An Old Bike for the Apocalypse?

You may be contemplating how you’re going to get around – how you’ll still be able to afford to get around – if as seems likely the price of gas soars to $7 (or more) in the coming weeks, months and (possibly) years.

Buying an EV – recommended by some – is probably not going to help because the cost of electricity is also going up. It is already just as expensive to fast-charge an EV as it is to put $4 per gallon gas into the tank. If gas goes up by $3 per gallon, expect the cost of electricity to go up in tandem, because nothing is going to cost less when everything costs more. Data centers are already causing people’s power bills to go up, so it’s unlikely home-charging (assuming you can) is going to save you money. Never mind the cost of buying the EV and the peripherals you’ll need to be able to charge it at home.

An old motorcycle, on the other hand, could actually keep you mobile without making you broke.

I have one such. It is my 1983 Honda GL650. It’s the epitome of a beater bike. That’s probably why I ride it the most of all my bikes. It is, to begin with, a beater. Meaning it looks pretty beaten. The paint is faded and chalky The tank has a dent. The exhaust pipes are more rusty than chrome. That does not mean the bike isn’t mechanically sound. It just means I don’t have to worry about whether it gets rained on and I do not fear parking it in public areas. I wash it maybe once a year, cursorily. Not like my other bikes, which are kept cosmetically pristine and for that reason are garage queens. My ’76 Kz900, for instance, is more art than bike. Industrial sculpture I keep shiny and bright because it calms me down just to look at it. Same goes (even more so) for my ’75 Kawasaki S1 triple two-stroke, which I affectionately refer to as Little Stinker. The thing is as beautiful as it is useless.

My ’83 Honda, on the other hand, is useful. I bought it for next-to-nothing, to begin with. Someone had traded it in for a Harley and the Harley dealer just wanted it gone. Twelve hundred bucks later, it was mine. It was cheap because it wasn’t a Harley but also because it was just an old Honda and not one of the quick or sexy-looking ones. In fact, many cognoscenti regard its twin cylinder engine – with the big jugs protruding to either side – as ungainly, like a woman whose hips are too big for her frame. But it has its own kind of beauty. The simple and reliable kind. This engine – like most Japanese-brand engines made during the ’70s and ’80s and into the ’90s and early 2000s, even – is analogous to an anvil in that it is damned hard to hurt it. You’d probably need to run it without oil for awhile to do serious damage. If you change the oil once a year it will run – reliably – almost forever. In the case of my ’83 GL650 that’s 43 years so far – with many more years to go, probably.

The bike needs next to nothing from me beyond the once-yearly oil change. It has two spark plugs that maybe need to be replaced once a decade. The big thing to be attentive to with this bike is the lube in the shaft drive (no chain or sprockets to change, ever). Change that once a year and that too will last decades. Other than that, it’s just tires – and they’re cheap because the GL650 isn’t a crotch rocket and doesn’t need “sport” tires or eat them nearly as quickly as a sport bike eats tires. I get two years of regular riding out of mine and replacing them costs about $150 (about the cost of replacing one “cheap” tire on most cars).

That’s pretty much all there is to it.

Except for one other thing. The even more important thing, given the situation. It costs me almost nothing to operate – as well as to own. The bike goes about 60 miles on a gallon of gas, easily besting the most “fuel efficient” hybrid car you can buy. Even if the cost of gas goes up to $10 per gallon, I can still afford to ride this bike because it would still cost less to fill its tank than it currently costs at $4 per gallon to fill the tank of a typical small crossover SUV.

Did I forget to mention that it has suitcase-style storage bags and so is capable of carrying a surprising amount of cargo? That it has a fairing that protects me from the rain and cold? Even without a heated riding suit, this is a bike that can be ridden in cold weather (assuming there’s no ice or snow on the road) if you dress warmly.

I use this as an example to make the point. There are many old, inexpensive bikes like mine out there that could serve to keep you moving when you can no longer afford to continue driving.

It might be worth thinking about.

. . .

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