers, a position I am sure they want to avoid.
To counter this I suspect you will see a decrease in production of US-bred bikes. Because the US bike is different than every other R1 sold in the world (and the costs to convert each one to the European-spec would be non-profit driving) the only recourse is to limit, or even stop, shipment of US-bred bikes. I highly suspect that you will not see many dealers with a ton of stock of these bikes, especially in the smaller markets. If you really want this bike and are in a small or medium market (and if you have a lot of people in your market that want this bike as well) you’re gonna have to travel or get a dealer transfer. This is going to mean the cost of the bike is going to go up for you.
Some people will get lucky if they buy early from someone who is pricing to sell. But unless Yamaha sees a physical increase in demand (meaning dealers not having the bike in stock) there is no financial advantage to spend money building bikes that are not going to be moved for 2-3 years. Or better yet, it would be more profitable to move production focus to the rest of the world if they can sell more product there.
If the economy improves this will change. But if it doesn’t, and you really want this bike, you’re going to have to lessen the “deal” you want to get on it or be willing to travel.
