Born to be mild: As the motorbikes go, so goes the culture
Jack Baruth
This will come as a surprise to everyone from Sons of Anarchy viewers to Upper West Side residents scattering in the wake of yet another “street takeover” filled with ear-splitting dirt bikes defiantly wheelie-ing past their bodega, but: The second-bestselling motorcycle in America is a meek little affair made in Thailand, sold here for about $5,000, and producing just 31 horsepower. It’s called the Honda CB300R, and in the words of a 57-year-old ad campaign, you’ll meet the nicest people riding it.
Which is more than a little ironic, because Honda’s 1966 slogan was perhaps the biggest bait-and-switch in advertising history. Motorcycling had a bad rap in the post-War era, partially due to Hollywood exaggeration, but also based in the genuine truth of Harley-Davidson’s biker gang clientele and in various antisocial sporting cycles from British manufacturers. Honda offered something entirely different: an 8-horsepower Super Cub that could be easily ridden and maintained by almost anyone. It was a house cat of a bike, suitable for college campuses or quiet suburbs, and it enabled Honda to sell more motorcycles to America in a month than the Brits could sell in a year.
Just three years after the “nicest people” campaign, however, the firm debuted its CB750, a 67-horsepower, four-cylinder, overhead-cam race bike shorn of the fairing and sponsor logos. It was absurdly rapid, impossibly competent. “If the Four didn’t run faster than 120 mph, if it didn’t turn a 100-mph standing quarter-mile,” Cycle World enthused, “it would still be the finest.” The bad boys of Harley-Davidson and Triumph were easy meat for Honda’s bullet train, and everybody knew it. Kawasaki and Suzuki responded immediately with half-baked, high-power bikes that could outrun a CB750, assuming the rider survived the attempt. And the arms race was on.
By 1978, when the staid and thoughtful people at Yamaha claimed the “world’s fastest” crown with their XS1100, a cultivated brute of a bike that is still capable of dusting off everything from a modern Corvette to most Teslas, the motorcycling hobby had become obsessed with speed and power. Audiences thrilled to the red-and-black Kawasaki Ninja ridden by Tom Cruise in the first Top Gun, not knowing that it was two years old at that point and already eclipsed by other, faster “crotch rockets” from Suzuki and Yamaha.
A whole generation of young men grew up obsessed with these machines. It was like a secret club that offered immense power to its members; for $2,000, you could buy a used Ninja that would humiliate any Ferrari or Porsche. But the breakneck pace of advancement meant that you’d be left behind by anyone who could spend $8,000 on the latest “literbike,” a motorcycle with almost a thousand cubic centimeters of displacement and as much as 200 horsepower. Groups such as Akron’s Starboyz made underground videotapes featuring 120-mph wheelies in traffic, escapes from police prosecution, and horrifying crashes. There appeared to be no practical limit to the madness; in 1999, Suzuki announced the first 200-mph superbike, sold in showrooms for a thousand dollars less than a base-equipment Chevrolet Cavalier subcompact car.
Of course, the party couldn’t last. The Japanese government imposed a “voluntary” top speed limit of 186 mph on its manufacturers. Police across the country began aggressively targeting sport bike riders. After 2008, an annus horribilis in which motorcycle crashes claimed the lives of nearly as many service members as the war in Afghanistan, the military clamped down on its sport bike-obsessed young men, requiring everything from the completion of a training course to the wearing of “mil-spec” safety gear while on a bike. The insurance companies made their displeasure known, as well. When your humble author bought a 186-mph-limited Kawasaki ZX-14R in 2015, the lowest quote I could get for full-coverage insurance was $4,300 a year. For a 43-year-old man with no tickets or accidents on his record. God only knows what they were charging the enlisted Marines or college students half my age who made up the bulk of would-be ZX-14R owners.
The decade that followed were lean times for the Japanese manufacturers, even as Harley-Davidson returned to prominence with a brand-new line of touring bikes and some high-profile Sons of Anarchy product placements. The industry as a whole went upmarket, led by new performance bikes from BMW and Ducati that cost two or even three times what you’d have paid for a fast Honda or Suzuki. Within the industry, it was tacitly acknowledged that their existing customers were “aging out.” Boomers still bought Harleys, and Xers still bought sport bikes, but the 25-year-olds who had sustained the industry since 1966 were staying home with their PlayStations.
All of that changed in 2015, when Yamaha introduced the YZF-R3. From a distance, it kind of looked like a sport bike, but it was really a mild single-cylinder commuter that returned more than 60 mpg with a modest top speed of 112 mph. Built in Thailand as an apex predator for a Southeast Asian market that doesn’t have a lot of money to throw at personal transportation, the little Yamaha was marketed here as suitable for teenagers, female riders, and urban commuters. Expectations were low.
To everyone’s surprise, the YZF-R3 immediately jumped onto the bestseller lists, and the buyers were largely young men. Unlike their Gen-X and millennial predecessors, these buyers weren’t obsessed with power, speed, and risk. Instead, they took their cues from an “extremely online” riders community on Reddit and elsewhere. It was a new secret society, where the hypermasculine language of derring-do and street racing was replaced by heartfelt posts such as, “Afraid to ride on the freeway” and “Worried that my girlfriend will leave me if I get a louder exhaust for my R3.” Their parents did wheelies on the freeway wearing T-shirts and flip-flops, but on Reddit, the consensus is that you should wear full armor and safety equipment, even when riding downtown at 25 mph. In the lingo, it’s “ATGATT,” or “All The Gear, All The Time.”
Another subculture goes even slower. They are devoted to the 125 cubic centimeter Honda “Grom” minibike, which is most comfortable in a city and completely unable to reach Gerald Ford’s famous “double-nickel” speed limit, the one Van Halen’s Sammy Hagar complained about in the song “I Can’t Drive 55.” To accommodate them, Honda brought over an even more modestly powered “Navi” minibike, which in your author’s hands proved unable to exceed 37 mph up a steeper section of the Pacific Coast Highway near Malibu, California. I found that to be considerably more frightening than running my ZX-14R at five times that speed.
In the past eight years, motorcycle manufacturers have completely revised their product lineups to accommodate the new generation’s desires. Everyone now fields a competitor to the YZF-R3, of which the aforementioned Honda CB300R is the most successful. Even BMW sells a “G 310 R” with just 34 horses. The “supersport” four-cylinder 600 cc bikes that went 165 mph and were considered “entry-level” in 1995 have been replaced by much slower two-cylinder offerings such as the Ninja 650R, which makes about two-thirds the power of its predecessors but retains the same approximate styling.
As the bikes go, so goes the culture. The old underground VHS tapes of riders cheating death at triple digits have been replaced by Reddit posts in which the owners of single-cylinder Groms and YZFs share their helmet-cam footage of other people driving or riding dangerously. A recent popular post demanded “accountability” for a rider who was seen making a dangerous pass of other motorcyclists while wearing a bright-yellow safety jacket. The community was aghast that its unofficial uniform of “high-vis” protective gear had been coopted by someone who would ride into oncoming traffic! There was much clucking along the lines of “The police need to see this, so action can be taken against the rider.”
Marlon Brando and Sonny Barger wept.
The boomer and Gen-X riders with whom I’ve spoken are a little befuddled by this, and a little angry as well. We spent decades being despised by polite society for our high-power superbikes, only to now be reviled by the next generation of safety-obsessed motorcyclists. “Still,” a friend sighed, “it’s nice to see them riding, even if it’s on… those things.” We’ve all noticed, as well, that there’s no longer much police interest in our Ninjas and Hayabusas. It makes sense. The young riders don’t have the power to get in trouble, while the old guys on the big iron no longer have the inclination. Whatever hooligan culture there still is in motorcycling is limited to the cities, where children on stolen dirt bikes and ATVs openly taunt the police and citizens alike. It has nothing to do with respectable old men on 186-mph crotch rockets.
Not even venerable old Harley-Davidson is immune to the winds of change here. The bestselling bike in America is still its Sportster, but the firm introduced the “Street 500” and “Street 750” a few years ago to gauge the depth of enthusiasm for miniature Harleys. The response was mixed; people liked the idea, but not the execution. The bikes were discontinued last year, though spy photos published in car magazines show a replacement is in the works.
If the Milwaukee-based manufacturer wants to survive much longer, it’ll have to get these new minibikes over here sooner rather than later. Just as important, it’ll need a slick advertising campaign to make the public aware. Would it be too forward to suggest “You Meet The Nicest People… On A Harley”?
Jack Baruth was born in Brooklyn, New York, and lives in Ohio. He is a pro-am race car driver and a former columnist for Road & Track and Hagerty magazines who writes the Avoidable Contact Forever newsletter.