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.
All Rights Reserved © "Never argue with a fool; onlookers may not be able to tell the difference."
- Mark Twain I check the comments on this blog regularly. The idea is that we're going to have a conversation about the ideas I've presented. You should be aware of the fact that when someone emails me an interesting comment, the odds are good that I'll post that in the comments anonymously and reply to that comment on the blog rather than in email.
Sep 30, 2011
3 comments:
Disagree? Bring it on. Have more to add? Feel free to set me straight. Unfortunately, Blogger doesn't do a great job of figuring out which Anonymous commenters are actually real people, not Russians or Chinese bots. Because of that, I don't accept anonymous posts. If you have something worth saying, you shouldn't be afraid of using your ID.
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.
ReplyDeleteTriumph 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....
ReplyDeleteHonestly, 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?
ReplyDelete