Bill Bassett from Motoprimo had his curiosity piqued by my comments about the CBR250R's tool kit. So, he called Honda to ask "What's up?" The response was funny enough he had to call me about it.
It turns out that Honda thinks motorcyclists are a lot lamer than most of you anticipated. And most of you anticipated that we're pretty incompetent, as a buying crowd. Honda's policy is to included only enough "tools" to allow the user to get to the battery. So, the CBR250R's kit includes one 5mm Allen wrench because you have to remove the seat to get to the battery. The Goldwing's battery can be accessed without any tools. So, guess what's in the Goldwing's "tool kit?"
Bill said Honda is, so far, alone in its low opinion of customer mechanical capacity. Yamaha and Kawasaki, for example, still include a reasonable collection of marginal quality tools with their bikes.
3 comments:
Sounds like a lame excuse to try to save a few pennies per bike. I hope they are trying to save money and they really don't think we are that incompetent.
Triumph did the exact same thing with the Scrambler/Bonneville line, just one 5mm allen wrench to remove the seat with but they included a handful of crap tools (I wouldn't call it a 'tool kit' but more than an allen wrench) on my Tiger 1050, enough for a few basic maintenance items....
Honestly, I can't argue with their logic, as much as I'd like to. The reason the tools have been so crappy for so long is that most riders never use 'em. Those of us who do use tools and carry them, replace the crappy tools with our own selection before we take the bike out of the garage. Why spend the money on a full kit if it's either not used or useless?
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