Why I Still Ride an Analogue Motorcycle

People keep asking me when I am going to upgrade. They see me arrive on a bike with a single round dial, cable-operated everything and not a single riding mode to its name, and they assume I simply have not got round to buying something better. They are wrong, and I have stopped trying to explain politely. The truth is that after two decades of riding the most sophisticated machines on earth for a living, the bike that brings me the most joy is the one that does the least on my behalf, and I have made my peace with how strange that sounds.

This is not a rant against progress. I have ridden the radar-equipped flagships and marvelled at their competence, and I would recommend them to plenty of riders without hesitation. But somewhere along the way, motorcycling started solving problems I did not have, at the cost of the very thing that drew me to it in the first place. So allow me to defend the analogue motorcycle, not as a museum piece to be admired from a distance, but as a living argument for a purer kind of riding.

The Machine Talks to You

On a simple bike, information reaches you directly, through your hands and your backside rather than through a processor deciding what you are allowed to feel. You sense the front tyre find its grip, hear the engine load up before any tachometer would have told you, feel the rear step out a hair before an electronic net would catch it. Nothing is filtered or interpreted. My Royal Enfield Himalayan does not have lean-sensitive traction control because it does not need it; the conversation between rider and road is uninterrupted, and that dialogue is precisely what makes riding feel like riding rather than supervising a very expensive computer that happens to have wheels.

Fewer Things to Fail

There is a deep, practical serenity in simplicity that the spec-sheet crowd never mentions. A bike with fewer systems has fewer things that can strand you a thousand miles from home, in a place where the nearest dealer is a fantasy. When something does go wrong, I can often fix it at the roadside with the tools in my tank bag and a little patience. Try that with a machine that throws a cryptic error code and refuses to start until a technician plugs in a laptop and pays a subscription. Out where I do most of my riding, far from any dealership, simplicity is not a lifestyle choice or an affectation. It is genuine, hard-nosed freedom.

What Simplicity Gives Back

The rewards of riding analogue are hard to quantify on a dyno, but they are real, and they accumulate on every journey rather than announcing themselves on a spec sheet. Strip away the electronics and you rediscover things the modern bike quietly took from you without ever asking permission, one convenient feature at a time.

• Total engagement, because the bike demands your full attention and gives nothing back for free.
• A tactile connection to the machine that no haptic buzz or beep can imitate.
• The satisfaction of skill earned, rather than borrowed from a control unit.
• Lower running costs, lighter weight and repairs you can understand and often perform yourself.
• Pride of ownership in a machine that will still run long after its software would have expired.

The best rides of my life were not the fastest. They were the ones where it was only ever me, the engine and the road, with nothing in between.— Diego Marroquín, Adventure Correspondent

The Cost of Convenience

Consider what we quietly surrender for all that cleverness. A modern bike depreciates partly because its software ages, its screen looks dated, its connected features stop being supported. Repairs increasingly require proprietary tools and dealer accounts, so the owner is slowly locked out of his own machine. Ride modes multiply until choosing one becomes a chore performed at the lights instead of a decision made with your wrist. None of this makes the bike faster or more enjoyable; it simply makes it more complicated, more expensive to keep, and more dependent on a network of specialists who did not exist when I started riding, and who I would rather not need.

I Am Not Telling You to Follow Me

Let me be fair, because this is an opinion and not a sermon. Modern safety technology saves lives, and I would never argue a nervous newcomer should reject cornering ABS to feel more authentic. If radar cruise gets a tired rider home safely, it has earned every penny it cost. My argument is not that simple bikes are objectively better for everyone; it is that we have quietly forgotten they are a valid choice at all, and that something precious is lost when every machine becomes a rolling computer with a saddle bolted on top of it.

The Skills a Simple Bike Builds

The deepest reason I stay loyal to simple machines is that they make me a better rider, and they never once stop. An analogue bike has no safety net, so it forces you to develop the real thing: a delicate right hand, a genuine feel for available grip, the judgement to read a surface before you commit your weight to it. Every wet roundabout becomes a lesson in throttle control rather than a problem quietly outsourced to a processor. Every gravel-strewn bend teaches you to look further ahead and carry the right speed, rather than trusting an algorithm to gather up the mess afterward. Over the years those lessons compound into instinct, the kind that keeps you upright on any machine, in any conditions, whether it carries electronics or not. I have watched riders who lean heavily on their aids come unstuck the moment they borrow something without them, their fundamental skills quietly atrophied by years of being caught before they could ever fall. The simple bike never lets that happen, because it never catches you in the first place. It is a demanding teacher and an unforgiving one, but the education is permanent, and it transfers to absolutely everything else you will ever throw a leg over. That, far more than nostalgia, is why I keep the throttle cable and politely refuse the upgrade.

So I will keep riding my stubborn, uncomplicated motorcycle, and I will keep smiling at the well-meaning questions about upgrading. When I twist the throttle and feel the whole machine respond as one honest, mechanical thing, I am not missing out on the future. I am holding onto the reason any of us started in the first place. Progress is wonderful, and I am glad it exists. But every so often, it is worth remembering what we were trying to preserve before we improved it out of existence.