Leanings

LEANINGS

Crossover

Peter Egan

A FEW YEARS BACK WHEN I WAS FEELing a little uneasy about buying my first BMW because I was afraid that personal neatness, orderly thinking or some other dread compulsion might rub off on me, I was reassured by my friend and longtime fellow Norton rider Bill Getty, who owns a British parts business.

“Interesting that you’ve bought a BMW,” he said. “I own an R100RS myself, and I would say that most of my Norton customers, if they have a second bike, own BMW Boxers.”

While I hadn’t suspected such a dualownership pattern, it did seem to make sense. BMWs were traditional Twins, after all, dovetailing nicely with Nortons in terms of reliability and upper cruising speed. Stock Norton Commandos were happiest and healthiest at 80 mph or less, except for short bursts, and the R100RS really just hit its stride at that speed and could go all day, without much maintenance or bolt-tightening.

Anyway, Bill seemed to have spotted a pattern. I still own both an RS and a Commando, and within the Slimey Cruds Motorcycle Gang I joined last year there are no fewer than four of us with this same dual ownership. Must be something to it.

Are there other patterns like this?

Fellow Crud Bruce Finlayson says that when he worked at a Triumph shop years ago, it seemed to him that many Triumph owners switched to Ducatis, once Triumph’s fortunes started to decline.

Certainly plausible. Triumphs were light, sporty streetbikes that also doubled as highly successful roadracing mounts in their time. In that role, Ducatis make a pretty good successor. And I do know at least three other Triumph guys who also ride Ducatis.

On the other hand, I also know two other Triumph riders who are lifelong Honda devotees, so there’s yet another huge statistical link to ponder.

In pursuit of even greater insight on this dual-ownership theme, I called up my Ducati dealer friend Bob Smith and asked him what other brand of modern bike his customers tended to own.

“BMWs,” Bob said without hesitation. “They own other Italian bikes, too, like Laverdas, but most of my customers own BMWs as their everyday bikes. If not a BMW, they have a Guzzi in addition to their Italian bikes.”

“But a Guzzi is an Italian bike.”

“Yeah, but it’s more like a BMW, or halfway between. You know what I mean.” Strangely enough, I did.

Okay, so lots of people have BMWs as alternate bikes. But what do mainstream BMW buffs own when they get around to buying something else? I called BMW dealer Brian Bell at Irv Seaver BMW in Orange, California, to find out.

“We’re seeing a lot of our customers who have recently bought Harleys,” Brian said, “but they still have their BMWs. We also have quite a few customers who sold their BMWs to buy a new Ducati, and now they’ve bought another BMW but kept the Ducati. The Ducatis and Harleys seem to be their ‘talk about’ bikes, but they still put a lot of miles on their BMWs.”

He also confirmed the Norton connection. He said that years ago the local Norton club used to have rides, and about half the bikes would be BMWs because so many people owned both kinds.

Okay, so we have Harleys in the mix now. What do Harley guys have as a second bike?

“Another Harley,” local dealer Rudi Kutter told me. “A common pattern is a customer with, say, a Softail Custom who rides a friend’s Electra Glide, discovers how comfortable it is for long trips, so he keeps the first bike and buys an FLH.”

Another neighborhood dealer, AÍ Decker, said he has some customers who won’t own anything but a Harley, but he has others who, like him, are collectors and are apt to have almost anything. “There are so many great bikes out there,” he says, “I don’t know why you’d want to limit yourself to one brand.”

And what of Japanese-bike owners? I talked to saleswoman Sarah Stoehr at the local Honda/Yamaha/Suzuki shop, and she said some cross-brand migration seems to occur between Japanese bikes of the same type, but not so much dual ownership. Salesman Dean Kelly agreed, and said there are also many riders who are extremely loyal to one brand and think of themselves as Honda or Suzuki guys, for instance, and don’t switch around much.

But both said they have customers who own collections of older classic bikes, but buy a CBR900RR or a FZR1000 because they like to keep up with current technology, or because they regard it as a modern classic.

Local Kawasaki dealer Bob Barr said Kawasaki also has a pretty hardcore band of loyalists, but if they do own another bike it’s probably most likely to be a Honda, statistically speaking, “Just because there are so many Hondas out there.”

As you can see, it gets a little complicated with Japanese bikes, because each company covers nearly every niche of the market.

So are there really any patterns here?

Sure. We naturally have a preference for motorcycles with, as my friend Steve Kimball pointed out, “the same intent.” If we like one lightweight sportbike, we are more likely to be drawn to another one with similar virtues. But I think we are also inclined to seek bikes without much functional redundancy or overlap, just to do entirely different kinds of riding. Kimball is a good example. His other motorcycle, he reminded me, has always been a dirtbike.

In either case, we seem to have successfully avoided the automotive syndrome, where the driver of a rusty Pinto has a license-plate bracket that says, “My other car is a Ferrari.”

Few of us ever dislike the bike we are riding enough to make fun of it. And besides, any time we want a motorcycle with the performance of a Ferrari, we can buy one used for about the cost of a rusty Pinto. □