Simon Weir’s May column: “I’m struck by the way our tastes in bikes seem to change”

Bear with me. I’m going to talk about sunglasses for a minute – but it’ll make sense when I switch to bikes, I promise. I first became aware of sunglasses at some point in the seventies: my mother had these big, plastic framed things with graduated lenses. By the time I started wearing sunglasses in the ’80s, mirrored aviators were on their way out and horn-rim Ray-Bans were cool. Then shades got bigger and wrapped around the head, before shrinking to look like normal glasses with dark lenses. Now my daughter’s started buying her own sunglasses: big plastic-framed things with graduated lenses...

It’s just fashion, of course. I’m struck by the way our tastes in bikes seem to be changing. Sales of sportsbikes and sports tourers are falling, while adventure-styled bikes are on the rise. If you count the base and Adventure flavours of the BMW R1200GS as a single bike, it was the biggest selling bike over 125cc last year. 

While the S1000RR sportsbike was a great success, helping BMW become the third-biggest bike brand in the country last year (behind Triumph and Honda), it still sold less than the GS. The K1300S sports tourer logged about a quarter of the sales of the base GS model – and of course the 1200 isn’t the only GS. There’s also the F800, F650 and G650 in the family, all selling in respectable numbers.

Despite the high price, Ducati’s Multistrada was an instant sales hit – the firm’s biggest seller ever since it was introduced. Triumph introduced the Tiger 800 and it instantly became the biggest selling bike the firm had ever made (when, like the GS, you count the road and off-roadish XC versions as one model). And while sales of Triumph’s Sprint ST sports tourer halved over five years, so it was discontinued last year, the 1050 Tiger’s still a firm seller, despite being a clear road bike – not a dual sports machine.

And now Triumph have unveiled a bigger Tiger: the Explorer, a shaft-driven 1200. It’s very good – and it’s very clearly, aggressively aiming for a slice of the GS pie. But so too is the Honda Crosstourer, which takes the VFR1200’s shaft-driven V4 and rehomes it (in retuned form) in a tall-rounder chassis. And then there’s the Kawasaki Versys 1000 – even more road-focused than the fairly road-biased Crosstourer. And we’ll have a new Aprilia Caponord, the KTM Adventure is still going strong, next year’s GS will be liquid cooled. Not to mention the KTM 990 SM-T, the Aprilia Dorsoduro, the original 650 Versys…

As sales of sports tourers and sportsbikes shrink and these upright, trail-styled road bikes grow, it’s easy to assume that these machines are the future. And they are – for the next few years, at least. They’re great machines for older riders, tired of back ache and to responsible for sporty hooliganism. But I suspect that, if we give it a dozen or so years, we’ll see these bikes loosing sales to sportier machines again as fashion changes. What goes around will come around again.

Simon Weir