Things They Don't Tell You About New Bikes
And I don’t mean that they stink as in they suck. I mean they stink as in they smell really bad Now I was familiar with this I heard about it You know that motorcycles emit some sort of odor, brand new motorcycles Never experienced it, this is my first ever brand new vehicle of any kind and I as I said I expected it but I didn’t I didn’t expect it to be quite as bad. So a few kilometers after the dealership The engine had warmed up I came to a stop my visor was up and it
hit me this really really nasty smell that you otherwise would never ignore. Burning plastic, burning wires I don’t know Really nasty and despite being aware of it and expecting it I couldn’t resist to call the dealership and ask them is this really what it smells like? Is this really okay? This bad? They said “yes yes it’s very noticeable just keep driving it’s gonna go away” and sure enough it did go away after about 350-400 kilometers maybe you get used to it then it’s like stuck in your nostrils and you always feel it you kind of
go crazy from it but it does really go away after in my case, about 300-350 kilometers fortunately. What is the smell? Where does it come from? I have no idea.
one of the best sold bikes currently on the market Now this is a bike with 27-28 horsepower and 286 CC of displacement. What I’m trying to say is that it’s not a very fast bike. I mean to me it is fast but more than later. The problem arises when you combine 28 horsepower with the break-in instructions presented in the owner’s manual having 28 horsepower means that when you’re merging onto fast roads or highways you usually need to go full or near full throttle and up to 8000 RPM to ensure that you adapt your speed to
the speed of the traffic quickly and safely. But you’re not supposed to go full throttle or do aggressive acceleration during the first 500 kilometers. The result is that the break-in period is a bit of a pain and I was honestly forced to ignore these instructions once or twice Nothing too harsh but I’d rather not risk getting hit than worry about the perfection of the wear pattern inside my engine. You’ve probably heard about the alternative approaches to break in the stuff that requires you to go full throttle to ensure better break in and you know ring
shapes and whatnot well the deal is that once you actually buy the bike with your own money you sort of forget these theories and feel it’s best to go by the book so if you do buy a small displacement machine it’s a good idea to find a long winding road with little traffic This will force you to constantly vary the throttle input which should improve break-in and it will also rack up miles fast to help you get through the break-in I feel like that the less experience you have on a bike the more useless reviews
can be Of course before buying this bike I watched and read a lot of reviews about it and if you watch reviews you will see that a lot of people think that this is a slow bike. That the suspension is too soft. Maybe that the front brakes feel kind of mushy You know stuff like that. The issue is that reviews are made by people who have a lot of experience on motorcycles. Many many different types of bikes. Many many miles of riding And of course they review every motorcycle from their own reality. That’s how being
human works. We perceive things from our own reality. The problem is that someone else’s reality is not your reality So if you have very little experience on a motorcycle like me. I have a total of about 3500 km of riding and my reality is that I can’t feel any of these things that people talk about in reviews. I have no idea how mushy or non-mushy a front brake is supposed to feel To me it feels great. I squeeze the brakes and the bike stops it stops well even on hard sudden stops The engine has plenty
of torque and I feel like it can handle so much more than I can actually throw at it. When it comes to the suspension funnily enough it feels really stiff to me because it’s a lot stiffer than the suspension on my used NX250 Honda Dominator which has like half a million miles so probably everything is worn out Basically from my reality, from the reality of someone… I have no idea where I’m supposed to go. I forgot the road So from the reality of someone with little experience this is an Africa twin I’m sure that over
time these feelings will fade. They will become less pronounced I will grow out of this motorcycle and that’s okay I’m supposed to grow out of things. I’m supposed to you move and evolve at my own pace But if you watch too many online reviews you end up feeling like the only thing that will make you happy is a Tenere 700 Yamaha and the reality is that with very little experience under your belt that bike would be too big, too heavy, too fast, too overwhelming and I know that the idea of growing into things can seem
sensible but I’m sure it can also be very frustrating if you buy something that is too much. If you bite off more than you can chew. So I prefer to enjoy things at my own pace, in my own reality. Discovering myself, the bike, the world around me. I always believed that the term “dual sport” is a bit of a gimmick because bikes that look like this to me just look like street legal off-road machines. I mean the big mud guards, the knobby tires the giant ground clearance, the tall seed height. All of that to me
screams off-road. And I I believed that these bikes must suck on road and being on road with a bike like this is just a necessary evil when you’re transversing and connecting two off-road trails. But this bike taught me that dual sport actually means dual sport. Now I prefer off-road riding ever since I discovered off-road riding. I really like off-road riding because I think it’s the most efficient possible shortcut to a real sense of adventure. Within a matter of I don’t know 15 to 20 minutes to half an hour you can be in the middle of
nowhere surrounded by beautiful nature and have this sense of true freedom and “I can go wherever I want to go”. Plus I feel that being off-road is a bit safer because when I’m off-road I’m the only variable. Wildlife doesn’t text and drive unlike humans I feel that you know middle of nowhere is safer than traffic but this thing is shocking me and scaring me by how it’s managing to make me fall in love with asphalt riding. You know on-road regular riding A twisty road with this thing is a joy. The bike feels sporty, accurate, confident,
stable It’s actually inviting you to push it and try to increase cornering speed To be brave and the lean a bit more and I’m really enjoying it. I’m kind of scared of the fact that I’m enjoying asphalt riding but I am I can’t lie to myself. And how this bike manages to do that with knobby inexpensive tires from a brand I never heard about before I have no idea Now this is the big one and the key reason why I made this video. This motorcycle costs 6000 Euros and for me this is a lot of
money for something that is basically nothing more than a grown-up toy. A form of personal entertainment. Justifying this purchase was very hard for me until I realized that I was being extremely stupid – allow me to explain. The first grown-up toy I bought was my Toyota MR2 I bought it back in 2014 for 1350 Euros. I bought my first bike a Kawasaki gpz750r in 2019 for 250 euros. After that came the TZR 125 in 2020 for 800 euros and finally the Dominator 250 in 2022 for 1600 euros. As you can see the price of the
bikes slowly increases as I kept making the same mistake over and over. I wanted to reduce the financial burden as much as possible because I couldn’t justify spending money on grown-up toys but each time I would actually end up spending money, more money and a lot of time trying to fix the bike. The GPZ was so bad that I couldn’t even get it started so I just sold it and I also discovered later that the frame was bent. The TZR I painstakingly rebuilt and then it died on me after just a few hundred kilometers. The
Dominator was finally decent and despite being a very high mileage bike it got me through my first riding season and took me everywhere with just basic servicing I am forever grateful to it but even that because it’s old is now starting to make problems. The speedo died the tachometer works only up to about 5000 RPM. Sometimes the bike refuses to start and so on The problems are beginning. The whole idea behind all these grown-up toys is that they’re supposed to re-energize and revitalize me. This is why the channel is called driving for answers. I bought
my MR2 with the goal of rebuilding it and then driving it and through driving and enjoying it I was supposed to look for the answers to the big questions in life. Originally this was supposed to be a channel about philosophy, psychology and self-introspection. And for some reason my idea was to deliver that content while driving. Turns out that I ended up having more fun looking for totally different answers after I got engulfed by the MR2. Now what I’m trying to say is that all of these rebuilds and of this work was incredibly valuable and I
learned a lot and it changed my life But I realized that I’m slowly becoming frustrated because I never managed to satisfy my original goal and my original goal was seat time. So far I’ve managed to spend 80 percent of my time building and only 20 of my time riding and driving. Building is fun but for me there must be balance. The goal of building is to enjoy that which you have built otherwise I personally feel frustrated and I realize that if I want to make sure to actually get seat time I must purchase something that
does not need building and that something is a new bike. Initially the CRF seems more expensive than all of my other purchases but this is an illusion because over the years I spent a lot of money on all these things to get them running but more importantly I spent incredible amounts of time on them and time is most certainly money. So although the CRF seems more expensive it really isn’t if you add up the time and the money spent in the long run, but the real catch is that I feel like the CRF has already
managed to buy me as much if not more seat time than all of these other machines combined. The first two thousand something kilometers have been pretty much zero work Just pure enjoyment. Get on it, start it, go. No need to fix anything, no need to order parts, no need to you know do a million things just to get on the road. And after years of building and fixing it honestly feels liberating. But this is why balance is important. I probably wouldn’t even appreciate a new bike if I hadn’t gone through all the fixing and rebuilding
and the knowledge, experience and joy I got from fixing and rebuilding is truly invaluable and I would never undo it even if I magically could. So basically what I’m trying to say is that if you’re in a stage where seat time has high value for you then the price of a new bike is realistically far cheaper than it seems and buys you far more sea time than most used machines will. It all depends on your current priorities and it’s very important that you value things not in terms of their absolute price but also in terms
of your personal priorities, time and opportunity costs. Now the final point of the video: Some of you may remember that a while ago I asked whether I should make a sub-channel for motorcycling content or post motorcycle content on this existing channel? Well, I decided that neither of these two scenarios will be happening. I realized that I am enjoying riding far too much to ruin everything by putting a camera on myself all the time. I may post something once in a blue moon but that’s about it There will be no regular motovlog style content. If I
start recording then I’ll just start thinking whether I should go here or there? Is the camera angle good? Is the lighting good? Is my riding good? all these things that completely ruin the feeling of freedom and enjoyment. And honestly I don’t want to ruin this beautiful world that I discovered. And I’m certain that many of you can relate and understand I feel like I really can’t bring any true value wit my riding content and adventures and exploration. It might be fun but it will take away a lot of time and energy from my main content
and I’m sure that the quality of my main content would suffer because I’m already spending all of my time on the main content. So basically what I want to do is use riding for my personal enjoyment to re-energize me and to make it possible for me to you keep making the original, the main content and keep improving it and keep going further in that direction Basically enjoy riding as it is. Because cameras, I did it with the MR2 many times ,recording when you’re driving or riding it really really makes things hard and ruins it and
and then you’re just thinking whether the footage is good or not and I really I really don’t want to do that I’m just having far too too much fun doing things as they are. So maybe I’m gonna post something as I said from time to time but really there will be no regular content. I am sorry if anyone expected it but as I said I’m sure that you understand, thank you. So yeah that’s pretty much it as always thanks a lot for watching I’ll be seeing you soon with more fun and useful stuff on the
d4a channel
