Winter is here, and the mind can wander a bit.......and I got to pondering if the manufacture and sales of sport bikes can continue?

The young riders are crashing and being injured or killed on a regular basis, and there may not be an endless supply of Hooligans and/or stunters.

Will the riders stop buying them - will the insurance become too expensive for your riders to own motorcycles (for those who actually buy the motorcycle and actually insure it) - with the government allow 16 year old males to purchase a 150HP sport bike?

Those bikes will always be wanted/needed. Even if the USA were to ban them, or restrict them to certain riders, there are plenty of emergent economies who will take them up. Young people will want to push limits, sadly for motorcycling some will die, but that goes with the territory.

I guess maybe the bike is not the problem, as much as what riders are doing with them. Most buyers don't go to the "track" events where the bikes are in the element they are built for - and they don't live in an area with mountains and curves - the public roads become the playground for this kind of riding:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rI8L59brPQE


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKydosJYnAs

I've read about life in the USA before Social Drugs were Outlawed.   Apparently some Senators Child got caught up in a Drug habit that ended in our current Drug Laws .  

Some time , we are bound to have a power to weight restriction on bikes and sports  cars .  

So , did the two-cycle bikes get outlawed for the same reason under the disguise of air quality .    I know the 50:1 mixed machine don't really smoke no more than rich-running 4 strokes.   But they sure ran strong for their sizes !

Undoutably, these are all "cool" riders.

That second video:

Travels 3 times faster than any other vehicle on the road - uses turn signal for lane changes!

My observations mirror engineer's. Most of the bikes I encounter when out on the road in my locale are cruisers, mostly Harleys. Sportbikes are a (very) distant second, Third is a mix of other types.

A lot of my local riding takes me in the vicinity of two very large university campuses and that's where I see most of the  sport bikes, The riders are almost always wearing backpacks to carry their stuff.

I've never witnessed any of the hooliganism like in the videos though.

Two summers ago I rode down to Pittsburgh International raceway for the MotoAmerica road races. I expected the motorcycle parking area to be filled with sportbikes. Nope. There were quite a few, but of the many hundreds of bikes there, the majority were cruisers, big touring bikes and adventure bikes. I've never seen so many big ADV bikes in one place before. I'm pretty sure that my S40 was the only one in the lot. Possibly the smallest bike there too

Another personal anecdote for what it's worth. When I bought my Sportster a few years ago from a local dealership's used inventory, the salesman told me that the  young fellow that traded it in had traded it in on a brand new Kawasaki Ninja 300. Wanted a bike to commute back and forth to work, and wasn't happy with the Sportster in that role.

One of the things that makes me question the "sustainability" of the sport bike - is if enough of them are being purchased to keep the manufacturer building them.  They were a hot seller for the last 20 years - I just don't know if that will continue.  As oldNslow stated, the ADV touring market seems to be strong, the "scrambler" models seem to be hot sellers for Ducati/Triumph/BMW....and BMW has about 5 models of their RNINET and Moto/Guzzi has a similar number of models of their V7 - they seem to think those affordable mid size bikes will be the hot sellers in the coming years.

Currently it is nearly impossible to buy a mid sized sport touring bike in the US.....they all seem to be 1,000cc and up.  Several companies have built and marketed smaller sport touring bikes - but after a few years they stop as their just isn't a market for them.  Honda built the PC800 from 1988-1998 and it was a great bike - but sold in limited numbers.  Honda built the NT650V since 1988 and NT700V came later and it sold well in the UK - the NT700V was only sold for 2 years in the US - it didn't sell well and US dealers had a hard time getting rid of them.  BMW sold the F800GT from 2013 until 2018, and it has been discontinued for 2019.  Mysmaller body size and advancing years make a mid size sport touring bike the perfect choice for a bike - and yet the manufacturers can't sell enough of them to justify building them (In the next year I am going to start looking for a nice used BMW F800GT to be my bike for single riding on long trips - 90HP and 470 pound is a good size for me).

I wonder how long companies like Honda/Yamaha/Suzuki/Kawasaki will be able to keep designing and building sport bikes in 300cc/400cc/500cc/650cc/750cc/1,000cc sizes (and also make the same bike in a naked version) - will there be a big enough market to sustain 30 different versions of sport/naked bikes?  The US is a very small market compared to the sales worldwide, and we have a very small influence on what the big 4 manufacturers build and sell.