BUY NOW, EARN LATER

Sick of losing cash on bikes? Want to pick up something that might actually go up in value over the next few years? Then step this way. Our man Alan Dowds has scoured the bike trade for the Next Big Things in collectable bikes. Pick up one of these, and y

New bikes are awesome. No doubt about it. I’ve got a 2017 GSX-R1000 outside right now, and it properly facking rocks. Millions of horsepowers, lightning steering, Tron-style electronics, and even the looks are starting to grow on me. But what new bikes are shit at is making money. In fact, they do the opposite, shedding cash like your straight-edge mate on his stag do in a Magaluf strip bar. You might as well be burning £50 notes instead of Optimax for the first 1000 miles, as you cut £2k off the value. Booooh!

So what if you could buy a bike that would actually go up in value, as well as giving you a big pile of laughs? And with the banks only handing out a tenth of a per cent in interest, shouldn’t you be taking any savings out and spending them on hot metal instead? Hindsight is a wonderful thing of course. But every time I see a Suzuki RG500 or RGV250 on the Bay for £15k, I remember when they were scrappy old nails, worth a couple of grand, tops, and only of interest to weirdos. Back in the mid-2000s, there were signs of interest, but you could still pick up Yamaha RD350YPVS and RD500LCs for very decent cash. Now, a decent YPVS starts around £4k, and a 500 is three times that.

Creating desire

So, what’s going on? And how do we get in on the ground floor with this malarkey? Well, the principles are fairly straightforward really. Bikes which represent something you can’t have any more – two-strokes, for example, and bikes which were the big thing when many current riders were young and impressionable. Add in rarity, and you have the three major factors behind the price jumps on many bikes.

The current lust for two-strokes is entirely down to them not being around anymore. If the environmental rules had banned four-strokes, and we were all riding round on 200bhp, 750cc fuel-injected two-stroke bikes, we’d be lusting after the Honda 400 Superdream and Yamaha XS750, instead of the old strokers. Folk like the idea of something you can’t have any more – even if it’s a bit shit when you get down to it.

People obsess over RG500s, but the bare figures for one are pretty mundane – 95 claimed bhp? Okay, it was light at 156kg dry and a dull old R6 is only about 10kg heavier, but has more than 30bhp more power. Because it makes a different noise, is a bit peakier and you can’t buy them any more, the RG500 is elevated to some sort of different plane. One where eBay slags think they can charge £30,000 for a nice one…

Where to stick your cash

So, armed with this info, we’ve set out to find the Next Big Things in the used bike game. Now, we don’t quite have the advantage of the two-stroke cliff edge – there’s no massive game-changing design difference like this about. But the growth in electronics might help out – you can’t now buy a bike without ABS, and all the other stuff like traction control and power modes are also becoming ubiquitous. Perhaps in ten years’ time, people will be going mad for a bike with a plain old throttle cable controlling the butterfly valves, rather than a computer.

Whatever the tech changes – here’s our list of the hot contenders of the moment.