Over the past three years sales of new sports motorcycles fell by 40%. Dan Sager, from transport think-tank Two Wheels Better, investigates whether this marks the end of the British love affair with performance super bikes.
Since the first 'superbike' was unveiled a quarter of a century ago, manufacturers have shaved off weight and improved performance so that it's now possible to buy a street legal machine weighing less than 200kg and pumping out nearly 200bhp, complete with ABS and traction control as standard. Kawasaki's latest incarnation of the ZX-10R caused a sensation when it was launched this year, just as the BMW S1000RR did in 2010 and Yamaha's R1 the year before. Sports motorcycles have never looked so exciting, yet registrations of new super-sport machines dropped from 23,403 in 2008 to just 14,256 last year. Of course, this could be a temporary slip caused by the credit crunch and global recession. After all, these bikes are a luxury, not practical every day transport.
However, if that were true, then sales of other 'luxury' styles would have decreased by a similar amount. Yet both the custom and sports-touring sectors fell by 25% - that's a big drop but nowhere near as substantial as the 40% decline in sports bike sales. Total motorcycle registrations (not including mopeds) stood at 115,000 in 2008, but by 2010 the figure was 81,000, a fall of 30% (or 34,000 machines in real terms). If you remove sports bikes from the statistics, the figure is nearer 25% so it's clear the sales of these high performance machines are falling much faster than the rest of the market.
Some people might argue that modern sports motorcycles are simply too powerful for Britain's congested road network, but there is another very telling figure within the statistics that suggests otherwise. So far we have been talking about styles of motorcycle, but, in this case, size matters too. While sales of machines in almost every capacity class have fallen by somewhere in the region of 30% over the past three years, registrations of bikes over 1000cc have dropped by less than 10%. Last year one in five new motorcycles sold in the UK was over 1000cc, which proves that riders are not intimidated by powerful machines. It also shows that customers are not necessarily opting for smaller capacity machines that are cheaper to buy, insure and service.
It may not be the end of an affair, but it's clear that British motorcyclists are gradually losing their passion for sports bikes and although they still like their machines to be big and powerful, they also like them naked!.
Read the full feature in Used Bike Guide April/May 2011
