The Tiresome Motorcycle Debate - Perception Versus Quality

"In the spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love." -- Alfred Lord Tennyson

Love of once again riding the motorcycle! Today marks the beginning of spring, and so I offer this lighthearted take on the advent of the next seven months of motorcycling.

There are only two classifications in the motorcycling world: You ride, or you don't. That being said, there are very passionate and hotly debated stereotypes in the motorcycling community. Harley riders are "cool," BMW riders are well educated elitist purists, and Honda riders are misguided idiots that want to put one foot in each camp.

I ride a Honda Valkyrie. I don't just want to put in each camp, I know that I have the best of both worlds. My bike has six cylinders, six independent carbs, a shaft drive, a seat more comfortable than my office chair, the power to beat all but the most high performance cars on the road, the nimbleness to tear through hairpin curves with ease, and unbeatable dependability. Oh, and yes, it sounds throaty and intimidating -- but that's not why I ride.

As stated previously on "the old blog," I don't care what you ride. You ride, therefore you have my respect. At the two or three charity rides in which I participate each year there are bikes that look like they cost $75,000 and bikes that are barely road worthy. If you saddle up and twist the throttle, great. From my experiences at these gatherings (sometimes of a thousand bikes and more), people are very interested and appreciative of my Valkyrie. Forget performance on the road -- it just looks big and mean. Harley guys give their respect and say it must be awesome to ride, but they just can't get beyond their devotion to the Harley brand, even though unbiased journalists and riders all agree it's a better product.

Kind of sounds like me talking about my passion for the Apple Macintosh? Sorry ... that was off topic.

My buddy Jeff forwarded a funny PowerPoint show which had a picture of a Harley and a Valkyrie. There were buttons to elicit the sound of a Harley (a rumbling engine rev) and a Valkyrie (the opening sequence to the infamous "crazy frog" ding a ding ding tune). I laughed good naturally. It was creative, so I give credit where credit is due.

Although it took me ten minutes, I diligently copied and pasted every e-mail address from the dozens of people in the forward trail ... and sent a retort. Below is a fair representation of the PPT file I sent in response, entitled "The REAL Harley Versus Honda Sounds."

You can see it here. Please forgive the amateurish PowerPoint presentation, but I merely replaced the sound files.