It Hurts to Crash Your Brand New Harley-Davidson

By Sam Bendall - July 20, 2016

It’s happened to us all, we’ve laid our bike down at one point or another but it’s a particular dig to your ego when you lay your brand new bike down just after leaving the dealership.

That’s what happened to Popular Mechanics writer Buzz Blissinger in this delightful (not really) recap of his experience. I have italicized his copy and added in my own additions.

In Blissinger’s words:

Anytime I mention to someone that I ride a motorcycle, the first thing they do is tell me a story about a crash—some ghoulish tale filled with lip-smacking gore. Their implication is that riding a bike is about as safe as taking two sticks of dynamite with a glass of water to cure a hangover. And they’re not entirely wrong.

According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 92,000 riders were injured in crashes in 2014 (the latest year for which data is available). And 4,586 riders were killed. Wearing a helmet helps, but it is no guarantee: 61 percent of those killed were wearing one. Bikers are about 26 times more likely to die in a crash compared with people in cars.

NHTSA also states that riding a motorcycle is 33 times more dangerous than driving a car so it is clearly evident that the pursuit is more dangerous that regular four-wheeled transit. However, we all know it’s more dangerous and don’t need to be reminded by those that don’t ride.

Of course, this danger is what attracts us to riding. It makes us different, daring. We ride with the wind while the rest of the world trudges behind in the morass of its own monotony.

This is a sentiment I agree with entirely. There is a freedom and productivity that harmoniously comes together when riding a motorcycle.

Yet make no mistake: If you ride a motorcycle, you will crash sooner or later. For me, it happened just a few months after I got my license—and on the very same summer day that I bought a shiny new Harley-Davidson Sportster 1200.

By the time the paperwork was done, it was close to five p.m. The dealership was in suburban Portland, Oregon. I had a two-and-a-half-hour ride home to southwestern Washington. I was giddy but I was also tired. I should have had the bike shipped and gotten a lift.

I left the dealership into the snarl of Saturday shopping traffic—a chaos I had never ridden in before. I got nervous. Then I got lost. For a half-hour, I went the wrong direction. I veered onto an uphill highway ramp. The bike began to sputter. I was clearly in the wrong gear. I downshifted but released the clutch lever too quickly. The bike violently lurched and fell to the left. I went with it.

There is no worse sound than helmet hitting pavement. I can still hear it. I didn’t lose consciousness, and by some miracle there were no cars behind me. I managed to get the bike upright and push it off the road. The left front directional had cracked off and the gear shifter was bent to hell. I felt foolish, mortified at the thought of having to call the dealer and say, “Oh, hey, it took me all of 30 minutes to total my brand-new Harley. How ’bout a tow?” But somehow the bike still worked. I took a minute to calm myself then turned around and headed the right way.

Soon it started getting dark. I had never ridden in the dark. There was also a soup of fog as the elevation increased into the coastal mountain range. It was hard to see. And on that stretch of road there were no gas stations.

The Sportster 1200 has a 2.1-gallon peanut tank. It gets 45 miles to the gallon, which would have been enough to get me to the Oregon town of Seaside and a gas station—had I not gotten lost earlier. I ran out of gas with 20 miles to go and wound up having to get towed anyway. I got home seven hours after leaving the dealership.

Still, I was lucky. Lucky not to have been hurt. Lucky not to have hurt anyone else. And lucky to have done something so stupid so early in my riding career. We are bikers. By the very act of riding we are supposed to be fearless. But with that attitude it is easy to confuse hubris with confidence, to think you are the king of the road when really you are a pawn.

That’s what crashing teaches you. That and how you can’t stay scared. I got back on the bike the next day, humbled and ashamed. And a much better rider.