Here's What You Can Do To Save The Motorcycle Industry

The motorcycle industry is in trouble and it’s all my fault. When I say “my,” I mean millennials. We get blamed for being lazy and entitled – and now for the decline of the motorcycle industry. Aging motorcyclists are going out faster than newer riders are coming in. Younger folks just don’t seem to be interested in motorcycling, they say. This has caused manufacturers to dump millions into not only marketing, but also research and development to create new motorcycles in order to save the motorcycle industry. They need to find some sort of solution.

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Oh, What a Beautiful Time It Is to Be a Motorcyclist

Why is the motorcycle industry in a rut? I understand that consumer demographics are changing as baby boomers are aging and aren’t really buying motorcycles anymore. Gen-Xers? Well, as the last of the analog generations, you guys have basically been passed over in light of rapid advances in technology over the last 20 years – consider yourselves lucky. Which leaves a large part of the burden to us millennials bailing our asses out.

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Whatever: Hello, I Must Be Going

And now for my next complaint. The topic keeps coming up: Why aren’t more people buying motorcycles? When applied to Millennials, we conjectured a few Whatevers ago – after minutes of careful thought and some research including opening our eyeballs – that they’re not buying more motorcycles because they have no money. I’ll add to that today: In addition to not having any money, riders are also not buying more motorcycles because they simply have no damn time to ride them.

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Top 10 Motorcycles for Millennials

I was a little surprised my kid liked the new Honda Rebel 500 as much as he did last week, but then all of us are surprised by our offspring, aren’t we? His daily driver lately is my old Yamaha R1. He finally got around to getting his motorcycle endorsement last month – on our borrowed KTM Super Duke GT… so he does have quite a varied motorcycle background for a kid who’s only 23 years old. In an effort to understand the younger moto-mentality, and as a service to all the manufacturers trying to figure out what the hell millennial motorcyclists want, anyway, I drilled further into my child’s mind to get down to the Top 10 of things.

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Whatever: Moto Inequality

A few MO commenters are always encouraging me to keep my politics to myself, which I do as much as I can because I understand people want to read about motorcycles and look at pretty pics when they come here to get away from it all. The problem for me is that if you’re paying attention to your life, including motorcycles, politics can’t be avoided any more than you can just ignore the family of bears who just decided to share your campsite. Politics affects my bottom line.

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