Starter Bike

It's an easy concept, a starter bike (aka beginner bike) is a bike you start out with before you are ready for something bigger, more exciting, more expensive, and harder to ride. I have no problem with the idea, only with where the line is sometimes drawn.

Take for example the Kawasaki Vulcan 900 LT, which according to some riders would be a starter bike. To be fair, the salesman who sold me my bike never once brought up the starter bike topic. But I can imagine other salesmen mentioning it to some customers, and it definitely gets mentioned on Internet forums.

To me a starter bike would be more like a 150-250cc bike that is capable of hitting 95+ kph., weighing under 350 lbs. And costing much less than a car. For the $10,500 price of my Vulcan, I could have bought a Hyundai Accent with $500 change! Yes I know that some Harleys can cost over $30,000 (in Canada), but I'm just being practical when I compare the bike to the car.

Everybody has their own reality, depending on their own life experiences. When I see the Vulcan 900, I see a big, heavy motorcycle. Even though I have had more powerful bikes, this is still a high powered, long distance machine for me. Why do I think this when others might call it a beginner bike?

For one thing I started on a Honda 175, and after that for 10 years I had a Yamaha 250 that was powerful enough for me. In fact I crossed the continent twice with a passenger and camping gear. Experiences like that will colour your judgement of the line between big and small bikes. Later on, I had bigger and more powerful bikes, a Honda CBX and a BMW K1100LT, but neither was much bigger than the Vulcan physically, although the seats were higher. The Vulcan engine is about 50% lower horsepower than either of those. So? It's actually kind of nice to be riding a bike that lets you know when you are riding at an outrageous speed. Those more powerful bikes would lull you into thinking you were crawling along while they were moving you at double the speed limit.

I actually know of several people who bought Vulcan 900's after decades of riding lots of different bikes all over the place, and for them this topic just never comes up. But for newer riders, the idea that they might be riding a "starter bike" begins to gnaw on their consciousness after a few months, tempting them to trade the bike in on something that is really bigger than they need.

The Vulcan is simply too expensive, heavy and powerful to be a beginner bike. If others see a beginner bike in it, I guess that's what no money down, and zero percent financing can do for ya.