So many questions
Buying and selling bikes is not always as easy as it seems
For the last few years, since I’ve known him really, my friend Bob has been riding a K1600 BMW. I’ve ridden with him countless times, often following directly behind him. He rides that big, but agile motorcycle well. And he takes care of it well. In 75,000 miles, his bike has never shown a sign of age, not a scratch, not a puff of smoke. A few months ago he started talking about wanting another bike, not an additional one, but a replacement. He suggested that he would be buying his last motorcycle, one he’d keep until he quits riding. We’ve heard that story before, haven’t we? I wondered what a guy with a K1600 buys next.
Bob looked around online and found a year-old DCT Gold Wing for sale in Florida... with 260 miles on it.
More often than we’d believe, a person, perhaps a rider, buys a specific type of bike (not just any bike, no way) and decides after a ride or two that he doesn’t want it after all. Or he doesn’t want to ride after all. Baffling. Never mind, back to Bob.
Bob called the owner and agreed to buy the Gold Wing, flew to Florida and rode it home. Had to be 2000 boring miles. Remarkably, Bob didn’t take his helmet to Florida. The bike’s owner gave Bob his nolonger-needed helmet... and Bob wore it all the way home. I can’t ride home from Starbucks wearing a strange helmet!
Bob says he’s ridden the BMW a few times since he acquired the Honda and still likes it. When he’s on the Honda he misses the BMW’s speed, the bottomless reservoir of acceleration and the effortlessness at almost double the speed limit.
But he really likes the Honda’s DCT, he says. Any doubts about it vanished after a few hours in the saddle. The bike magically finds the right gear in any situation, he told me.
Now when I follow Bob on our usual mountain roads, he looks just the same as he did on the BMW, smooth and capable through the hundreds of bends we negotiate each ride.
Weeks ago he told me he was selling the BMW. As I said, it’s a pristine, 75,000-mile K1600. Needs nothing. Apparently, no one wants it.
At one point, his frustration with his sale-proof BMW started to wear on him. He said he was thinking of selling the Honda! I believe he quickly abandoned that idea. But the BMW was still in his garage when I saw him a week ago.
Let’s imagine that you or I are considering the purchase of a six-cylinder BMW, a ‘grand touring’ motorcycle if ever there was one. Let’s imagine that we think of the bike’s lifespan as five years or 75,000 miles... and then we throw it away. That’s expensive motorcycling.
Why would we buy a $20,000 ultra-capable touring bike when we feel it’ll lose its usefulness, its value, at 75,000 miles? Evidently, all those people who didn’t answer Bob’s ad think that way.
We know that less refined, less powerful motorcycles serve reliably for mileages we never dreamed bikes could attain. We know that our usual 75 or 80mph pace on a K1600 is not going to worry that bike. A hundred thousand miles on a motorcycle in 2020 is no big thing. A bike that won’t scoff at that distance is a disappointment.
So why is Bob’s K1600 impossible to sell? He’s asking $6500 for it, a third, give or take, of what he paid for it. He’s had one response to his ad, from someone in Nigeria asking him to prepare the item for shipping. It was a scam, obviously. He’s not had one sincere offer.
Sixty-five hundred dollars is 5000GBP. What could one buy for £5000 in 2020, new or used, that could do the work of a 75,000-mile K1600? What could you buy that would carry two people and their luggage in comfort across continents at any speed you could desire?
Last week Bob told me he’d decided to give his BMW to a nephew from Chicago, 1000 miles east of Denver. The young man was scheduled to fly here last Friday and ride home from Denver to the Windy City on the Great Lakes – in the fourth week of November.
That’s not a journey I would attempt in late November. Bob did not seem to think that riding across the plains to northern Illinois late in the fall was so iffy. I’m shivering just thinking about it.
Even after so many years of riding and of friendships with riders, I still waste time trying to understand people and their motorcycles.
If it’s true that there’s nothing logical about the purchase of a motorcycle these days, then there’s no understanding any of the decisions we make about these damn things.
If I were Bob’s shrink and asked him in my office why he bought the BMW a few years ago and the Honda a few months ago, and why he is giving the BMW to his nephew, would his answers be convincing? Would I believe them? Maybe. Would
Bob believe them? That’s the question, isn’t it?