#cars

We all know Yamaha as one of the world’s leading motorcycle manufacturers, but what’s often forgotten is the Tuning Fork company’s work in the automotive sector. Yamaha has a long history of producing engines and other components for automakers such as Toyota and Ford.

Ah, beige. Like the apocryphal story about Eskimos having 18 different words for snow, so do car companies have many, many words for beige. There’s Stone; Bisque; Ash; Caramel; Camel; Smoke; Champagne; Linen; Almond; Shale; Sepia; Buff; Sorrel; Harvest; Sky Cool Gray and one for the fellas: Alloy. Those are just the interior colors. For the hard candy shell, Lexus sports Truffle Mica, Audi has a Beluga Brown, Porsche offers Cognac Metallic and Toyota, without irony, shows off its Toasted Walnut minivan.

Humans are odd animals. Generally speaking, they don’t like to stray far from the herd to avoid the anxiety that comes from being recognizably different than their peers. And yet there exists a potent part of society which thrives on being unconventional. As motorcycle enthusiasts, we obligate ourselves to a distinctiveness that clearly stands apart from cagers.

I spent several hours last Friday looking at cars. From replicas of the 1886 Benz Patent Moterwagen, one of the first “practical” cars (as its placard insists), to the 2017 Ford GT, cars were everywhere I looked – and I loved it. I was at the Petersen Automotive Museum attending media day, where several excited staff and board members were on hand to showcase the museum’s $125 million renovation. It’s strange for me to think that, despite being born and raised in Southern California, I’d only been to the Petersen museum once. And that was for a work trip.

In honor of National Motorcycle Safety Awareness Month, I’d like to take this opportunity to say thank you to all the automobile drivers who don’t try to kill us every day. “Clueless cagers” is a common theme wherever motorcycle people congregate and with good reason, but I think the vast majority of car drivers (of which I am one) mean us no harm and actually wish us well. If they do plow into us, most of the time it’s just an accident with mitigating circumstances. It really is human nature to become less than hyper-vigilant when you’re safe, warm, comfortable and entertained inside a nicely upholstered soundproof box the government mandates must be able to bang into things at speed without injuring the occupants. I wonder how much the government spends crashing perfectly good new vehicles every year? Maybe if cars were less up-armored, people would pay more attention?

Quality means doing it right when no one is looking. – Henry Ford*