Three power cruisers, each with their own style, go head to head. Will the Harley-Davidson FXDR 114, H-D Fat Bob 114, or Ducati Diavel 1260 S take the win in this shootout.

Cruisers generally don’t need to change much to sell. In fact, models that offer classic silhouettes tend to outsell progressive designs—regardless of performance. And while traditional bikes remain the bread and butter of the cruiser world, in an effort to attract new riders to the segment and to sell more machines, makers push designs in new ways.

These three motorcycles—the Harley-Davidson Fat Bob 114, Harley-Davidson FXDR 114, and Ducati's Diavel 1260 S—are here to shove a piece of cruiser market into a new era. These three bikes sit atop the evolving genre as the fastest, most aggressive cruisers out there. And the faster and more aggressive they get, the less they tend to look like traditional cruisers. In fact, this comparison could be called the shootout of weird headlights. We've come a long way from a 7-inch round sealed beam…

But the overall designs are just symbolic of another broader departure. Most traditional American-style motorcycles still replicate the design language introduced by the Harley-Davidson Knucklehead in 1936, and this silhouette typically hasn't represented all-around hot-rod performance. So when manufacturers want to stretch the category and attract new buyers who might be thinking of transitioning from another sportier category, they try to do something different.

We were big fans of the 2018 Fat Bob 114 because it offered seemingly impossible dynamics from this chunky-tired chassis and big-bore engine. It was such a fun "cruiser," and pushed the styling boundaries so hard, we picked it as Cycle World's Best Cruiser of 2018. This year, Harley-Davidson again forged ahead with the FXDR 114, delivering burly drag-racing-inspired styling to the mix but still on the Softail platform. The Ducati Diavel is also a previous Ten Best Bikes winner in the cruiser category for bringing an Italian superbike ethic to an American-style bike, though no one would ever mistake the Diavel 1260 S for anything but a Ducati.

To test these machines, three of us rode Southern California’s roads from our Orange County headquarters to the California historical landmark of Julian, a quaint town with a long history of serving exceptional apple pie at roughly 4,200 feet of elevation. This route meant that straight highways led to long, meandering turns as we neared our destination, and the final sprint up the mountain contained nothing but tight corners as we rocketed up in elevation. Through fast and slow, straight and twisty, we used Bluetooth comms to talk with each other in our helmets, comparing and evaluating the bikes as we rode.

Southbound on California's main motor artery that is Interstate 5, all three bikes chugged along at an effortless and relaxed 75 mph. With us twisting the throttle to pass cars at speed, seat-of-the-pants feeling had the Fat Bob responding a little more quickly than the FXDR, but the Ducati easily left both Harleys in the dust. Ducati's superbike heritage explodes from the liquid-cooled 1260 S engine, despite its "cruiser" role, while Harley-Davidson's air-cooled "big blocks" are high-performance versions of a purely American kind of motorcycle powerplant.

The Harley-Davidson models are both equipped with 114ci Milwaukee-Eight engines—the largest available in the Softail lineup. These 1,868cc, air-cooled, four-valves-per-cylinder, 45-degree V-twin engines brought the Softail lineup into a new era (along with all-new chassis), but still offer that big-flywheel, torque-intensive character Americans love above all other large-displacement motorcycle engines. And while you might expect these two V-twins with identical displacement and gearing to offer identical performance, they exhibited different characteristics on the road as well as on the Cycle World dyno. The Fat Bob made 82.3 hp and 111.39 pound-feet of torque, while the FXDR was about 3 hp and 4 pound-feet down on those peak numbers, due, Harley-Davidson said, to normal production variation.

Out in the real world, seat-of-the-pants feeling also gave the nod to the Fat Bob, which felt like it launched off the line a little quicker than the FXDR, a somewhat unexpected outcome considering the drag inspiration of the latter and its 240mm rear tire. Winding up to the top of the revs, the FXDR also vibrated more than the Fat Bob, leaving us favoring the Fat Bob in both high and low rpm. The Ducati meanwhile was in a world of its own.

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