My idiot neighbor

Driving a monstrously oversized pickup truck for a daily commute is not smart, but is buying a bike to save on gasoline costs worth it?

I live in a pretty nice neighborhood (as long as you are not on Nextdoor, otherwise, we are a den of intolerant racist assholes). Most homes are owner occupied, but there are a couple that are rentals. One of them, the landlord is a genuine skinflint, who refused to help pay to replace a fence that had collapsed. But he always has tenants because he charges what goes for a "deal" here in South San Jose.

The rub is that you get the second tier of renters. Now, they aren't horrible. They do run a licensed daycare out of the house, but they rent rooms to help defray the cost of renting (a 3 bedroom detached home here rents for nearly $4K a month - Yikes!).

The Idiot I am referring to is one of the roomies. He does something industrial (welder or construction I think), so he makes decent money. Late last year, he bought a brand new, 2022 Dodge Ram 1500 pickup truck, a behemoth with the 5.7l Hemi V8.

And he drove that to and from work (I will add that he traded in a 2019 Ford F150 that looked perfect for it).

About 2 months ago, he was whining about gas prices, and the 16 MPG that his truck got was killing him, and his roughly 45-mile round trip commute.

What to do?

If you said "buy a motorcycle" give yourself a gold star.

Of course, if you wanted to be frugal and save on gas expense, you would buy a Kawasaki 250 or 400 twin cylinder that sips gasoline (60 - 80 MPG) or others that are even more frugal.

But being a real 'murican, he bought himself a 2022 Harley Davidson XL1200 (sportster) that gets about 43 MPG. The list price on that fine paint shaker is a hair over $13K. But stock its exhaust has the tone of a farting mosquito, so naturally, he had to have a set of loud pipes installed, and after a month of picking bugs out of his teeth, a windscreen appeared, the pair of which probably set him back about an extra grand.

So, $14+K to save money on gas because his ginormous Ram 1500 pickup is thirsty, and gasoline is about $6.50 a gallon here in California.

How long to break even?

He gets 43mpg/16mpg savings, or 2.7X as many miles per gallon. Thus on a typical daily round trip, it costs about $18.28 for the truck. Ouch. On the bike, it is about $6.80, so roughly 1/3 the cost per day.

But he paid about $14K for the Harley, so how long to break even?

At $6.80 a day vs. the Truck, he is saving $11.48, let's round that to $11.50.

Now if you take the $14K for the bike, divide that by the $11.50, it will take 1,217 commute trips. Assuming 5 days a week, and 50 weeks a year (2 weeks of vacation) and calculating, he breaks even after commuting 4.87 years.

So, what did we learn? That buying an expensive-ish bike to save on gasoline because your SUV or big-assed pickup truck is a guzzler is not really a good idea.

The math would have made more sense had he bought a small, used Japanese street bike for a couple of thousand bucks, but still, the economics aren't great.

The real reason I wrote this?

If you want to know why I took the time to write this it is because at 4:35 AM every weekday, this knob fires up his LOUD Harley and lets it warm up for 5 minutes before heading to work, and that makes sure that me, and most of the neighborhood is awake.

If he had bought that well-seasoned, 'used' Kawasaki Ninja 250, I wouldn't give an iota of a damn.

---