Go big…then go small?

You haven’t been interested in motorcycles and surfing the internet without seeing the old trope “Is a 600cc too big for my first bike?” I won’t go into the difference between a 600cc inline-4 and a 650cc single. The point is that everyone wants to ride bigger/faster bikes as quickly as possible. Smaller bikes are better for most things aside from long highway runs. Most of the rest of the world rides sub-500cc bikes anyway. So why do we go big?

As with many things, it probably comes down to ego and feelings of inadequacy or peer pressure. Maybe you’re afraid your buddies will point and laugh if you pull into bike night on an 883 Sportster or a metric 750. Nobody wants to ride a ‘girl’s bike.’ I don’t know if when that changes. Perhaps most riders start younger and they feel like they have something to prove. Age doesn’t stop a guy in his 50s from buying a Harley Davidson Ultra Limited as his first bike because he can afford the $30k price tag. So it isn’t all about age.

Years of riding might be a factor. Not many people buy one bike and its the only one they ever have. We usually go through many over the years. Bigger, heavier and faster bikes enter and exit our lives. We think we want something until we have to live with it (and make payments) for a while. We fall into the trap of buying bikes to fit into grandiose plans instead of what we are actually going to do with them. We buy the dream and not the reality. It can be an expensive journey.

Someone is buying all of these Honda MiniMOTOs and it probably isn’t the new rider. The novice rider wants something they can at least go the speed limit with. Price is also a factor. The 125cc lineup will run you between $3500-$4200. ‘Real’ motorcycles with more than 10hp are available for under $5k at the same dealer (excluding ADM).

Note: I’m limiting myself to new motorcycles because the used market is in bizarro-world right now and is barely worth mentioning, at least in California. I don’t know who is going to pay $4k+ for an $1807 Navi or $7500 for a $3999 Trail125. New motorcycles have waitlists but at least you might have a chance at paying MSRP.

Size and others’ opinions on what we ride matter less eventually regardless of the path taken. We get to a point where we don’t care if we look like a gorilla on a moped. If you don’t like my bike or judge me for owning it, you can keep it to yourself. I’m having fun. I would imagine this is one of the reasons why Honda’s MiniMOTO lineup is so popular.

We were all a new rider once.

I was issued a Yamaha TW200 when I took my Idaho-STAR class (similar to MSF) to get my endorsement. I loved that bike. I talked to the instructor and said I was planning on getting one for my first. He talked me out of it. It was too slow, he said. I bought a used 2008 Kawasaki KLR650 instead. Still slow but not as much.

Looking back, that was terrible advice. It set me on the path many new motorcyclists follow. I needed to go fast(er). The TW200 was slow. Nobody could argue that it isn’t. Top speed isn’t much different from my Ural and the fact that it is slow is part of its charm. If the instructor hadn’t talked me out of it, I would have acquired one and who knows what path I would have gone down. It would have been fun and I wish I’d have bought one and kept it all these years.

The KLR was a good bike for my use case and I wish I still had it, too. It had enough power to do what I wanted and would take me anywhere I wanted to go. It even leaned as far as I dared in the twisties, though a 21” front wheel required some encouragement. I sold that to buy an orange 2003 Kawasaki Z1000. I felt like I needed something fast and the Z1000 was fast and cheap. Did the instructor put speed in my head? You can’t unring the bell so we’ll never know. The problem with the Z was that I could hit the speed limit in 1st gear and I never really used its potential.

Chasing a vision/image major reason why a lot of us get into motorcycles in the first place. I’m not sure anything will stop that. Many salespeople will sell you anything you want regardless of what is a good idea. The hardest thing for any of us to do is self-reflect and not get caught into keeping up with the moto-Joneses. Don’t buy a bike that is too big or fast that ruins your experience and keeps you off of two wheels the rest of your life.

I followed some internet advice when I bought my KLR and it wasn’t a bad first set of wheels. It was a good bike for my height and didn’t have enough power to get into too much trouble. The advice I wish I would have gotten was not to let someone tell you a bike you want is too slow.

Bonus advice: Don’t sell a bike to fund another purchase unless you genuinely don’t like it. I regret letting go of most of my bikes and still haven’t learned my lesson.