Once upon a time, $10,000 was a whole lot of money. It's still a healthy chunk of change for motorcycle magazine editors, sanitation engineers and other working stiffs gettin' 'er done on the average American family income of $47,000 with 28 years of mortgage payments left. That once-tidy sum barely gets you into the cheapest new car in America, affectionately known to devotees of life on the cheap as an '08 Chevy Aveo 5. But cheer up, boys and girls: That 22-pound pile of dollar bills goes a whole lot farther when you're shopping for two wheels.
Setting a hard five-figure ceiling in most showrooms still lifts you into the muscle and phat of the lineup. No bottom-line apologies necessary. Even a perfunctory Web-surfing expedition will reveal scores of alternatives. So, being the selfless public servants that we are, here's a comprehen-sible if less than totally comprehensive exploration of the sort of bang you can expect for 10,000 bucks. We went for bandwidth, whether skewed toward track days or cruise nights or somewhere in between. Let's take it from the top, starting with BMW's long-awaited F800S.
Your basic, do-it-all Bavarian streetbike slots in just under the magic $10K mark with belt drive, fuel injection and plenty of typically atypical engineering designed to lure buyers out of the usual four Japanese showrooms. There's nothing normal about Buell's big Firebolt. Erik Buell doesn't do normal. Adding the liquid-cooled 1125R to the '08 lineup slots the previous ber-twin XB12R neatly into this price bracket.
Yes, Virginio, you can put a real-deal Ducati in the garage without subjecting little Fabio to the slow social suicide of community college. New for '07, the 695 grew out of the popular 620 model, which was for years Ducati's best seller worldwide. It just may do more for less than anything else from Borgo Panigale. Perhaps you prefer pushrods to desmodromics? Flying low and solo, Harley's Nightster tells anyone with eyes in their head that the Sportster still knows how to do the nasty. More physically and financially accessible than its 1800cc brother, Honda's VTX1300 is 100 pounds lighter and leaves your wallet $3300 heavier, which you can blow on cheap hotels and horrific bar tabs in Sturgis.
You're welcome to spend more than $9499 on a sportbike, but it won't buy anything better than Honda's 412-pound CBR600RR. Moving through our alpha-betical order, K stands for naked, as in Kawasaki's chiseled Z1000. Undressed, but not at all stripped, it's unlikely to be mis-taken for anything but a heavy in the next Transformers movie. Suzuki's V-Strom 650 only sounds like an exile from the planet Cybertron. It's actually quite adept at just about any sort of two-wheeled terrestrial travel you carbon-based life forms can come up with, and better than its more expensive 1000cc sibling at most of 'em. Next?
Triumph's 1050cc Speed Triple is another practical set of sporting wheels likely to inspire some healthy fear and loathing in the corporate car park. For an encore you can strafe unsuspecting poseurs on Racer Road. Our little preamble winds up with a little good news/bad news state of affairs: Yamaha's superb new V-Star 1300 breaks the budget by a measly $90. That's OK if you've got the money, but rules, as they say, are rules. On the flip side, the V-Star 1100 Classic is Yamaha's best-selling cruiser for a reason: a 1063cc, eight-valve twin with dual front discs, shaft drive and faux hardtail rear suspension for $8899.
Actually, this whole thing is a gambit. A con. We fed our corporate overlords a load about taking the whole lot of 'em out on the road in the interest of science and the greater good. Going the extra mile for you, the loyal reader. The truth of it is we just needed a good scrape around L.A. As it turns out, we filled a few notebooks and learned some things in the process. Turn the page and tag along.