I think this says it all.

Driving a motorcycle is a sensual, visceral, and immediate experience. It's the blast of air parting in an almost physical way around your body. It's the feel of heavy steel machinery between your thighs and knees as you move through turns, running a good road in the morning. It's the taste of wet grass, deep woods, damp riverbanks, and freshly cut hay that finds its way to the back of your throat. You know and experience what is around you and feel the very sensation of motion itself, in a way that you never can behind the wheel of a car.


In a car you drive a road, on a motorcycle you feel it. On a motorcycle every rise and dip, every change in surface or cant, every turn or straightway, is a temporal and physical experience. In a car you are enclosed, removed from what is without by the machinery that moves you. The windshield, the air conditioning, the heater, the radio, the upholstered cradle of your seat, the locked doors, the surrounding frame, they all separate you from the reality of the road and weather. On a motorcycle the machine and the environment are an integral part of the experience. As you come home in the afternoon, the sun touches your shoulders with great warm hands. Somewhere in the middle of a long day of riding--especially on curves, where lean and torque, body and bike angle, gravity and speed, determine the physics and the line of movement--the machine becomes an extension of the body, a melding of what is human and what is mechanical.

I have heard the criticisms and they are true: on a motorcycle you trade safety for sensation, enclosure for exhilaration. A steering wheel, an airbag, and a roll cage are, however, poor substitutes for the motion and the freedom of a motorcycle.I have heard the criticisms and they are true: on a motorcycle you trade safety for sensation, enclosure for exhilaration. A steering wheel, an airbag, and a roll cage are, however, poor substitutes for the motion and the freedom of a motorcycle.