Recently I rode the BMW R 1250 GS motorbike that featured in Steve Cropley’s column, partly because he was so impressed by it. I’ve read great things about GS models over the years and wondered how good the tech-heavy, archetypal adventure bike had become.
Cropley rides more bikes than me, as do bike reviewers (obviously), and it took about five seconds on the GS for that to show. The lower seat height, on what I had always considered to be a bigger bike than my old Honda Africa Twin, was a pleasant surprise at a standstill. But as I tottered out of our office car park on it, I thought: “I don’t like this.”
My feet felt too low. The bars were too wide. The ergonomics were all over the place, the digital display was complicated, the throttle response was sharp and the speed at which it tipped into corners was unnerving.
Ultimately, though, those things all came down to familiarity. A week later, it felt similarly weird getting back onto my own bike. Why the narrow bars and high seat, pegs and centre of gravity? Why did it feel so heavy? Because exposure to vehicles – lots of vehicles – is the key to getting comfy quickly and being able to make a decent assessment.
Mine isn’t the most skilled job in the world, but one of the assets that writing about cars gives people is the ability to suss out a lot about a car in a short space of time. Then, after a longer drive, while reviewers have slightly different tastes, a consensus about a car is usually easy to find.
And so to automotive engineers. Some like to join us on events where we have lots of cars, if they can, because they know how valuable an exercise benchmarking is.
All major car companies engage in it. They will usually buy some key rivals to whatever they’re developing, not necessarily to strip them down (agencies exist to do that) but to drive them and see what does what well. They hire cars, too, and there’s an industry pool where they swap with each other for a few weeks at a time; but demand on those cars is high.
And sometimes it isn’t enough, which I say not out of smugness but because I’ve heard engineers, who are under more time pressure than most of us, say they don’t drive enough other cars. So much of their time is spent in their own that they get used to the way they do things. Anything else feels strange. Ideally, I’ve been told, rival products would be on tap. Which sounds expensive.
Perhaps this is one of the reasons why Lotuses, for all their compromises, have driven so well over the years. Alongside testing their own cars, the staff who also work on the Lotus Engineering side spend serious time in, if not necessarily rivals, plenty of other firms’ cars.
At the start of a development cycle, manufacturers have huge lists of data outlining how they would like their new car to behave – from things as straightforward as the wheelbase to elements as complex as steering ratio and lateral stiffness.
But in addition to nailing those, you can never spend enough bum-on-seat time in cars, both yours and those of your rivals. That’s true whether you’re developing a car or learning something about familiarity on a bike that isn’t yours. Which, it turns out, is as good as they say.
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