There's a basic truism. Maybe some of you also don't know this yet. Motorcycles out-accelerate cars pretty much all the way across the board. A fast car might catch a smaller-displacement or slower motorcycle in the long run, but the bike will take off faster and head toward that vanishing point with greater rapidity. A lot of it has to do with power-to-weight ratio but, generally, motorcycle engines are also higher-performance units, pound for pound.
If you didn't know that, I hope you remember it now, because underestimating the ability of even a small motorcycle to cover ground has resulted in many accidents thanks to car drivers pulling out in front of an incoming bike at (relatively) glacial speeds on those rare occasions when a car driver actually
sees a motorcycle. Those things can move quickly, so please consider that when you're determining whether to make that turn or wait until the motorcycle's safely past.
But that's not my main reason for writing this. I basically am just equal parts amused and eyesrolling at the apparently not uncommon belief that a car or truck can outpace a motorcycle from a standing start at a stoplight. The antagonists are invariable male and often resemble either (a) extras from a
Deliverance casting call or (b) extras from a street gang film's casting call. These yahoos appear to equate ability to take off quickly with sexual prowess, I can only imagine, though I am led to believe that most women value staying power over speed
or acceleration.
Anyway, I don't recall having recently engaged such morons in vehicular combat, my brian cells being too well connected for such silliness in traffic, and -- to the best of my recent memory -- I usually just let them take off amidst a screech of tires and stench of burning rubber in hope that Smokey is hiding out just up the road. Not that I don't routinely leave cars way behind when the light turns green -- they're safer further away from me, basically -- I just don't play silly traffic games with doofi (who're all too often shortening their engine life by revving the hell out of their rides at a standstill while repeatedly looking at me, one of the less subtle signs that, indeed, said f***wit wants to race).
The reasons for their f***wittedness are obvious in the context of what I wrote at the outset: my bike (a Kawasaki ZX-11), and just about any bike, would probably leave them way behind if ridden to the max. In my particular case, my mount happens to be one that was -- for almost a whole decade -- the fastest production bike on the face of the planet.
The big Ninja's supremacy ended when Suzuki came up with a (larger displacement) new speed king a few years ago, though Kawasaki fought back with a new model that may or may not have reclaimed the crown that's been Kawasaki's most of the time since the first years of the '70s. I don't ride it like road testers ride it, but it'll do the standing quarter mile in 10.52 seconds or less and hit 132 mph or so on the way out. It'll go from 0-60 in 2.69 seconds. Heck, it'll easily hit 60 mph (even 100 mph) in second gear, with six gears available for your riding pleasure. Its top speed is at least 180 but may be higher and my bike -- modified quite a bit and with its overall weight reduced -- might well hit the 200-mph mark, or close enough to it.
I've never had my bike's speed higher than an indicated 130 mph -- it cruises beautifully all day at 100-110 mph but, once you get much higher than that, things suddenly start to feel serious and tunnel vision and acute paranoia quickly sets in. It scared me that the thing was still rapidly accelerating when I hit 130 mph -- actually, I probably went over but the last place my eyes wanted to fixate was on my instrument panel (I was more concerned with animals, cars, mountains, etc, coming out of the desert from the sides of my narrowing visual tunnel). To be honest, speed itself does not especially thrill me, and theres that point at which it becomes a distinct negative. Acceleration , though -- yeah, that's always been the most exciting part of riding a bike, when properly applied.
Actually, taking off with extreme swiftness and then settling down to something closer to the speed limit is how I usually ride from stoplight to stoplight and more than once I've been roared past by some doofus in a car, often one of those little souped-up things that typically look pretty ridiculous and that I believe are called 'ricers' (typically driven by clones of one Marshall Mathers), who was apparently under the mistaken impression that I gave a f*** about his ability to ride through town at highly dangerous speeds with judgement and reactions impaired by testosterone and possibly by other subtances. I see the look of triumph sometimes, as well as less subtle indicators that he (it's always a he) believes us to be racing. It's entirely misplaced because I owned his bony ass on takeoff and if he wants to go faster than me once I settle down to suggestive-of-almost-quasi-legal speed then good luck to him and to anyone who might pull out in front of him. They'll never 'get' it: (a) I'm not racing and (b) I beat him, anyway, and he's doing the equivalent of dramtically spiking a touchdown after the game's over and the stadium is empty. Ride a motorcycle long and, even more than as a car driver, you'll come to believe that most drivers should not be on the road and that many are also basically idiots or cursed with reaction times that an anaesthetized amoeba would be proud of. You'd be right, too.
Anyway, the beast moves. And I don't need to run it anywhere near redline to pull ahead of pretty much anything on the road (a nice safety feature, actually). But smaller and less sporty bikes I had before, nowhere near as swift or powerful, also left cars far in their wake. It's a fact: motorcycles accelerate faster than cars and many of the past two decades or so, especially anything of or over midsized engine displacement, will also hit higher top speeds than most cars on the road today.
Okay, so let's look to see what cars we can find that equal this kind of acceleration performance. Hmmm. Very few, indeed. This site (
http://www.cars.com/go/crp/buyingGuides/articles/2005sportsQuickest.jsp), that professes to round up the quickest cars on the market, only offers up one candidate that would theoretically equal or best my ZX-11 (remember, there're slightly faster bikes about now): the Saleen S7, whatever that is, with a 0-60 mph figure of 2.9 seconds and a price tag of $395000. The next nearest competition is the Lamborghini Murciélago, that achieves the same 60 mph in a snail-like 3.8 seconds at price of merely $281400. The Porsche 911? Bahh...way down at 4 seconds, with the Corvette and a couple of Ferraris at 4.2 seconds. Pull over into the slow lane, dudes.
The thing is, though, that I've never been challenged to a duel by a Lamborghini or such (though I've been stuck behind a couple in traffic jams on the Vegas Strip, recently). A recent overt and obnoxious challenge came from some moron driving a Hyundai Accent. I found performance data for the 2001 model and, as I suspected, the prognosis for the car's supremacy was not good: the Accent does the standing quarter mile in 15.1 seconds, hitting 94.4 mph at the end of it and giving me enough time to have a cup of tea and a couple of scones before I get back on my bike to pass it again, and it accelerates 0-60 in 10.9 seconds.
But MANY of the most obnoxious would-be speed demons seem to be in big trucks, like the big Fords and so on. Yeah, they're got powerful engines, but they also weigh a ton (literally) and are...well..trucks. Not really built for blinding speed, just as my Ninja isn't too good at hauling bags of cement. But there they go, a-whoopin' and a hollerin' as they rev that ole' baby and commence to deliver to me a velocitary bootie-whuppin'. Duh. The Ford F250 does 0-60 in 9.25 seconds, covering the quarter mile in 16.83 seconds and coming out of it at a respectable (dude, it's a
truck, not a drag racer) 83 mph. My bike can easily hit 100 mph in six seconds, though that'd not be the most prudent strategy between stoplights in an urban environment...not much of a contest, really.
So let's consider some smaller bikes, less famed for sheer speed. The baby Ninja and the middle-kid Ninja, at 250cc and 500cc respectively, are pretty good examples. The little Ninja does 0-60 in 5.5 seconds, meaning that it -- and this is a small bike with a small engine -- is bested in acceleration only by the likes of Ferraris, Porsches, and so on. In other words, it's proof that just about all the cars actually on the road, the ones driven by most people, will be out-accelerated by all but the very smallest of motorcycles, scooters, and mopeds. The little bike loses a bit on the quarter mile, because acceleration isn't the whole story (it tops out at 115 mph), but its 15.5 seconds on that measure is not bad compared with the Accent, with its vastly larger engine, and it beats the F250's substantial mass. The Ninja 500 is also not going to give faster bikes (including the much sportier 600 Ninja, a
very quick little race-bred beast) any competition but, by covering the quarter-mile in 12.73 seconds and going 0-60 in 3.76 seconds, it places above most of the sports cars on that link above and is roughly equivalent to the fastest Lamborghini listed (it'd undoubtedly lose in the long run, with a top speed of just 140 mph, but it'd possibly gain ground again in the twisties).
But it's not just car drivers who underestimate what a motorcycle is capable of. Last night I was raced -- well, they gave it a try, anyway, but I didn't fully engage -- by two idiots on shiny new Harley Davidson Sportsters. I use the word 'idiot' advisedly because, well, they were: rode like idiots, dressed like idiots, and wore the useless little plastic beanie like idiots. I'll assume that these were the larger (larger than mine, for that matter) 1200 cc model of late. If so, they're capable of a quarter-mile acceleration of 13.47 seconds, coming out at 94.9 mph. Those twin engines DO have a lot of grunt low down but it slips away higher up...regardless, my bike and the 500-cc mild-manner Ninja, less than half the displacement, both accelerate more expeditiously. Still, these relatively quick and nimble Hardly-Ablesons do pretty well considering the Soviet-pattern tractor engines that power them. I couldn't find any data on 0-60 acceleration, probably because it takes several days -- for one, it can take a while to root around at the roadside, looking for parts that have fallen off.
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