People in this country have had enough of experts, said a senior politician the other day, one who is, at the time of writing, unusually, still a senior politician.
It’s okay – I’m not going to get political. It just occurs to me that these could be worrying times if he’s right, because I could be considered ‘an expert’, of sorts. Not about international finance or anything, obviously, but on the merits of McVitie’s Jaffa Cakes versus M&S’s version, or on what different cars are like, I can hold my own.
This is because I have – to paraphrase another man off the news – never had a proper job. Most of my working life I’ve spent researching, measuring, driving and testing cars and advising people – perhaps like you, dear reader – where to put their money when it comes to them. There’s little honour in it, because I am but a reviewer. What you might call a rentagob. A critic. A Lidl Chris Harris.
Anyway, as a result of that, I put a reasonable amount of stock into people like me. So I won’t buy a pair of headphones unless What Hi-Fi? has given them five stars. The respective merits of a gas versus induction hob are things I’d deeply research before plumping one way or the other. You can’t know everything about everything, so I like it that there are people out there who know their market equivalent of the things that I know without looking them up: that horsepower and torque are always equal at 5252rpm, or where the bonnet release is on a Ferrari California. So I trust them. I listen to them. I won’t make a decision without them.
Until, that is, I decided that I fancied going on a solo road trip later this year, probably to and around Italy, on a motorbike I don’t yet own.
There are lots of sensible motorcycles for a long trip like that, but the Honda Dominator – a single-cylinder, 650cc ‘dualsport’ (read: ‘off-road’) bike that hasn’t been in production for 16 years – isn’t one of them. It has a short range, its on-road stability and handling are compromised by the fact that it’s a trail bike and the seat is too tall.
There is, then, no sensible justification for choosing a Dominator to travel 2500 miles when there are other bikes that do more than it, better than it and more cheaply than it. It is the motorcycle equivalent, I think, of a Vauxhall Frontera.
At least, that’s what the experts reckon. But I don’t care: I just like them. Now to find a bike, put some boxes on it, make sure it’s mechanically sound and naff off on it. Because experts, eh: what do they know? I suppose we’ll find out.
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The vauxhall frontera was a
Nope - the Bighorn (or
The Frontera was the Isuzu Mu (3 door - Mysterious Utility apparently!) and Isuzu Wizard (5 door).
The main problem wiuth the Frontera was that it was built by truck builders at IBC (isuzu bedford) in Luton, who didn't give a rats ar$e about tolerances, panel gaps, quality control, that kind of thing
TransAlp a far better bet for long distance
Nice bikes, but the short
Very true