Last year, for the second time, I took my grandson to the show and we had a particularly good day of fooling around with mechanical objects. He's 13 this year and will probably be even more interested in motorcycles. None of my kids have been bikers and I don't really expect Wolf to be any different. I think the two-wheeled jones is going to live and die with me. My brother was into it for a while, until a close encounter with a deer demolished his ankle, but he's mostly over it now. My step-brother was a dirt biker and a bragging-rights Harley owner/crasher for a very short time, but he and his son have "grown up" and moved on to big trucks. Like I said, I'm the family's lone two-wheeler and, outside of bicycles, I'm probably going to be the last.
There is some speculation among industry insiders that my family experience is similar to the national trend. As an answer to the often asked question, “Honda has a marketing department?” Honda has dumped the Honda Hoot (apparently, permanently) this year and blamed the economy for the demise. Honda has been making noise about abandoning motorcycles in the US, due to liability issues, since the 1980's economic crash. Yamaha and Kawasaki are about equally enthralled with our low-tech, high maintenance, marginally economic stability marketplace and, if they could find a replacement for the US income, they’d probably dash to it so quickly that there would be a small tornado caused by the vacuum.
I’ve heard off-road distributors describe vanishing youth from those sports and road bike dealers and marketing gurus wonder if street bikes will become a “rich kid’s toy.” The companies who positioned themselves to take advantage of characters who would be willing to spend $30k-$100k on a giant cruiser and now wondering where their customers went. The biggest of the bunch, Harley, is stuck with hundreds of millions of dollars in bad loans after chasing the poor credit risk crowd that is wiping out the housing market. I imagine it won’t be long before we hear that the other companies in this market are suffering similar pains. In the end, the only people who will be buying a $20,000 Polaris Vision will be the guys who handed themselves million dollar bonuses for screwing up their companies and got out before the feds slammed them in jail. That might be a small crowd if those of us who are paying their bills have our way.
Risk is a big topic in the country, too. I’ve listened to several big-time ex-offroad competitors explain why they wouldn’t consider letting their kids ride motorcycles. For a country founded by folks abandoning their homes, history, and security to gamble on a life in “the new world,” we seem to be turning into a caricature of conservative, old-world. Hell, almost every European country is more progressive than the US and if we keep going backwards we’ll get to enjoy hearing China brag about being more contemporary than the United States. Won’t that be fun?
So, I’m going to take in the Motorcycle Show with the thought in mind that I might be the last of a breed, watching obsolete technology fun its course in my lifetime, wondering over what kind of world it will be without risk, adventure, surprise, or even real-world sensations over virtual experiences. Maybe, I’ll even look for something new from the motorcycle industry. That would be a surprise.
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