6 odd accessories aimed at motorcyclists
Once, it was the humble fingerless glove or brightly coloured camo pant that left many shaking their head at odd design, but now there are quite a few more…1. The stick-on mohawk
You know the few times in your life you’ve found yourself pointing at something and heard yourself saying, “It’s things like that which gives motorcyclists a bad name”? The fake and brightly coloured mohawk is one of those things. Unless you are Matt Mingay and you can do with a motorcycle the things he can (get well soon, Matt!) and you’ve used said silly mohawk to carve out an identity in the popular world of stunt riding, then you really should consider removing it from your helmet immediately and popping it somewhere indoors where you can gaze at it as much as you please.
2. The love-handle belt
Good for the ticklish types who ride sports bikes, maybe, but unless you’re a multi-time national or world champion taking someone for a spin on something amazing, how must one actually feel pulling on the love-handle belt over his or her smart-looking riding kit? Okay, so it might be very practical in some situations, but it looks silly, if not strangely kinky, and if your passenger isn’t comfortable hanging onto you, the bike, or using their core strength to balance – then perhaps motorcycling isn’t for them after all.
3. Gear-change straps
There are actually two variants on these and they’re both as strange as the other. Strange not because of what they’re trying to achieve, but strange because of what the user is trying to replicate. So one option is a sock-like sleeve that goes over your gear-change lever and the other is a stirrup-type strip that slips over your clean, white and presumably largely inappropriate choice of footwear, designed to keep said inappropriate footwear clean and white.
4. The Bond-like pop-up mechanical speedo
No, really. In this day of free GPS-actuated smartphone apps, Breva has released the uber-expensive Genie 03 watch which, wait for it, features “a patented instant speed scientific measurement mechanism”. So, once you’ve dug around between your jacket and glove and found your watch, you then push a button which makes the speedo pop-up and sit 6mm above the watch face. Then, ensuring your wrist isn’t sitting behind a screen, fairing or mirror, little alloy cups work like an anemometer and measures wind speed (read: your speed) between 20 and 200km/h. So it’s not specifically aimed <i>at<i> riders and it’s actually kind of cool – but the odd bit lies in the price tag, which is somewhere in the vicinity of $75,000.
5. Coloured motorcycle tyres
Thank goodness these didn’t take off. About 10 years ago pictures of strange-looking motorcycles started appearing: Blades with red-coloured tyres, ZX-9Rs with green tyres fitted to purple rims, Husqvarna motards with a yellow front tyre and a blue rear – you get the idea. Luckily, for motorcycling and how it's regarded by the non-riding mainstream, it turned out whatever was added to the recipe of silica and rubber to successfully turn black into an otherwise bright and gaudy colour, wasn’t quite as successful at providing rider confidence and the novelty wore off.
6. The road-hazard scanner
Cos eyes are so overrated on a motorcycle. Okay, so specifically designed for push bikes, the crowd-funded Byxee (get it?) unit scans the road for you and alerts you to upcoming irregularities on the road’s surface, like potholes, pedestrians and even dogs. It does beg the question of whether a rider would need alerting to what’s ahead if, indeed, he or she was spending more time looking at the road and less time watching the scanner so as to not miss alerts of potential dangers. Sure, in most cases it’s an audible alert but, in what could be seen as an admission by the company of its strangeness, it “knows to keep silent” when a rider is riding in a group. And something tells us it’s not all to do with who or what’s ahead.
What else?
There are plenty of other silly and strange accessories out there aimed at (silly and strange) motorcyclists. The fender extender, for example, or maybe the funnel that allows women to wee standing up gets your vote. What’s the strangest thing you’ve bought or seen?
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