Sweet talk official dealers, with the wad of cash in your underpants, chances are they will match or even slightly better the prices of the parallel importers. Prices of new motorcycles have, largely, reached sensible and reasonable levels (about twelve years after the UMG started complaining about them in issue number one).
There are still anomalies. Low end motorcycles, for instance, cost around 500 quid out of the factory gate but end up costing two grand here. (Replica 600s, by contrast, cost about three grand ex-factory and can be had for £5000-£5500, which given the level of tax here works out as a reasonable deal). Fixed costs to blame for some of this but there isn't really any reason why commuters shouldn't be going for around the grand mark rather than twice that.
It took the official importers a while to stop pissing around with offers of cheap finance, free insurance, free clothing, etc., but they have finally given the people what they want. Good motorcycles at cheap prices. Triumph haven't quite bitten the bullet this year, offering pre-registered (by the factory) bikes rather than slashing new prices as such but next year they are likely to be highly competitive, also plenty of new models.
Lots of parallel importers have given up or switched back to second-hand bikes. Some have done a disappearing act with the deposits as a final encore in their cut and run game with the motorcycle business, moving on or back to other sectors of the economy where price discrepancies rule - car prices, for instance, are still over the top compared to Europe or America.
Prices in the used sector still rock bottom but the first signs of new bike prices bottoming out (with consequent knock-on effect on used bikes) can be found in some of the new parallels which have risen slightly in price over the last month. It's unlikely that the bigger parallel importers will disappear altogether, though, as they have the buying power to purchase cheaply in bulk and pass on those savings to customers. They too have started offering cheap finance, insurance and extended warranties as incentives. Worth supporting the more established parallel importer if they are in your area, without them new bike prices would still be a rip-off.
The Big Four are much more likely to start really competing against each other on price, too. It only takes one company to step way out of line to start the ball rolling. Having cut most of the fat out of the UK retail market the next step is to design bikes from the ground up to be cheaper and more competitive.
Bikes like Suzuki's SV650 indicate the way things are going (you should buy a Suzuki if you can, anyway, just to thank them for starting off the whole cheap motorcycle game with their 600 Bandit). A lightweight, high tech V-twin so nicely refined that you can't really see any evidence of its budget price. Alloy frame, light weight, great brakes, ace handling, marvellous style and a vee twin motor full of character.
Not the fastest middleweight on offer but fun without having to lose your licence on each outing. Makes similarly priced twins, like the GPz500S, look pretty silly. The design's based on the TL1000 but honed and refined. There's still yet more mass that could be pruned, even if it threatens to make the middleweight straight four redundant.
Expect bigger versions of the SV at even lower prices. All kinds of interesting tackle just over the horizon: big four engines shoe-horned into light and minimal yet strong chassis; V-twins in as many sizes and configurations as you can shake a stick at, and a final refinement of the vertical twin that will let all its attributes shine without any of the usual horrors.
The design and development cycle is the next thing for the chop, bikes updated every six months instead of every year, then every three months. The idea being to improve the bike almost every time they set up a production run for it! Many European companies can't even get one model, however long-lived, right!
This won't happen overnight, already the Japanese companies are having trouble coping with the rapid redesigns of their high tech engines - recalls reaching alarming levels! This is all in the detail, the Japs will just keep on refining their testing procedures until they more perfectly match life on the road. But there's no reason why they can't, immediately, do styling updates every few months, using the same engine and chassis as a basis.
The Japanese, as master engineers, can play any games they like. Move on from the straight four to other designs, more or less on a whim. A singular engine design conceived and executed by any of the big four would form the basis of a whole company in Europe or America rather than merely the centre of yet another model range in Nippon. The intricacies, in both basic design and production, so well refined by the Japanese that they can easily be transferred between models.
Oddly, Triumph started out using modular three and four cylinder engines but have now switched to different engine and chassis designs that must be a minor nightmare to source. Chances are, if prices are going to be competitive, they will slim all that down next year with one basic version of the triple (plus four and twin!) and only a couple of chassis variants, with a large range of styling options. The thing that pissed most punters off, the fact that the bikes were selling a lot cheaper in the States than here! They seemed to have wised up, these days - fortunately for them!
Modern replicas are rather disarming creatures, full of instant gratification, incredible acceleration and mind warping top speeds. The prospect of my buying the latest replica is as likely as my licence lasting more than a couple of hours were I to find myself astride such a device. Replicas won't disappear overnight but they will be supplemented by an increasing range of much more interesting and useful machines. Sit back and enjoy.
Bill Fowler