Sound Familiar?

Bloomberg just published an essay titled, “The Motorcycle Industry Is Dying.” Not a new concept and much of their analysis has been seen here first, but it’s slightly comforting to see some one else get it. The article puts a lot of weight on the new Honda Rebel 500 and I have to admit that is entertaining. I rode the Rebel 250 for the first time in a MSF class a couple of weeks ago and it is awful. There is nothing about that motorcycle that would have enticed me to get into motorcycling.

“Honda’s Rebel is the latest entry in a parade of new bikes designed for first-time riders; almost every company in the motorcycle industry has scrambled to make one. They are smaller, lighter, and more affordable than most everything else at a dealership and probably wouldn’t look out of place in the 1960s—back when motorcycling was about the ride, not necessarily the bike. They are also bait for millennials, meant to lure them  into the easy-rider lifestyle. If all goes as planned, these little rigs will help companies like Harley-Davidson coast for another 50 years.” Good luck with that daydream.

I personally can’t imagine anything other than a hoard of electric bikes in the $5,000-territory that will turn the motorcycle economy around, but power to them for finally waking up and discovering Boomers are dying off. “A motorcycle is a picture of discretionary spending, and they can be tricky to finance even in a healthy credit market. Even now, with the stock market on a historic bull run and after the U.S. auto industry posted its best year on record, traffic in motorcycle stores has stayed slow. In 2016, U.S. customers rolled off with 371,403 new bikes, roughly half as many as a decade ago.”

Too little, too late has been my analysis for the last decade. This author sort of agrees, “The problem, however, with this sudden industry pivot to younger customers is that it may be coming too late. For years, it was too easy to just keep building bigger, more powerful bikes.“ It was easier and Boomers were dumb enough to buy into pretending that 60 was the age of midlife crisis. Ride down WI35 and look at all the Harleys out on the front lawns for sale. It’s over boys, now what are you going to do? One problem with a lot of these little motorcycles is that they aren’t as energy efficient as many cars. If anything makes motorcycles a purely recreational toy it is lousy fuel economy.

It could be a bigger trend than motorcycles, though. Driving, in general, has lost a lot of appeal to practically everyone.

Product Review: More Miles for Me

All Rights Reserved © 2012 Thomas W. Day

After my 2011 cruise around Lake Superior, my only bitch about the WR250X is the mediocre mileage. At 55mpg, the stock two gallon tank barely gets me past the 100 mile mark before the fuel injection is sucking fumes. Yamaha claims 71mpg for this bike, but I have never done better than 62 and the Lake Superior trip knocked down 55mpg for several tanks in all sorts of conditions. I installed a 3.1 gallon IMS tank, which gives me closer to 170 miles between full to drained, but 150 to reserve is pretty predictable. I need a minimum of 200 miles per tank for touring. What to do?

I looked at the IMS 4.5 gallon tank, but sticking 27 pounds, plus the tank weight that far forward on a lightweight 250 seems like a bad idea. I like the front suspension somewhat soft and that won't work if I load up the front tire with more fuel weight. Plus, I do not trust the idea of making the radiator guards into fuel storage. I've read about a few guys who have crashed off-road and gouged a hole in one of those protruding scoops, losing all of their fuel capacity. I like my "guards" to be guards.

I looked at carrying a 1 or 1.5 gallon plastic tank on the seat. There are many things I don't like about that option. Doing a little research, the modern lazy-man's way (the internet and Google), I found that a lot of off-road folks really liked RotoPax fuel cans, so I ordered one; the 1 gallon version, which is a near-perfect 9 1/2 L x 13 1/4 W x 3 H and cost about $80 with the mount and shipped. When the container arrived, I thought they'd shipped it with fuel. This thing is heavy, about 5 pounds, and appears to be as solid as a metal can. I can stand on it without seeing much flex and I'm not light.

At first, I thought about mounting the bracket on my Yamaha rear rack, but that would screw up the rack for every day use. Target sells a 9-1/2 x 15 x 1/4" black polyethylene cutting board that sells for about $10. Poly cuts easily on a table saw with a plywood or crosscut blade, so I hacked out a plate that fits on the my rear rack's frame. A little finish work, $3 worth of stainless screws and washers, and I have a solid mount for the gas can and it is narrow enough for my Giant Loop Coyote Saddlebag to fit over the tank and attach normally. Even better, with a $20 extension, I can load up two 1 gallon tanks, still use my Giant Loop gear, and get a 250 mile or better range out of the WR. Now, we're talking adventure touring!

My Vehicle Ownership Costs

A while back, blog reader and old man abuser Andy Mckenzie, challenged me regarding my assumptions that motorcycle ownership isn't an economical transportation alternative, relative to cheap car ownership. The chart below describes the results of my careful accounting of my operational costs since I purchased these 3 vehicles. The actual odometer reading \on each vehicle is greater than that listed below, but the only significant variance in the "Miles" spec is on the Ford Escort Wagon which had about 100,000 miles on the odometer when I bought the car. The two bikes weren't even broken-in when I bought them from their original owners (less than 900 miles).

Economy Comparison between My Cheap Car and My Motorcycles
	1998 Ford Escort Wagon	2008 Yamaha WR250X	2004 Suzuki 650 V-Strom
Costs/Mile	$0.225	$0.290	$0.172
Cost/Year	$1,865	$1,414	$1,114
Miles/Year	8,294	4,882	6,497
Years Owned	9.4	1.9	6.4
Miles	78,053	9,469	41,778
Average Fuel Economy (miles/gallon)	24.4	52.6	50.3
Vehicle Expense	$2,700	$3,200	$3,400
Total Fuel Costs	$9,437	$531	$2,450
Tires	$280	$426	$1,540
Oil Changes	$120	$39	$328
Major Repairs	$3,572	$0	$0
Minor Repairs	$84	$439	$1,056
Taxes and License Fees	$517	$253	$310
Insurance	$1,468	$410	$956
Farkles	$275	$845	$627
Current Resale Value (estimate)	$900	$3,400	$3,500
Total Lifetime Costs	$17,553	$2,744	$7,166

This is not the data result I expected. For years, because of the cost of drive-line repairs (chains and sprockets) and tires, I've assumed that owning a motorcycle is inherently more expensive than driving a cheap car.  The comments I made on a past blog/rant more than implied that and Mr. Mckenzie called me on it. It's only luck that prevented me from putting money on this claim.This is a discussion and assumption I've shared with the publisher of Minnesota Motorcycle Monthly Magazine, Victor Wanchena, and a disagreement that has continued with the owner/founder of Aerostich, Andy Goldfine, for years. I have, clearly, taken for-granted an erroneous assumption: motorcycles are not an economical transportation option.

The fact that the WR250X is, so far, the most expensive vehicle I currently own means nothing. The bike needed a lot of TLC in the form of returning it to stock after the original owner chopped it to bits in an effort to make his dick appear to be bigger (or whatever motivation it is that causes children and fools to ruin perfectly good engineering in an attempt at proving they're smart). All of the Minor Repair costs on that bike have been the expense of buying stock parts and one chain/sprocket replacement at about 1,200 miles (obviously, the previous owner didn't believe in lubrication). My first set of tires were actual SuperMoto tires and they were expensive and didn't live long. The current tires are dual purpose Korean cheapos and are wearing like iron. I also installed a 3.1 gallon tank, a new seat, a suspension-lowering link, and a rear rack which jacked up the Farkles costs considerably. As usual, I don't expect to get anything back from the Farkle "investment," but it is a one-time expense that will obviously be overwhelmed if the bike holds up and I'm able to put some serious miles on the 250 in the next few years.The more I've worked on the WR250X, the better the fuel economy has become, so it ought to show some serious "improvement" in cost/mile driven by next winter. Since I'm finished Farkle-ing the WR, now the fuel economy will start chipping away at the Cost/Mile figure.

The V-Strom ownership costs are artificially lower than they should be, due to my writing "business." The bike has a lot more Farkle-investment than $627, but I picked up most of those bits as evaluation "samples" so I don't have any money in my aftermarket luggage, chain-oiler, seat, and a bunch of other "improvements." I'm just working this out by what I have invested, not what the stuff might be worth. Most of the V-Strom's Minor Repairs costs have been in chain replacement. The bike has seen at least 12,000 miles of off-pavement travel and that chews up O-ring chains fast, even with an auto-oiler. In fact, if the Escort had seen the same kind of terrain, it might have not survived.

Since the Current Resale Value (estimate) is subtracted from the Total Lifetime Costs and Cost/Mile figures, if I get less than those estimates the numbers will, in the end, reflect that. I might be optimistic on the Escort and WR250X's resale, but from last summer's experience I don't anticipate getting less than $3,500 for the V-Strom whenever I sell it. Those numbers are just estimates, but I don't expect to be particularly surprised or depressed by the final values.

For most of my life, I suspected that car ownership is stupid. The cost of renting a brand new Kia in Portland and driving it to San Francisco this past January and the above data proves that point. I paid about $0.34/mile to lightly use that car for eight days. I would have paid 2/3 of that if I'd have returned the car to Portland. The "convenience" of car ownership is overwhelmed by the cost of the damn things and, since I hate driving them in the best of times, I will happily divest myself of at least one of my cars the day I retire.

The Consumption Nation

My wife and I are in Texas and have been for a week. I haven't been back in this state for a few years and haven't been here for any period of time since the 70's. My father-in-law died last week and we've been trying to sort out his mess of an "estate" since. I learned a lot about why some people are careful about planning their death. The last memories of us that the people who have to sort out our crap will have can be pretty negative.

I snagged this picture from another website, but it is exactly
typical of the "traffic" we experienced in the Wichita Falls
ghost town freeway tour. 

I've been here for a week, putting on miles between Wichita Falls and Dallas, and there aren't enough Texas motorcycles on the road to warrant bothering to license motorcycles in the state. If a motorcycle is a transportation device, it falls miles below bicycles, skates, wheelchairs, Hot Wheels, and feet in miles-traveled in this state. If I throw out the few long distance travelers I've seen (maybe a half-dozen), I could easily count the number of motorcycles I've seen on the road on one hand. Pitiful.

This place is clearly oblivious of the world outside of its boarders. Cars are generally huge, mostly SUVs and single passenger pickups. Dallas is the ultimate urban sprawl collection of houses without communities. Downtown is all but dead, even the few suburban downtown areas are dead zones of empty business buildings and decaying neighborhoods. There is a light rail, but every time we've been traveling along its path the cars appear to be mostly empty. The highways, freeways, and toll roads are monuments to massive federal investment and a mindless faith that petroleum will last forever. Wichita Falls is, for example, a dying town, with a business real estate market that resembles Detroit. The place is overpass rich, though. For a town that has about as much traffic as a rural Nebraska farm town, Wichita Falls has a collection of giant overpasses and empty freeways. If I were making an "end of days" movie, I couldn't hope for a better collection of sets than in this abandoned city.

Texas drivers are mad. I mean exactly that word, too. They are a nasty combination of insane and angry. If I were forced to live here, I'd probably still ride but I'd spend a lot of my days in terror. If there is an example of a place that is actively burning up the world's resources so that their children can live in the stone age, this place has to be on the list. It's worse than LA.

When we went shopping for my grandson's birthday presents at a local Target, a man was hauling his 10-12 year-old daughter out of the store. She was kicking and screaming and nearly choking with emotion as the embarrassed man walked quickly through the store. As they approached I began to make out what she was screaming, "I'm not leaving until I get something I want!" She said it like a chant, repeatedly, all the way out the door. It felt like a national anthem after my experience in Texas.

We're Back?

In 2008, fuel prices bumped against $4/gallon and suddenly motorcycles took on a practical value to a fair number of US citizens. As a motorcycle safety trainer, we were almost overwhelmed by the number of people who wanted to take the course and earn their motorcycle license and by the sudden change in student demographics. For the first 6 years of my MSF trainer career, the overwhelming majority of "students" had been old farts working on their late term bucket list. Most of these characters were Hardly stereotypes of either sex and I put the word "student" in parenthesis because many of those people demonstrated none of the characteristics of real students; mainly a willingness to work hard at learning something new.

Suddenly, in 2008, our student population turned young. I don't know if the state's data would support my observation, but I do know that the energy in the classes I taught that year was a lot higher than in the previous six. After the economy tanked, fuel prices collapsed and so did a lot of motorcycle safety training programs. The following year our class load was at least 10% down and the program I teach with started canceling classes as early as June, a full two months before previous years. Last year was a repeat of the previous with $2 gas convincing the marching SUV morons that "peak oil" was a liberal tree-hugging delusion.

The fact is, we past peak oil almost a half-decade ago (or you could argue that the little 2008 blip was the peak, but that doesn't explain the previous 3 years of flat production) and we're going to be teetering at the peak for a few years before the down side of that curve forces real changes in human behavior. Every time the world's economy shows signs of recovery, energy consumption will go up and prices will follow, high energy prices will force consumption down, the economy will collapse, and the cycle starts over.

If we're on the downside, that means that motorcycles, even in the US, are part of the alternative transportation solution. At $4-10/gallon, getting 70-150mpg becomes a lot more enticing. Folks like the shade-tree engineers at EcoModder.com are talking about modifying to a variety of motorcycles in the interest of squeezing more mileage out of production motorcycles. Scooter owners are already used to getting 100-or-more miles per gallon from their vehicle of choice. Motorcycles are more about performance than efficiency, but that could/should/will change. It has to, or we're going obsolete like the SUV, 3,000 square foot yuppie Texas Whorehouses, and the buggy whip. [Actually, the buggy whip could make a comeback.]

I, believe it or not, have my new (to me) WR250X in the kitchen this weekend (since it is 6F in the garage) sorting out the suspension, fixing the silly things the previous owner did to the bike (chopping off the back end of the stock exhaust), and getting the bike ready for a season of commuting, exploring dirt roads, and a tour or two. I'm also hoping to have a stuffed motorcycle safety class schedule to pay for it all.