American Motorcycle Dealer AMD 227 June 2018 | Page 4

Bring on the Middleweights
lthough it is tempting to laud the increasing popularity
of lightweights as showing the way forward for the
motorcycle industry in the United States, don’t fall for
thinking that the future of the performance, parts,
accessory and riding gear markets lies at that end of the market.
Guess why people buy low-cost motorcycles? Because they don’t have the
money for more expensive ones! Nobody is going to invest $1,000 in a filter,
cam and exhaust upgrade on a bike whose power is anyway limited to the kind
of grunt that can be gotten out of bikes in the Honda Grom through Ninja 400
territory.
Sure, there are people racing them (which is great, especially in Europe) and
customizing them, but those who think they are a platform for aftermarket R&D
investments and trade show booths need to think again. They are not. That is
not where their value lies; that is not why we should nonetheless be pleased
about their popularity.
Their value is in the pathway they provide for entry
level, cost-conscious riders to gain the confidence that
can keep them in the Powered Two-Wheel and wider
powersports marketplace as their wallet books and
waistline fatten.
Entry level bikes are just exactly that, an entry level, a
price-point solution, a starting place - and for that we
should sing a dozen hallelujahs, because right now we
need all the starters, all the entrants and all the
affordable riding opportunities we can lay our hands
on.
However, rather like the (returning!) Honda monkey bike, that first moto-crosser,
that old Triumph, BSA, Jawa, Norton or (as in my case) MZ ET175, they are
transitional acquisitions, a means to get somewhere else in riding terms - and
therein lies their good news for those who would want to be able to see ROI
from R&D, G&A and S&M investments (Sales and Marketing, fool!).
lthough the modern-day entry level equivalents are vastly superior to their
historic equivalents and can, in truth, provide years of perfectly satisfactory
urban transport for a population which (in the northern hemisphere) will be
greater than 75 percent urban and suburban dwelling within forty years of now,
it is the pathway that is the story, but at present a pathway to what?
It’s a generalization I know, but in real terms there is a void where the next level
of price-point and power band options needs to be for generations of consumers
whose ideas of what the riding and ownership experience should deliver
couldn’t be more different to the Boomers.
A few years ago we were bemoaning the entry level to be the choke point –
meaning we could be storing up real problems for the future as the number of
riders available to migrate up the price and power tree diminished.
Well, regardless of whether or not the numbers stand scrutiny to those of past
decades (and, sadly, at this stage, they still don’t, but are what they are, like it
or not), if the new entry level models that the OEs have developed (conspicuously
the Japanese, Asian and European OEs, not the American manufacturers) are
A
going to save our asses, as an industry, then it would appear that it is those
same manufacturers who are going to reap the benefit and be the ones to
pathway their consumers onto the sunlit uplands of higher displacement, higher
performance and higher collateral spend products.
The trend in new motorcycle pricing in the past 20 years (on both sides of the
Atlantic) has been relentlessly up, way ahead of where low earners can engage.
List prices and the real prices achieved for current production models have
grown, indeed exploded, far ahead of inflation, as manufacturers seek to recoup
losses and fund more expensive technologies, product standards and
requirements.
orse, the relative cost of entry-level machines has actually increased even
more than for larger displacement models, which is why the current
generations of Groms and Ninjas can be so superior as riding machinery to what
went before. Curiously though, this is a good thing, this speaks to a healthy
future – that attitude to the ownership and riding experience? It is one that
requires quality and reliability, and the emerging
generations of savvy, digital-age 21st century
consumers that we need to be making ready to sell
to know that quality costs.
It is projects such as the British/US derived and tuned
but