Why is it so hard to buy a bike? Actually, let me rephrase that and ask why is it so hard to decide which bike to buy?

I’ll take a step back. For some time now, I’ve been thinking about adding a general purpose, all-round, everything to everyman (and woman) type bike to my garage. This year, I plan on doing an awful lot more miles and the Daytona 675 beautiful as she is, simply isn’t cut out for distance, at least not for me. As such, I’ve been looking round and there’s lot of choice out there but the experience with the Daytona and the simple number of well-scored reviews have led me to believe the Tiger1050 is the bike for me.

However, when you’re making this kind of purchase, there’s always that niggling doubt isn’t there? If you were buying a house, you’d assuage this by attending open houses. If it was a car, you’d be driving around to multiple car dealers. But in the bike world, things are rarely that simple. I just called my local dealer and apparently, they only just ordered a test ride so it won’t be ready until at least next week. Why? it’s spring already. Didn’t they realize people were *more* likely to buy a bike as it started to warm up?

Given that we’ve all heard the Tiger has a bit of a drinking problem with the old synthetics, I also called a few other places in order to test other bikes. While I often got the same reply, more often than not it was “no, we don’t offer that”. Why?

For the most part, bikes are high performance machines and yes, they are expensive. Perhaps it is a bit unreasonable to walk into a show room and be given the keys, especially as you can’t take the floor manager with you. The ride days that manufacturers seem to have go some way to dealing with this, but they are somewhat rare and on the few I’ve been to, seem to consist of arriving very early in a parking lot and waiting around all day for a 15 minute group ride that does little to show you the machine in question.

There’s a number of things that could be done. The most obvious is to get dealers to start thinking about the problem. I’m sure that with a swipe of the license and maybe some form of deposit (credit card imprint, car keys /etc) they could obtain reasonable insurance against any problems. The other thing that springs to mind is why not rent bikes too? This would solve two problems – firstly, you could test a range of bikes at some reasonable cost and secondly, it would mean we could rent decent bikes no matter where we go. I know Harley do the bike rental thing, apparently with huge success. Personally, I’m not a harley man but if the can do it, why not Honda with their larger dealer network? Same for BMW. Come on guys. Surely there’s a way you can figure this out. Besides, I really want to test that 1098s as they daytona is starting to look a little old…

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