Why are BMW air-cooled engines called “boxers”?
Well, you see, the name comes from the fact that all BMW bikes (with the exception of that current abomination) use shaft-drive for turning the rear-wheel. How does a shaft-drive imply the name “boxer”, you ask? Well, the VERY first shaft-drive bike was of course the Spagthorpe Boxer, an experimental design of the earlier years of the company. And that motorcycle has quite the history, quite the history. The best theory of the time said that if you were to use longitudinal crankshafts (the Spag models of that time were all opposed-triples, so had two cranks) with a shaft-drive turning in the same direction, the motorcycle would be wheelie-unstable. That is, under strong application of counter-steering, along with the requisite roll-on throttle, would produce an uncontrollably violent wheelie. (The theory is quite complicated; suffice to say that the waffle-cone had not yet been invented.) Well, Lord Julian and his trusty engineers knew a seductive challenge when they saw one, and rose
