There are a lot of reasons why bikes are great, from practical things like speed through city traffic to intangibles like… Well, they’re just great, if that’s intangible enough. But one facet of biking I wanted to explore is both tangible and particularly relevant to life in the post-recession/pre-double-dip Great Britain of 2011 – running costs.
Having a moderately heft commute, the Treasury’s attempts to single-handedly solve the nation’s deficit dilemma by going nuts on fuel tax has been dismaying, to say the least – when unleaded approached the heady heights of 80p per litre back in 2000, the British people stamped their feet, said enough is enough, and, led by truckers and farmers, blockaded oil refineries for most of a week. As crazy as 80 pence per litre seemed back then, we’re now up to a dizzy £1:30 per litre around our way, with every sign that things are going to get a lot worse before they get any better. That being the case, fuel economy is very definitely an issue – but how does an average bike compare to an average car?
Whilst not exactly a textbook science experiment, I’ve got some data for you. For comparative purposes, the control car is a Fiat Punto, 1.8 petrol – nippy, if some way short of a full-on sports car, the HGT at it’s very best has never managed more than a disappointing 32mpg, And that’s not 32mpg at your average motorway speeds, either – that’s 32mpg as a result of driving through a whole tankful at 60mph. Boring, very, very boring, and no-one’s going to spend almost two hours a day driving at 60mph on a motorway. At 32mpg, it’s hardly worth the effort, especially when driving at more entertaining speeds only drops it down to around 30mpg.
Against the Punto is ranged the Yamaha Thundercat. The ‘Cat’s only had a few weeks of data gathering, but the early figures are looking good, much better than I was expecting. Using a mixture of motorway and A road, the Wonderbat has returned, rather pleasingly, a hair over 55mpg (with more to come when I can remember to use sixth on the motorway). Although the bike weighs around 800kg less than the car, the little 600cc four-pot motor is in a much higher state of tune, despite lacking the Fiat’s fancy fuel injection and variable valve timing gubbins – Punto’s detuned Alfa Romeo engine is three times the size of the Yamaha’s, but only puts out 30 horses more. My hypothesis was that the bike would be marginally better but over the course of a 400 mile week, ‘Cat drinks something in the region of 22 litres less, which is a fair old result for the two-wheeler. Especially when service stations are charging a smidge under £1:47 per litre for premium unleaded, god curse their black souls.
As part of the ongoing fuel-related experimentation, I have this very week been pushing the very edge of the envelope, in the spirit of Captain Scott, Yuri Gagarin and Edmund Hillary. Admittedly, the experiment was inadvertent, but it was both relevant and a useful lesson nonetheless - plodding into work one unseasonably sunny morning with over 180 miles on the trip, the thought occurred that I could stop for a top-up on the way in, but decided, what the heck and pushed on regardless; after all, I had the reserve to fall back on. The last stop before work is Warwick services, and I’d just gone past them when the orange fuel light flickered on. No problem, I thought - it’s only fourteen more motorway miles to work, as long as I take it steady, we should be good. Ten minutes later, the ‘Cat began to cough and we slowly began to lose pace. On the hard shoulder, stationary just twelve miles after the fuel light came on, a shadow fell on my heart as the realisation struck just a little too late – there WAS no reserve tap, and there was nothing but a long, hard push between the ‘Cat and mobility again….
MCN’s online guide gives the ‘Cat a rather miserly 140 mile tank range (and, a touch inaccurately, a 599 litre fuel tank), which I’d thought might be a bit pessimistic, unless they’d been testing it flat-out around, say, Indianapolis or Bruntingthorpe’s 2 mile oval. A quick search of the internet finds plenty of reports of riders achieving 200- and even 240 miles on a tankful. I couldn’t match that, but I did manage 228 before having to resort to Shank’s Pony. Having to push her three miles to the garage was a hard slog, but I tell you what – it doesn’t half underline that figure of 228 miles and drive it home. From now on, I’ll be looking for garages any time the trip shows signs of approaching the 200 mile mark.
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