Motorcycles have personality. If you don’t ride motorcycles you’ve no idea. While most people complacently park their ass behind a car’s steering wheel, a motorcyclist saddles a dragon. If you’ve never ridden a motorcycle all I can say is that you should, if you can, but you probably can’t or you’d have already done it. The next time you’re commuting in a Subaru look out the window at the motorcycle roaring past and know, know deep in your heart, that he’s living life on a wavelength and depth that would make a Subaru weep.
The mechanics of motorcycles tend to cluster into groups seeking like minded experiences. Every bike is different but the stereotypes hint at their purpose. There are bikes for speed, for style, for distance, for tricks, for power, etc…
As with all things that are powered by the soul (you think motorcycles run on gasoline?) one selects a motorcycle based on their spiritual needs. I certainly did.
When it rains you get wet. When it’s cold you get cold. So what? It’s worth it!
A common motorcycle configuration is the cruiser. Painting with a broad swath, cruisers tend toward the heavy, loud, and chrome laden. This isn’t an insult. My motorcycle is a cruiser. It had to be black because, at least in my mind, that’s the proper color of a cruiser. Cruisers, regardless of their inner mechanics, look primitive. That’s part of their charm. You should look at a cruiser and see engine bits hanging in the wind. James Dean and The Fonz were not jetting around on bright blue, body cladded, motorized spaceships. They cruised.
Also cruisers tend to be slow. Of course they’re only slow compared to other motorcycles. They’re almost never as slow as a car. Read what I said about saddled dragons. (Because this is the Internet, some yoyo is already reaching for a keyboard to refute me with technical specs they’ve copied from Road and Track. Spare me. Yes, some cars are faster than some motorcycles just as occasionally a politician tells the truth. That’s not the normal situation and you’re pissing into the wind citing exceptions.)
In order for a cruiser to be a cruiser it’ll have a low revving, fat pistoned, rumbling, deep sounding engine because you want to feel the power. Most people think “Harley Davidson”. I’m a little less into show and much more into reliability. My cruiser is a Honda. It has as rock solid engine that has served me well. Yet Honda engineered in the requisite rumble. I’m sure this caused engineers to weep because a smoother engine is more efficient and simply better in all logical ways. Then again if it were all about efficiency and logic I’d be driving a mini-van.