If all the maintanence is performed, chances are the guy took care of the bike. I'm not saying worn sprockets means large repair bills, or that it means the bike has been abused. He's looking for things to look for. Bad shocks and struts aren't a major concern on a car either, but you still look for them because it's a sign of how well the car was taken car of, and it's still additional expenses. While a "stunter" may stay off the side of the tire, so do people who ride the bike easy. Having a tire scrubbed all the way over is a pretty good indiction the rider does know how to ride, and they show it every chance they get. That goes right along with riding the bike hard. Not everybody fits in the hard core canyon carver and stunter categories. Plenty fit into the squid and Sunday rider class too.
I would agree. If you're directly attempting to crash a bike, a cruiser isn't as tossable as a sportbike, but you're not going to save either from coming over trying to ride it like a dirt bike. For those who are just riding around, and not intentionally trying to kill themselves, they aren't as hard to "just ride" because the cruiser requires less effort to direct. Kinda like comparing a Ferrari to a Town Car. In some ways the Ferrari is going to be a lot more responsive, and easier to control. The Town Car is still going to take less effort to drive. It's also more comfortable than being cramped up on a little sportbike for a few hundred miles.
From an insurance point of view on a bike, if you drop it, the cost of repairing the bike with the real stuff isn't cheap. Take a bike that books at $3000. By the time the insurance company is through dicking around with you, it's worth $2000 according to them, and you only need $1400 in damage to total it. Lay it down and take out the upper, one side, and tail. Throw in a windshield, headlight, bent rim, tire, a couple covers, and a handlebar. Perhaps thousands is easy to misinterpret. The insurance company wants to total the bike because they know salvage titles don't hurt bike value as much as it would a car. They also know how cheap it truely is to fix them, and a lot of people will buy them high because of that. Basically all I was trying to point out is that nothing really major has to happen to a bike that's a few years old to get totalled. Getting the entire set of plastic can be a bargain compared to buying each individual piece seperate. The insurance company isn't shopping Ebay, or the junkyard. That means when all is said and done, and the body shop comes back with it's estimate, the company will total the bike. That's also partly because the body shop will tack on above the cost from the dealer they get the stuff from. That doesn't mean you can't get some racer plastic, buy some used parts and have your buddy at the body shop hook you up, but as far as the ins co is concerned, the bike will have a salvage title.
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