Month: July 2020

Does Suzuki Have a Future?

Posted on | by Nick Tasker

With the global economy about to swan-dive into depths not seen for more than a century and many European governments piling on the pressure to speed up the transition to zero-tailpipe-emissions motoring, many are arguing that motorcycling faces an uncertain future. Some manufacturers are well-positioned and making positive steps to prepare for difficult times ahead, but many other old and established brands may well be caught short.

I’ve covered more miles on Suzuki motorcycles than all other brands combined, either owned or borrowed. Both of those I paid for with my own money were workhorses, used for everything from commuting to trackdays to touring, and while masters of no individual discipline they were undoubtedly competent at all of them. But miles travelled don’t translate to profits – quite the opposite, in fact, as those who actually use their bikes as practical daily transport contribute less to manufacturer’s bottom lines than our fair-weather brethren.

After 70 years, is Suzuki’s motorcycle business running out of steam?

We perhaps spend more on tyres, but dealer service schedules and pricing are directly at odds with the penny-pinching mindset of the year-round rider. And while modern motorcycles are more than capable of shouldering six-digit figures on their odometers without exploding, the market is skewed to undervalue well-used examples. PCP doesn’t work when a three-year-old bike already has 30,000-60,000 miles on the clock, and the steep depreciation hit makes regular replacement uneconomical. So we run our bikes until they literally fall apart, maintaining them ourselves to extract the best value-for-money from our investments.

The problem with building a great bike is that there’s no incentive for customers to upgrade.

The result is that brands who specialise in sunny-Sunday toys that get replaced every 18 months with well-padded profit margins have flourished in recent decades, while those making more basic but long-lasting machinery have struggled to maintain, never mind grow, their market share. I find it unlikely that the likes of BMW, Ducati, and KTM deliberately engineer their machines to fall apart after 30,000 miles; I simply suspect they don’t bother to ensure that they don’t. Their marketing departments work hard to engender customer loyalty towards their brands as a whole, not towards the particular bike that they happened to choose this PCP cycle.

Supporting that regular upgrade habit requires that there be significant perceived improvements year after year, so that a three-year-old motorcycle will seem old-hat next to the current version. While top speed, weight, and power figures were once the way to woo buyers with wandering eyes and bulging wallets, these days electronics have to provide the incentive to trade in early. But that kind of technological arms race is expensive, and those without the resources to invest in future product risk falling behind. It’s a vicious cycle – without the fancy tech to tempt owners to upgrade you don’t earn the profits necessary to fund the development of the next wave of marketable bells and whistles.

Goldwings are famous for easily swallowing hundreds of thousands of miles.

Owners love their Bergmans, but not enough bought new ones to justify further updates.

This might not be the end of the world if a given manufacturer could simply continue to sell their existing models to their core customers. But even if those customers weren’t eventually lured away by the promise of newer, better motorcycles, emissions, noise, and safety legislation mean that some degree of ongoing product development is essential. Wait too long and you’ll find you’re no longer allowed to sell some of your bikes, and your product range gets whittled away to nothing. With limited budgets, you have to pick and choose where to spend your research & development funds. And just like a battlefield medic, you sometimes have to let some of your patients die in order to save others.

This is the exact situation that Suzuki seems to find itself in at the moment. When the 2007 financial crisis hit, the Japanese manufacturers battened down the hatches, freezing research & development spending and hoping to ride out the dip. A number of European manufacturers did the opposite, using the time to develop new technology and modernise their entire product range. The result was that, as economies improved and buyers returned to showrooms, they found that there was no reason to replace their 5-year-old Japanese motorcycle – the brand-new models were exactly the same as the ones they already had in their garage. But the likes of BMW had leapt ahead, offering a truly next-generation range of motorcycles, and converting customers in their thousands. The fact that exchange rates meant that European exotica was not dissimilarly priced to more basic Japanese fare merely accelerated this shift.

Yamaha rallied magnificently with their modular 700cc twin-cylinder and 900cc three-cylinder platforms, designed from the ground-up to be fun and affordable for all. Their range was almost completely renewed in just a few years, with the resultant profits providing the necessary funds to keep bikes such as the ageing FJR1300 compliant with government legislation. Honda dragged their heels a bit, reluctant to invest in genuinely new engines and platforms, but also used their NC-series to corner the commuter/courier market at a time when no-one else was even trying to cater to those buyers. What’s more, their small-capacity motorcycles and scooters continued to sell in incredible numbers in markets that would consider a 750cc bike to be grossly oversized.

It’s also worth remembering that motorcycles are just a small part of Honda’s business, the corporation having plenty of capital to invest in long-term product planning. Kawasaki is an even starker example here, with motorcycles representing a mere footnote in a corporate portfolio that includes gigantic cargo ships and military aircraft. They’ve been able to regularly renew and refresh popular bikes such as the Versys 650 and 1000, not to mention the best-selling Ninja 1000SX, providing them with comfortable margins and a loyal customer base.

Yamaha’s bulk sellers earn enough to cover the costs of keeping the FJR alive for now.

But Suzuki has none of these safety nets, and has been struggling to attract new customers for more than a decade now. Their car business folded entirely in the United States and is facing tough competition across Europe in the low-cost segments from the likes of Hyundai and KIA. Their small-capacity bikes remain popular in south-east asia, but profit margins are thin and increased competition from the Chinese manufacturers is eating into their volume. Europe and America used to be the cash cows whose high-margin product paid the research & development bills, but those funds have been drying up for a long time now.

The result is that Suzuki’s product range has stagnated, with key lines being forced to retire due to increasingly-stringent emissions legislation. What little money remains has been spent carefully, one bike at a time, in the hopes of striking gold and kick-starting a sales success that could, in turn, fund further development of their ageing lineup. But time and time again it seems that the upgrades and face-lifts are too little, too late, and always one or two steps behind their competition.

A popular, steady seller, but the money for Euro 5 upgrades just wasn’t there.

The V-Strom 650 remains a steady, if unspectacular seller amongst the practically-minded, which is probably why Suzuki has continued to spend the minimum-necessary funds to refresh the design and stay ahead of emissions legislation. The fully redeveloped V-Strom 1000 launched in 2014 with the fanfare befitting a major brand’s new flagship, but BMW had stolen their thunder with the all-new watercooled and tech-laden R1200GS just one year earlier, and buyers weren’t interested. With PCP the new and exciting way to make expensive bikes affordable, the lacklustre residuals of historically rust-prone Suzukis made their bikes deeply uncompetitive in this strange new financial landscape. It didn’t matter to most people that the retail price was thousands of pounds cheaper; if you were buying on PCP, then BMW offered you a lot more bike for very similar money.

Pivoting towards their traditional cash-cow, the GSXR-1000, may have seemed sensible, and in 2017 we got an all-new litre-class sportsbike with modern electronics and segment-competitive horsepower figures. But this was the first serious effort in over a decade, and those traditional customers had moved on. With the Japanese brand now seen as a budget alternative to the more desirable European offerings, matching the now well-established upstarts on the spec sheet wasn’t enough to bring buyers back in sufficient droves. What’s worse, choosing to pin their hopes on these two big bikes meant that the money necessary to keep the GSX-R 600, GSX-R 750, Hayabusa, Bandit 650/1250, and even the Burgman 650 compliant with the latest round of European emissions regulations simply wasn’t there. Visit a Suzuki dealership today, and the choices are looking very limited indeed.

The 2014 V-Strom 1000 was fantastic, but customers ultimately voted with their wallets.

Which brings us to Suzuki’s latest refresh of their big adventure-tourer in the shape of the new(ish) V-Strom 1050. Suzuki is counting on the styling to do the lion’s share of the work, and it’s certainly succeeding in turning heads amongst the traditional motorcycle press. And if the public show the same interest, Suzuki is hoping that the technology upgrades will carry them the rest of the way to their cheque books. We’ve got cruise control, lean-sensitive ABS & traction-control, not to mention various gimmicks like hill-hold assist. We’ve also got a new LCD dashboard, just in time to be considered out-of-date next to the current crop of big-screen full-colour TFT dashboards the competition are triumphantly displaying. Still, it works, and it’s a pleasant enough bike that does a perfectly adequate job of being a good all-round motorcycle.

But while Suzuki have increased the spec to match their competition in the adventure-touring space, they’ve also upped the price to match, giving up their value card and going toe-to-toe with the likes of Triumph’s new Tiger 900 and Ducati’s Multistrada 950. And as much as I am a fan of Suzuki and their V-Strom line in particular, I don’t think this is a fight they can win. Personally, I’m not sure I trust Ducati’s engines to last 100,000 miles without serious work, and the servicing schedules and costs are clearly not designed with high-mileage riders in mind, but it’s a much more exciting bike to ride. My experiences with modern Triumphs suggest that they can shrug off salty British winters far better than a V-Strom can, but again – servicing costs become prohibitive when used regularly.

I’d like to say that this is an area where the new V-Strom has retained its edge, but dealer rates for both basic oil changes and valve adjustments are equally eye-watering. I’ve historically found that Suzuki’s motorcycles are very easy to service at home, so a competent home mechanic might perhaps choose the Japanese option for this reason alone. But as stated earlier, the people willing to spend £12,000 on a motorcycle and also get their hands dirty maintaining a 20,000-mile-per-year vehicle are a very small and unprofitable minority. Suzuki was hoping to lure in buyers from other brands, but I fear all they’ve actually done is freed up their existing customers to go elsewhere.

The new V-Strom 1050XT looks the part, but underneath it’s a 6-year-old bike. Competition is fiercer than ever, especially at this new, higher price point.

For my part, I’m planning to spend some more quality time with the top-spec V-Strom 1050XT soon. While my short initial ride failed to disappoint in the way that many over-hyped and over-priced alternatives have, it also failed to bowl me over. If my own personal V-Strom 650 exploded tomorrow and I wanted a well-specced replacement, it’s newer, bigger brother would do a fine job of filling those particular boots. But the market for sensible, upright, all-weather do-everything road bikes is now very, very crowded, especially at this price point. I’ve got an appointment to look at both Yamaha’s Tracer 900GT and have my name down for a ride on a Moto-Guzzi V85TT as soon as it’s available. Ducati’s Mulistrada 950 waits in the wings, and BMW are trying hard to tempt me with their new F900XR. And finally, there’s the Tiger 800 XRT that so impressed me last year, and its brand-new 900cc replacement.

If Suzuki can’t keep me as a customer, then who else is left?

Nick Tasker

First published in Slipstream July 2020

Yamaha Tracer 900 GT Review

Posted on | by Nick Tasker

There are a lot of motorcycles that, on paper, look perfect. Ride enough bikes and apply a little critical thinking and you can start to spot the things you like and the things you don’t in each offering. Eventually, you build up a list of the best aspects of each, mentally combining them into one bike that, if it existed, would have no peer. For me, that bike could well be the Yamaha Tracer 900 GT.

Years ago Triumph emailed existing Street Triple owners like myself a survey in an effort to discover what features and technologies we would prefer they focus on for future versions of our bikes. Many of the items they proposed in that survey made it into the current 765cc Street Triples, but one major variant never materialised. I’d always believed that my Street Triple would be perfect with a small half-fairing and hard luggage. Triumph teased that very idea in the survey, but it would appear that more power and gadgets were more interesting to other respondents.

MT-09-derived 850cc triple provides smooth, balanced power across the whole rev range.

Now that platform sharing has become the new normal, bikes like the Tracer series are inevitable. Developing, and crucially homologating a road engine is an expensive business, so manufacturers have joyfully embraced the opportunity to cheaply fill out their product lineup by reusing the same architectures. Take BMW as an example; there are Naked, Sport-Touring, and Adventure motorcycles based on their 1250cc boxer engine and associated running gear. The same is true for their 1000cc inline-four, which can be had in Supersport, Naked, or Adventure- format.

Yamaha’s naked MT-07 and MT-09 motorcycles donated much of their engineering to their Tracer variants, and the 700cc engine has even arrived in Teneré format. But while the Tracer 700 has previously proven itself a worthy adversary for the Suzuki V-Strom 650, the Tracer 900’s 847cc three-cylinder engine means that the bigger bike has the potential to represent that most elusive of concepts: a perfect combination of sporting performance, touring capability, and every-day riding practicality.

Low-slung exhaust hides a modern bulky silencer better than many designs.

First impressions of the GT-variant Tracer 900 are good. Four-piston radial brakes on adjustable upside-down forks? Check. Smart half-fairing with adjustable windshield and standard-fit handguards? Check. Integrated scaffolding-free lockable panniers with optional top box? Check. Cruise control, TFT instruments, LED headlights, reasonably large fuel tank and surprisingly frugal engine? Check. While 200 miles per tank is nothing to write home about in my book, it’s still welcome in a world where manufacturers are increasingly using theoretical incremental gains in fuel economy to justify smaller and smaller fuel tanks. Heck, you even get a centre-stand, something many other bikes don’t even support, never mind fit as standard.

There are, of course, also a few disappointments right off the bat. While the design is, in my eyes, a significant improvement over the ugly original, there are still a lot of untidily routed and exposed cables and hoses. Unlike the V-Strom 1050, the mudguard is too short to do any useful work. And despite this being a top-of-the-range flagship model in 2020, Yamaha still ask you to pay extra for indicators that don’t rely on super-heated wire filaments for illumination.

Some of the plastics seem a little flimsy, some of the decals look a bit cheap, and after experiencing BMW’s beautifully animated and easy-to-use TFT dashboard, Yamaha’s version looks functional at best. Brake hoses are cheap-looking rubber as opposed to braided steel, and the clutch lever is non-adjustable – something I’d expect to find on a 125cc learner bike, not a premium Sports-Tourer. Features aside, the Tracer can’t quite shake its budget-bike roots. This is a problem when the GT model now costs more than £11,000.

Pulling out into traffic, the riding dynamics of the Tracer don’t immediately impress either. When cold, throtte response is decidedly fluffy at lower rev ranges, and experimenting with the three throttle modes only seems to make things worse. Fixed in the lower of its two adjustable positions the seat seems to tip you forward into the tank, and even at its closest position, the brake lever is a bit of a stretch for small hands. The suspension seems fussy, never quite settling itself, as though the forks and swingarm are rubber-mounted to the frame. In reality, it’s likely that double-rate springs have been used in the forks, a common tactic in cheaper mass-produced units.

Handguards look small, but seem to be effective at deflecting wind and rain.

Once out of town and with the engine up to temperature, matters begin to improve. As familiarity with the light and sensitive throttle grows, so does the confidence to exploit more of the vast swathes of usable torque the three-cylinder configuration offers. Seemingly happy at any speed in any gear, choosing a different ratio merely changes how responsive the engine is to your throttle inputs. It sounds fantastic too, a rare feat on a standard exhaust system these days.

TFT dashboard is functional, but is beginning to look long in the tooth.

Front brakes work well, with plenty of power if not necessarily the instant bite I personally prefer, but further into the stroke the forks harden considerably causing the front wheel to chatter along the road surface and robbing you of any confidence during high-speed late-braking manoeuvres. Your mileage may vary along with your bodyweight, but once again we are reminded that motorcycle suspension will always be a one-size-doesn’t-fit-anybody affair. But while as a new owner my first stop would likely once again be MCT Suspension for a complete overhaul, once you start to turn the wick up it’s clear that the underlying chassis is excellent and the bike really starts to shine.

The riding position begins to feel much more Supermoto than Adventure-Tourer; you feel like you are sat much closer to the front wheel than on e.g. a V-Strom. I always believed that larger 19” wheels conferred an advantage on bumpy Northamptonshire B-roads, but Yamaha has clearly demonstrated that they can handle rutted surfaces just fine with the smaller, and therefore more accurate 17” wheel. There’s a sense of playfulness that other, similar bikes simply can’t match, helped of course by the class-leading 214kg wet weight. A modern frame and modern engine mean a 30kg mass advantage over many competitors, and the results are immediately apparent in how quickly the bike gains and loses speed.

It’s also a likely factor in how long the Tracer 900 can make its 18 litre petrol tank last. In mixed riding, the trip            computer reported that I’d managed 56mpg (UK), something that Fuelly.com confirms is a realistic and achievable real-world average. Take it easy, and pushing past 60mpg (UK) should be possible, a remarkable feat for a bike that, in the right gear, can build speed with deceptive and frightening ease. More than once I found my grumbling about brakes or suspension tempered when I glanced at the speedometer and found that I had wildly underestimated my rate of progress.

And you know what, I was having fun. It was hot, muggy, occasionally raining hard, and I was threading an unfamiliar bike along unfamiliar roads, and I was thoroughly enjoying myself. Yes, the stock suspension is far from perfect and would definitely benefit from the significant and expensive attentions of a specialist, but the potential is clearly there for this to be an exceptional multi-purpose motorcycle. And yes, the windshield, even in its highest position, is far too short for me, but ducking down just a little resulted in a bubble of silence with rain streaming off my visor. Clearly, a slightly taller windshield would do the trick, but it’s not something I would be enthusiastic about spending money on given the motorcycle’s stated touring intentions.

Four-pot calipers are fine, but let down somewhat by the front forks under hard braking.

Furthermore, the cruise control refused to engage in 30mph zones, a maddening oversight given the obvious licence-preserving benefit, and the right-side pillion footpeg can catch on your boot if you ride on the balls of your feet.

The minor annoyances continue with unintuitive on-screen menus, and the clickable scroll-wheel on the right-hand control cluster is stiff and awkward to use. Your left boot will catch on the footpeg when trying to lower the sidestand, and the up-only quickshifter is clunky at anything other than high-rev, high-throttle applications. The fuel gauge won’t tell you anything useful until after you have less than half a tank remaining, and activating or adjusting the heated grips can only be done by navigating into a submenu. It’s all a little bit…unrefined. Unfinished. And like Suzuki’s V-Strom 1050XT, at this price point the Tracer 900 GT is picking fights with Triumph Tiger 900s, BMW F900XRs, and Ducati Multistrada 950s – all bikes with more brand cache and decidedly more premium user experience.

Seat is two-position adjustable and both gel and heated alternatives are available.

Of course, buying European carries its own perils, not least of which are the cost and frequency of servicing. With valve clearance checks not due until 24,000 miles, the Tracer 900 costs just 6p per mile to maintain, and Yamaha regularly tops the reliability surveys that the likes of BMW and KTM sink to the bottom of. The Tracer is also noticeably lighter than anything in its class, a side benefit, perhaps, of dispensing with any off-road pretensions.

Windshield is adjustable while riding and well designed, but about 10cm too short.

Quickshifter only works going up the gears and is awfully exposed in this application.

As such, the Tracer 900 GT definitely makes my shortlist, in a way that I’m not sure the heavier, more expensive, and less exciting V-Strom 1050XT does. I’m still going to be sampling more of the competition first and may yet be swayed by the Moto-Guzzi V85’s charismatic air-cooled engine and shaft drive, or Triumph’s genuinely impressive build quality and uniquely-configured three-cylinder engine. As always, I’ll have to weigh up the pros and cons and may still decide that the Tracer 900 GT is the best choice for me, even with all its minor faults. So I can only recommend that you do the same and make up your own mind before handing over your credit card.

Nick Tasker

First published in Slipstream July 2020

Science of Being Seen – Part 6

Posted on | by Salli Griffith

Looked but FAILED TO SEE!

Last time out I began explaining how in around one-third of all collisions, the bike was in a place the driver could have seen it but for some reason FAILED TO SEE the machine – a ‘detection error’ where the driver looked in the right place, but failed to identify the presence of a motorcycle in the moments before making his manoeuvre.

We need to look beyond ‘not looking properly’ as an explanation. Human visual perception isn’t ‘camera-perfect’ and it’s not true to say that “if it’s visible, and if you look hard enough, you’ll see it.”

Any illusionist or soldier knows that.

Motion camouflage

In the last article, I mentioned that we have some ability to detect light / dark contrast as well as sudden bright stimuli and movement in peripheral vision. Anything that gets our attention is called an ‘attractant’ because it automatically results in our eyes moving to focus on whatever caught our attention – and at that point (and not before) it pops into our consciousness. That’s when we ‘see’ the object.

The problem is that it’s LATERAL movement that we are sensitive to – that is, ACROSS the background.

Movement directly TOWARDS the viewer is much more difficult to pick up. It’s well-known – I was aware of the issue from my science degrees – that hunting animals stalking prey will approach along a line that keeps them motionless relative to the background from the perspective of the prey animal. If the prey animal moves, the hunter subtly adjusts their own path so that they stay on the same relative bearing. This is how big cats and dragonflies operate, and they are exploiting the phenomenon known as ‘motion camouflage’. The only clue to movement is that the apparent size of the hunting animal increases as it gets closer, but it can get remarkably close before it gets so ‘big’ that it suddenly dominates the background. At that point, the hunting animal is finally detected – this phenomenon is known as ‘looming’.

Think about the typical motion of a motorcycle, riding along a straight road and approaching a stationary driver waiting to turn at a junction – the most common collision of all. It cannot be seen moving across the background.

With no lateral movement, we are also motion camouflaged.

And now there’s a significant risk that a driver will fail to detect our approach until we’re right on top of him / her when we ‘loom’ into view by filling the background.

You can check this out for yourself on YouTube. Watch this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iOoiEbtf2w

(PS – keep the volume down if necessary – there are some expletives!)

Even though we can hear the Spitfire’s engine, we cannot see it against the background for two reasons:

:: our eyes are focused on the presenter, so the plane is initially in peripheral vision

:: even when the camera shifts, giving us a hint where to look, there is no lateral movement to help us detect the plane – it’s motion-camouflaged.

It is not until the plane is almost on top of us that we see it –  a Spitfire is a LOT bigger than a motorcycle.

Saccadic masking

Here’s another issue. When we’re scanning left and right, we need to shift our eyes. But there’s a problem. This movement of the background is known to cause disorientation and dizziness.

So as we scan across a scene, we don’t move our gaze smoothly across the background although that’s what most of us think happens, and what most books on riding and driving imply we should be doing.

Our eyes don’t behave like a movie camera panning across the scene but work in a completely different way, much more like a still camera taking a series of snapshots of different parts of the view. Our eyes move in a series of jerks, pausing on one particular area – a ‘fixation’ – before moving very rapidly to the next. Then they move on again… and again… and so on.

The movements between the fixations are called saccades but unbeknownst to us, the brain ceases to process retinal images during these saccades. This is known as ‘saccadic masking’ or ‘saccadic suppression’.

Once again, this phenomenon has been known about for a very long time. It’s even exploited by dancers during fast turns – the dancer turns the body but ‘spots’ on a fixed location, then turns the head faster to catch up. Saccadic masking kicks in as the background blurs through the vision, helping maintain balance and prevent dizziness.

And now you can see why when we look left and right saccadic masking shuts down the visual processing system as our eyes move. Rather than ‘scanning’ right through the visual scene as we think we do (and as we’re told we should), it’s only where the eyes stop on an object of interest, in a stationary fixation (remember that from last time?) that we get a visual ‘snapshot’ that the brain can actually process. So rather than a ‘movie’, we get that series of snapshots interspersed by blank gaps.

But – just like the dancers – we are unaware of the shut-down and believe we have searched the entire scene because the brain synthesizes the missing visual data to give the impression of a continuous scan. Only if we are ALREADY tracking a moving object are we able to follow it without saccades.

Saccadic masking isn’t ‘carelessness’ or ‘failing to look properly’, it’s a fundamental limitation of – and a visual illusion created by – the human visual system.

There’s a second, but interlinked problem. As humans we learn. It’s a fundamental part of being human. And our learning often involves discovering shorter, quicker and most importantly, less energy-intense ways of doing something. At junctions, we’re always told to “look for vehicles” before turning. But it turns out to be an ineffective strategy, because if we look for vehicles, all we see are vehicles…

…and what we actually need if we’re to make the turning manoeuvre is empty space between those vehicles. So we discover very quickly – perhaps within half an hour of beginning to drive – that what we need to spot GAPS.

Now, remember the issues I mentioned last time – the narrow foveal vision cone, and the depth of field. There’s not just the possibility that a driver will look BEYOND the motorcycle, but a real risk that in turning the head to look both ways, the bike will be ‘blanked out’ by a saccade.

It’s worth pointing out that exactly the same issue can happen to bikers. There’s some evidence from countries with a lot of powered two-wheelers that suggests riders pull out in front of other bikes equally as often as drivers! So an attentive driver – or motorcyclist – can look both ways and yet fail to see an approaching vehicle.

How can we overcome this problem? Slowing down the head-turn doesn’t eliminate fixations and saccades but it does narrow the blank gaps and offer a better chance of a fixation landing the eyes on the bike.

 

Kevin Williams / Survival Skills Rider Training www.survivalskills.co.uk

(c) K Williams 2020

The Science Of Being Seen – the book of the presentation £9.99 plus P&P and available now from: www.lulu.com

The ‘Science Of Being Seen’ is a presentation created in 2011 for Kent Fire and Rescue’s ‘Biker Down’ course by Kevin Williams. Biker Down is now offered by over half the nation’s FRSs as well as the UK military, and many deliver a version of SOBS. Kevin personally presents SOBS once a month for KFRS in Rochester. He toured New Zealand in February 2018 delivering SOBS on the nationwide Shiny Side Up Tour 2018 on behalf of the New Zealand Department of Transport.

Find out more here: https://scienceofbeingseen/wordpress.com

From The Chair! (July 2020)

Posted on | by Andy Slater

What does the ‘New Normal’ look like as lockdown restrictions are relaxed? Well, as a biker you’d think our PPE means we’re already pretty well protected. What virus can fly at 70mph to catch you then penetrate a full face helmet with visor, gloves and leathers? However, I guess it’s the same old story, it’s the stopping which can hurt.

The new rules mean we can now have lots of social runs with up to six riders present – that’s people not bikes, so a bike with a pillion counts as two. Of course if two households get together there could be more on a run but I don’t know of many households with three bikers in them – mind you their garage would be interesting….

So we can do Observed Rides, with a Trainee Observer involved too, as that only makes three. Cafe’s now being open means we can start to frequent the stopping places we all know and love, which is when the ‘new normal’ catches up with us. Social distancing still applies. 1m Plus really means 2m if possible, so maybe stay outside to drink the coffee and anyway as an Associate you don’t want your debrief in front of an audience listening-in as the music has now been turned down low.

When at the petrol station keep your gloves on when using the pumps. If you haven’t tried the payment Apps that Shell, BP, and others have launched, now might be a good time to try them. It means you don’t have to go in to pay, wait in a queue behind someone who has also done their weekly shop, be tempted by chocolate bars, to then shout loudly at the grumpy man behind the plastic screen who’s operating the till whilst you still have your earplugs in and helmet on. You can just ride off knowing the payment has been authorised by those little men in the Cloud.

As we can’t, as yet, hold a St Crispin’s with 200+ bikers present, or run any of our courses it means most of the social activities of the Club are being organised by local teams. This is a real opportunity for you to get involved with your local team if you haven’t already. Apply to join any of the local team’s groups.io areas to find out what’s being organised.

With social runs being much smaller it might be more the size of group you’re happier riding with. Most of the social runs are using the Buddy System to keep the run together so the complexity of the Marker System isn’t there if you were at all concerned about being ‘dropped’ as a marker and sending everyone the wrong way – much to the annoyance of the Back Marker. There are many anecdotes of runs being ‘fragmented’ (substitute a stronger word of your choice) by a well-meaning marker. All that disappears with the Buddy System, though I guess someone will still get it wrong by forgetting to wait until the next rider is in view at some junction….

Hotels are starting to open and even the possibility of going onto the continent, which means that bike tours with a couple of mates might be on after all. Fire up the Sat Nav…..

Observers will know that for Father’s Day this year we ran a special offer of a Free Observed Ride with TVAM for anyone who applied. With St Crispin’s not being held for several months we were keen to raise the Club’s profile and possibly recruit some new members along the way. The offer was pushed out on social media and we had 13 riders apply. The nominated Observers are in the process of arranging the rides and so far around half are joining up. Added to the steady flow of people who are joining via the website, we’ve gained over 20 new members in June, with a week still to go.

So there’s lots going on in the Club even if you may have to look a bit deeper at the moment to find it. But most importantly, stay safe and I hope to see you all soon.

Andy Slater
Chairman

Science of Being Seen – Part 5

Posted on | by Salli Griffith

Looked but FAILED TO SEE!

The most common collision between a motorcycle and another vehicle happens at a junction, when the other vehicle (usually a car) turns across the motorcyclist’s path. It accounts for the majority of crashes in an urban area but is also a relatively common crash on a rural road too.

I’ve already mentioned that a significant proportion of these crashes happen when the driver COULD NOT see the bike in the run-up to the crash – the motorcycle might have been hidden by other vehicles, pedestrians or roadside furniture, or concealed by the driver’s own vehicle.

But in around one-third of all collisions, the bike was in a place the driver could have seen it, but for some reason FAILED TO SEE the machine. This is a ‘detection errors’ – ie, the driver looked in the right place, but for some reason failed to identify the presence of a motorcycle in the moments before making his manoeuvre.

Road safety has always treated this as ‘not looking properly’. This ‘fault’ of the driver is nearly always presented as a simple ‘common-sense’ truth, as in “if it’s visible, and if you look hard enough, you’ll see it.”

Sadly that’s simply not true, as any stage illusionist or camouflaged soldier knows.

Illusionists and camouflage both exploit human visual perception limitations, so if we’re to understand why drivers might fail to spot a motorcycle that should be in clear sight, we need to understand a little about how the human eye works with the brain to present a representation of the outside world into our conscious mind.

The starting point is to understand that the human eyes and brain are not the equivalent of a camera and film (or digital sensor). If you plonk a bike in front of a camera, the bike is what the camera sees. But if you put a human in front of the same scene there are a number of reasons that something in plain view can go missing.

So if we’re to understand just how invisible we can be whilst on two wheels, we need to look for a genuine understanding of visual perception, not just resort to the tired old blame-game approach by saying “the driver didn’t look properly”. I’ll start by looking at two human visual perception issues, before finishing off this investigation in the next article.

Narrow foveal zone and peripheral blindness

Hold your arm straight out, clench your fist and give a ‘thumbs-up’. Look at your thumb nail. Now shift the focus of your attention to the top knuckle instead. Your eyes just moved. Although your thumb nail is only a couple of centimetres below your thumbnail, your eyes had to shift FOCUS because the cone of clear, focused colour vision – the foveal zone – is just a couple of degrees of visual angle deep.

Turn your thumb on its side and repeat. Your eyes moved again.

We have to move our eyes because only a tiny patch of the retina – known as the fovea – that actually transmits a sharp camera-like image to the brain and, to see a particular object in detail, we need to line up the fovea to the ‘fixation point’. The zone where we have this ‘foveal’ clear vision is also just a couple of degrees of visual angle wide.

Although the retinas of both eyes combine to give us visual coverage which extends slightly more than 180 degrees left-to-right, outside of the fovea, that light falls on a part of the retina with a very different construction. This ‘peripheral vision’ becomes increasingly blurry and lacking detail, and colour vision fades increasingly to black-and-white the further we move away from the fovea.

Why this limitation? There’s a simple answer – transmitting ALL the visual data that falls on the retina to the brain at the same high fidelity as the fovea would require an optic nerve bigger than the eye – there simply isn’t the capacity to carry, let alone process, the data.

Interestingly, designers of high definition Virtual Reality goggles have hit much the same problem. To get a high pixel density – and thus high realism imagery – across the entire goggle would require more computing power than any domestic computer or phone can deliver. So they are trying to exploit this phenomenon by increasing pixel density ONLY where the user is looking. The screen therefore provides increased resolution where necessary and where the eye can USE it, rather than attempting to display it across the entire screen and frying the processor.

But here’s the remarkable thing. We don’t notice that because the brain creates an illusion. It’s so good that few of us ever notice, but it’s there. The phenomenon has been known to visual science for centuries – it’s attributed to Leonardo da Vinci.

Given the tiny coverage of the fovea, the vast majority of the incoming visual data falls into peripheral vision. Just 20 degrees off the line-of-sight, our clarity of vision (or ‘visual acuity’) is about one tenth of that of the fovea.

Nevertheless, we do have some ability to detect light / dark contrast in peripheral vision, but we’re much more likely to detect sudden bright stimuli and movement.

But once we do, we automatically turn our head to bring the attractant into our line-of-sight so we can examine it with the fovea’s high-resolution vision – this is called a fixation.

Depth of field

Just like a camera, the human eye has a depth-of-field. If we focus on something close to us, everything in the background is out of focus. And vice-versa – if we’re focused on a background object, those closer up tend to blur. Combine depth-of-field with the narrow cone of foveal vision and not only does this have consequences in terms of detecting / not detecting other vehicles in peripheral vision, it also leads me to question the concept of ‘eye contact’ that’s so frequently proposed in the motorcycle safety literature. It seems a doubtful concept at best. Anecdotally, I have heard (and I’m sure you have too) motorcyclists say many times:

“I had eye contact with the driver and he/she still pulled out.”

I’d suggest this is the explanation; that although the driver appears to be looking at us, his actual visual fixation is behind us, and our machine is actually in his peripheral vision. I think that the best we can say is that if the driver is looking our way, we MIGHT have been seen, but it would be wise to assume the driver hasn’t spotted us.

So here’s this month’s takeaway. Never forget that the eye is not a camera, and no two people see the same scene in the same way. And if there’s one vehicle that’s likely to go missing when drivers search the road environment, it’s a motorcycle.

Don’t assume you’ve been seen… EVER.

…to be continued

 

Kevin Williams / Survival Skills Rider Training www.survivalskills.co.uk

(c) K Williams 2020

The Science Of Being Seen – the book of the presentation £9.99 plus P&P and available now from: www.lulu.com

The ‘Science Of Being Seen’ is a presentation created in 2011 for Kent Fire and Rescue’s ‘Biker Down’ course by Kevin Williams. Biker Down is now offered by over half the nation’s FRSs as well as the UK military, and many deliver a version of SOBS. Kevin personally presents SOBS once a month for KFRS in Rochester. He toured New Zealand in February 2018 delivering SOBS on the nationwide Shiny Side Up Tour 2018 on behalf of the New Zealand Department of Transport.

Find out more here: https://scienceofbeingseen/wordpress.com