While that was going on, the types of motorcycles people buy also changed. Last week, when I took a trip to my favorite bike junkyard, I saw mostly standard "Universal Japanese Motorcycles" (UJMs) from the '70s and '80s -- machines with inline-four and parallel-twin engines, fairly upright riding positions, and not much chrome or plastic bodywork. And most of these bikes were small, in displacement -- well under a liter, and in many cases, under half a liter.
Today, the UJM isn't entirely a thing of the past, but it's not what the manufacturers are featuring and customers are buying. For example, Yamaha doesn't make even one model (at least for the U.S. market) with an inline-four, upright riding position, and no windshield or bodywork. That's because they've found that in this country, most people who walk into their showrooms want one of two things: (a) a race-replica superbike, such as the tire-smoking YZF-R1, or (b) a cruiser, like the Virago. (For non-riders who might be reading this, cruisers are the chopper-esque bikes you see in great numbers around any stereotypical "biker bar," with footpegs forward, tall handlebars, and -- usually -- loud aftermarket exhaust systems.)
Meanwhile, companies that make big, expensive machines, like Harley-Davidson and BMW, have enjoyed their best sales ever, in the past couple of years.
Motorcycle columnists -- and, to some extent, the manufacturers themselves -- have been scratching their heads for years to explain the overall decline in bike sales during the '80s and early '90s; the lack of interest in small bikes and "standards" generally; and the phenomenal recent popularity of cruisers. Perusing an old issue of Cycle World (March, 1993), I ran across a column by editor David Edwards, in which he tries his hand at it: "Blame [the '80s sales decline] on the recession, blame it on the emergence of a no-risk society, blame it on overpricing and overspecialization of the motorcycles themselves, blame it on the insidious spread of couch-potatoism, but sales of new motorcycles went into a severe tailspin." Meanwhile, he credits the Motorcycle Industry Council's efforts to improve motorcycling's image, through its "Discover Today's Motorcycling" awareness campaign, with contributing to the resurgence in sales in the early '90s (which has continued in the five years since the Edwards column appeared).
The baby boom and the bike biz
I think the explanation is much simpler and more direct: demographics. All you have to do is take a look at the number of registered births nationwide, year-by-year, to understand why the initial bike boom of the '70s and '80s occurred, why sales tailed off in the late '80s, and why they've come back. The same demographic pattern explains why the types of bikes being sold have changed.
According to the National Center for Health Statistics, births nationwide peaked at around 4.2 million in the late 1950s (the NCHS Web site doesn't have numbers for years between 1955 and 1960, but I believe the peak year was 1957), then tailed off until reaching a trough of 3.1 million in 1973. After that, births came back up again, reaching 4.2 million in 1990 -- 33 years after the original peak.
Assuming the peak year was 1957, that means that there were something like 4.2 million 25-year-olds in 1982. This is why the early '80s were a great time to be in the motorcycle business. Young adults who are just out of college, earning some money, and still largely unencumbered by family obligations are likely to be interested in motorcycling.
The problem, of course, happens when they get a bit older. If you look through the motorcycle classifieds, it's written all over the page: "Getting married, must sell bike." Or "buying house, must sell bike." Or "baby on way, must sell bike." As the 1957 group started getting domesticated, they sold off the bikes they'd been so eager to buy only a few years before. Meanwhile, there were far fewer 25-year-olds to replace them -- and a ton of late-model used bikes on the market. You don't have to be Einstein to figure out that this was bad news for bike makers and dealers.
Well, a few years later, what goes around, comes around. The 1957 kids are now at an age where they've got a lot of earning power, because they've been in the workforce some 15-20 years. They've got kids in school -- but it's public school, not college yet. And they've reached a time of life when it's not unusual to start wanting to enjoy the fruits of one's labor a bit more. They remember how much they enjoyed riding motorcycles when they were younger, and they regret having sold their machines when they got married, bought houses, had children, and so forth.
So overall bike sales have climbed again -- but they're different sales, because the buyers are older, have more purchasing power, and want bigger, more comfortable machines than they rode the first time around. Bikes for 40-year-olds are big business now. The 40-year-olds want a big saddle, some wind protection, and an engine that doesn't require a lot of gear-shifting. Or, if they're still of the go-fast persuasion, they want big go-fast bikes like the Yamaha R1 or the BMW R1100RS.
A recent Clement Salvadori column in Rider lamented the fact that there aren't many models like the old Honda CB350, Kawasaki KZ440, Yamaha XS400, and so on in today's market (again, in this country; small bikes are big sellers in other parts of the world). Small, light bikes that got great gas mileage, were ideal for commuting, and didn't cost much, sold like hotcakes during the 1957 babies' first bike boom. The reason these bikes aren't selling (or even being made) this time around is that a small, practical, standard bike is not the kind of machine a 40-year-old wants -- he wants a $12,000 BMW or a $14,000 Harley. Meanwhile, there aren't many 25-year-olds around -- why should the bike companies make products for a market that isn't there?
As the cycle world turns
The baby-boom generation, and its offspring, aren't going to go away. So we're likely to see a resurgence of the low-end models when the next peak-birth group (1990) hits 25 or so. Meanwhile, as the original '57 group starts to get gray, they'll gradually give up riding again and sell off their bikes -- and again, we'll have a lot of fairly-recent used bikes for sale, but not too many buyers in the right age group. History repeats itself, but with the 40-year-olds' bikes this time around.
A lot of ink has been spilled trying to explain the phenomenal success of Harley-Davidson and the more modest successes of Japanese and European cruisers in recent years, as well as the concurrent decline in the kinds of motorcycles that used to make up the lion's share of unit sales. But there's really no mystery to it -- it's all a matter of demographics. H-D and the other manufacturers would do well to pay attention -- their future success or failure depends on it.
Copyright © 1998 John J. Kafalas