‘YOU WANT A NICE LITTLE CAR, YOU DO’
The Missenden Flyer on why all useful logic suggests you should be spending your money on a car, not a bike, but who cares about logic?
I’m in a fortunate enough position to own and run four motorcycles and three cars. My main family car, a luxury estate from a German manufacturer does an average of 46 miles per gallon thanks to its clever hybrid (diesel/electric) drive, and, because of its green characteristics, it also costs me just £20 a year to tax. Contrast that with my Ducati Panigale: a beautiful bike, but it returns, at best, around 40 miles per gallon and costs me £92.40 a year to tax. How about servicing? I recently had my BMW R1200GS serviced, and to be fair it was a major service at 23,000 miles, but it cost me £410. Similarly, I just had my car serviced (you know; the clever German one with both a turbocharged diesel engine and an electric motor), and that cost me £398. Don’t even get me started on insurance costs.
So much for running costs, how about when you buy the vehicle? Well again, arguably, the car scores higher. Last year I bought my daughters a very tidy five-year-old secondhand red Italian car, which is great fun to drive and cost me less than £5000. I was told recently that my R1200GS, which is also now five years old, is worth around £8000. OK, clearly I’m not comparing like with like here, but you get the point; you’re getting a lot more car for your money that you do bike. I recently had the great pleasure to test ride a new Honda Gold Wing, and within a few hundred yards I thought it was possibly the best bike I’d ever ridden. It was oh so comfortable, smooth, powerful; it even had a radio and a reverse gear…. oh, and costs close to £30,000. So, in pure monetary terms you could well argue, you would be better off with a car. Not only do you get a lot more for your money, but they’re also warmer, safer, and you can carry more people and stuff in one. But that is completely missing the point. Any motorcycle is exciting, they all have the ability to be brilliant fun to ride, they get you closer to nature, they take you out of the day-to-day grind of normal life. In short, they’re a joy to own and ride. In sheer pleasure-giving, lifeenriching emotive or measurable terms, a tin box on four wheels can never deliver the grin-inducing fun that a bike can. If it’s a richer life you want, live it on two wheels.