Horsepower

[curlyjoe]

There's no rational answer to your question, postoak. Humans—mostly men, I fear—have always had a bit of a yen for the biggest and the fastest. We are attracted top the bright, shiny things. Why, if you live in the city, would you buy a Porsche or an Aston Martin or a Ferrari or a Mustang or a Corvette or a CBR1000R or a ... you get the idea.

I think the answer is 'because you can' and because you want to say something like 'look what I can have'. It's also our way of replacing the brightly coloured feathers that Mother Nature denied us.

Before all the owners of these fine machines jump down my throat and tell me I'm maligning them, I accept, I do, that many people who acquire them do so because they have a genuine interest in motor cars or cycles and really enjoy the thrill of owning and using quality machines. It's fair enough. Good on you, but none of us belongs to a homogenous group.

I'm not sure that it is, as Mr Spock would have it, 'logical'. You don't need the horsepower; you don't need the speed; you don't need to support the petrol consumption; blah, blah, blah. But these high performance things are there, so people want them.

Why would you want a CB1100? It's probably bigger and heavier and more powerful that anyone really needs. My answer is that it's beautiful and I could have one so I did. Do I 'need' it? Not really.

Excellent post Cormanus.

In America, I rarely see traditional muscle cars these days. They seem to be replaced by large and powerful trucks driven by men that do not use them for anything work related and many of them drive aggressively.

Ferret posted some stats on motorcycle rider fatalities recently and I was surprised to see a steady increase in deaths of older men (+50 I think) riding large displacement (>1700 cc) cruisers and touring motorcycles. I guess these guys wanted the biggest and most powerful motorcycles but weren't able to handle these bikes safely.

Both my bikes have much more power than I need and perhaps I should have bought something in the 500-700 cc range but testosterone/adrenaline and logic do not correlate well among males.