They’re every inconvenience rolled in to one. A pain to get in. A pain to park. Use heaps of fuel. Don’t fit in garages, and to top it off are expensive AF. I’m confident in saying unless you tow like, horse floats on the regular, if you own one you’re a fucking idiot.
They're not actually that bad on fuel. Don't get me wrong, I'd never own one but a few of our major players at work have them as some sort of status symbol. Cruising in overdrive at 100km/h they can go as low as 6L/100km, but average is around 12L/100km unless you are doing lots of hunting through the gearbox or driving like a dick, then you can see some truly disturbing fuel usage figures.
To put it in perspective, this is on par with a modern hilux, and WORLDS better than the 2022 79 series landcruiser even with all the fuel efficiency gains they made.
To be clear I still don't think anyone should be driving one here - our roads and car parks are simply not built for them. They aren't that great offroad either. Really the only genuine use case is towing an enormous caravan down the hwy, in which case I hate you anyway because that's TWO symbols of you being an inconsiderate prick that doesn't care about anyone else.
They're also way more dangerous. They do more damage if they hit something, and because of the terrible visibility they're more likely to hit something.
That said, if they do hit something, the people inside the tank might be ok.
They are more likely to roll than normal cars (SUVs excluded), and when they roll they're generally more likely to crush the roof due to their weight. So yeah, while they're better off than the car they hit, they're still not amazing safety wise.
For complete fairness to everyone we should tax every vehicle on road or path from scooters and bikes to b-doubles based on the 4th power of axle load to properly account for the impact on road maintenance costs. Then additional levies for disproportionate environmental costs and harm to vulnerable road users. Keep the overall tax amount the same but shift the burden so people with smaller vehicles pay substantially less than they do now. And then add strict liability for anything much larger than a kei car.
Since the amount of damage caused by bikes to infrastructure would be small, the govt could just slap a tax for the cost to the purchase price of every bike. Not saying I'd agree with it but there are ways to make all road users pay their share.