comparing Prius to scooters and motorcycles

Motorcycles and scooters have horrible aerodynamics. (Actually YOU have horrible aerodynamics and you stick out)
Cd's
0.9 - a typical bicycle plus cyclist
0.65 Typical racing Motorcycle
0.26 - Toyota Prius, 2004

 

^ what he said.

You have to totally enclosed the bike, including wheels, in a fairing to get any decent aerodynamics. Look at the unlimited class of Bonneville salt flats racers for examples:

MoTeC > Latest News > New World Land Speed Record for BUB 'Seven' Streamliner

 

Don't forget, most of the Harley's use Premium fuel, an additional ~10% in cost from Regular (at least that's roughly the price diff here).

My Street Glide, same engine, gets about that same 45ish on the highway, but it is much worse here around town. It dips into the mid 30s then, vs the Prius of 45+.

My Suzuki M50 (800 cc cruiser) gets 50mpg combined. It's also a lot more fun to ride than the HD or the Prius.

Jimbo, where did you get those CD figures? I would imagine that since you're punching a much smaller hole into the air on a bike, it'd be smaller compared to a prius.

 

yeah aerodynamics an less efficient ICE

 

wind resistance is a function of both cd and frontal area.

bicycle frontal area is far better, but the cd is horrible, compared to Prius.

Takes less effort to move the bike, but I cannot find the ICE or motor on my bike, so my legs and lungs really feel the wind.

 

Cd is independent of Area, CdA is the Area times the Cd, which I think you are visualizing.

Schultz Engineering - Electric Motorcycle Aerodynamics

The page goes on and on, with great information on both motorcycles and bicycles.

 

Yes, drag depends on size. But I'd bet it also depend on speed and shape.
Also, the smaller engines work harder at high speed.

However, enclose a motorcycle and it can be very efficient. The Aptera would have been an example.

Harleys being gas-suckers is in part because they aren't built for efficiency. Still mpg in the 40s isn't bad and is cheaper for a long commute than a pick-up, as a friends finds.

But, I'd rather spend money on one vehicle that I can use year round and in which you're less liable to have somebody misjudge your distance and speed, turn left across you sending you slamming into the side of their car then up and over the top of the car, dumping you on the side of the road and leaving your vehicle with a completely wrecked front and needing lots of work. (As my friend also found. To make matters worse they've been given an Aveo as a rental.)

 

If you have to ask that question....then you shouldn't.
M/C's are re recreational vehicles for the most part.
Yeah...they can be used as semi-primary transport by a few urbanites, and some of the "Live to Ride...Ride to Live" crowd, but one-percenters notwithstanding....they're a hobby.
The distinct advantages that M/C's have over power boaters, private pilots, and other recreational vehicle users is that we can often ride to work, run errands, etc.
M/C's also use a LOT less fuel than boats,, planes, R/V's, etc.

Don't get me wrong....
I'm not one of "those" Prius drivers.
If you can afford to buy gas for a boat, plane or R/V.....knock yerself out!!

EXACTLY a sixteenth?
Or is this just one of those SWAGS?

 

You said a lot with that one short sentence.:rockon:

 

The coefficient of drag depends on shape, but not speed for the limited speed range of terrestrial vehicles. Drag itself obviously depends on speed, shape, and area. It goes up by the square of speed, which means the power required to overcome aerodynamic drag goes up by the cube of speed.

Tom

 

When the prices on gas started going up in '03 I picked 250cc Ninjette and had ridden it daily to work with something ~16-20K annual. On days it was snowing, family obligations, etc it was a car. Btw bike and family minivan my "hybrid" averaged about 54MPG.

I am not 1er but I had taken bike from coast to coast, there about a dozen of states we haven't been to yet.

 

After I had Pearl for a year or so I stopped licensing and insuring my motorcycles. There was no point. It was either too wet, too cold, or too hot to ride. It was always way too dangerous. And Pearl gets equal or better mileage.

I guess I finally "grew up".

 

I've been supplementing my 2005 Prius with a 2010 Honda Elite scooter (110cc) for the past year and a half. It's working well as the primary vehicle for a 40-mile (round trip) daily commute, while getting twice the mileage of the car. And it doesn't hurt that the cost of "real" insurance is drastically lower as well.

The main trade off, of course, is that it has a top speed of just over 50 MPH. That's enough to open the vast majority of the Kansas City area, however.

I ride year round, in all weather except for snow/ice, but will rearrange my schedule a bit to avoid heavy storms. Anytime the weather is too uncooperative, or additional range and/or capacity is required, then the Prius gets called into service.

The two of them together make for a pretty sweet team.

 

on a purely comprehensive cost per mile basis, my Prius beats my motorcycle.

mileage, I get about 35MPG on the bike, vs. 45-50 on the Prius, but even without that
oil costs more for the bike
oil filters cost more for the bike
tires cost more for the bike, and I go thru them much much quicker

For the vast majority of people it does not make sense to buy a motorcycle or scooter to save on gas money. Sure, on the surface the numbers look great. First off the vast majority of motorcycles get about what the Prius gets or worse in mileage. Then motorcycles are more expensive to operate over the long term. And if you are buying one just to save on gas, as opposed to really loving to ride; you would now have to save enough on gas to pay for the motorcycle, pay for the insurance, registration, maitenance, tires, helmet, gloves, boots, jacket, etc. That is a very very high bar to overcome. With a scooter, you might make the full numbers work, but it isn't going to be the HUGE money saver some assume it to be.

 

Yeah, on the motorcycle forums I'm a member of when the "is this a good commuter bike" question comes up my reply is to buy a used corolla, put a set of 80k tires on it and drive it into the ground.

SpikeVFR did forget one big plus a bike has in California; lane splitting/traffic light filtering. Depending on the route, this could be a huge time saver.

 

Thanks (and also to the previous poster that provided information). I lost this thread, and kept forgetting to go find it until it popped up in the "recent posts" section again. I really don't know much about how it is calculated, so I appreciate the information.

 

As with most things, the devil is very much in the details. While it's very true that a large motorcycle might be difficult to justify from a purely financial perspective, the numbers can actually work out quite well on the smaller end. It all depends, of course, upon the specific situation and assumptions made.

In my case, for example, my wife and I had been sharing a single car in a Kansas City suburb. It worked out very well for several years, with our house being very close to my place of employment (I often walked or bicycled to work). That changed about a year and a half ago, when the lease on the office building expired and our new location ended up being 20 miles from home.

Clearly something had to change, and we considered the options as carefully as we could.

• Purchase a second car.
• Purchase a small motorcycle or scooter. This was seemed rather appealing, although we had no idea of how realistic the idea actually was at the time.
• Move closer to work or find a new job close to home. Both of these options were deemed to be suboptimal, partially due to the lousy state of the job and housing markets at the time.
• Arrange to carpool with coworkers. Unfortunately none of them lived nearby, so this was deemed unfeasible.

We decided to start by pinning down the details of the potential car, since it was the default choice. We decided that it should be used, similar in size to our Prius, and about 3-4 years old. It wouldn't need much in the way of extras, but as my primary commuter it absolutely had to be reliable. After looking around a bit, we decided that $10K was realistically the minimum we would have to expect to spend. Insurance was estimated to be $600 per year (matching the existing vehicle).

After researching various motorcycles and scooters, and clarifying our needs a bit (deciding that it didn't have to be interstate capable, for example), we eventually decided that a 2010 Honda Elite scooter was the best two-wheeled candidate. It was selling for $3K brand new, and it turned out that full-coverage insurance cost only $100 per year.

As you all know, we eventually decided to go with the scooter. The $500 insurance savings from last year paid for a MSF Motorcycle safety course, which simplified getting the motorcycle endorsement added to my drivers license, as well as all of the required gear... helmet, riding jacket, etc. The $500 from this year covers all of the necessary maintenance and consumables to date, a set of new tires (whenever the time comes... looks like it will be awhile yet), with money to spare.

From my perspective, we've done pretty well on the financial front. We saved $7K (possibly more) up front, that being the difference in cost between a car and the scooter. Even if we assume that all of the insurance savings will end up going toward maintenance and consumables, I'm still avoiding the costs that similar maintenance would have incurred against the car. And to top it off, I estimate that to date we've burned approximately 80 gallons less gas than our Prius would have required... that's $240 right there, assuming $3 per gallon.


Now, I'll freely admit that my situation is unlikely to be typical. The main point is that it's simply far too easy to assume something "just won't work out"... you really need to examine the details, and crunch the numbers, in order to be sure. It's also important to remember, in a case like this, that one isn't (usually) competing against some nebulous, perfect car. The real comparison is against whatever you would have purchased instead... anything else is largely conjecture.

 

Hence I stated "for the vast majority of people", a qualifier, since, I knew it can make sense in some rare circumstances.

1) you compared it to replacing a car, most of the time people are adding the bike/scooter to the mix. that is a big difference

2) 150cc scooter isn't a viable option for most people. Both for need, and want. Most of the time people are looking at mid-sized to large displacement motorcycles, another large difference from your specific situation.

3) $500 covered your MSF course and gear and all maint and consumables for a year? (my helmet alone was $700, while I have $50 gloves, I also have $300 gloves)

4) something you can't really account for is the functionality difference of a small car to a 150cc scooter. Hard to price that out.

5) the overall savings between the car and the bike, price wise is unlikely to be $7k. the upfront cost difference might be $7k, but the overall cost will be less. For if you were to compare selling the imaginairy car to selling your current scooter, you would likely potentially recoup a lot of that money.

6) the mait costs can't really be comparable. Does the scooter specify motorcycle oil? Motorcycle coolant? I actually don't know, having never owned a scooter. And for tires, it is pretty easy to get decent tires for a car that are warrantied to 60-80,000 miles. I get about 4-6k for a rear tires on my bikes, and about 8-12k (depending on bike)for the fronts. Now a scooter doesn't have near the power or weight of a full bike, but I can't beleive they approacht he life of a car tire. I find that motorcycles also tend to be very conservative in the specified maintanance schedule, much more so than most cars, for things like brake fluid changes, plug replacement, etc., is the same true of scooters? Plus the bike added things like fork oil flushes that you don't do on a car.
Now all that said, my bikes serve a very different niche from my Prius, so it isn't really comparable. Just like you can't compare a 911 to a Prius. Even within my bikes, they are very different. Sort of like someone who has a Prius and a 911, oh wait, that is me too.

didn't forget lane splitting, but 1) we were talking about money costs, not time and 2) every other state but CA outlaws it.

time is money and all, but still...

 

Did a spot compare on consumption in the office. Our Prius against all the motorbikes. We get 65 mpg on the commute on average. Only the tiny mopeds (50cc) matched or bettered our result.

Then again - most of the bikers drive like lunatics whilst we just mosey along.