Agree, but if you have a marque in mind you can visit a dealer. They don't charge to walk through the door, or £15 to park and most will make you a cup of coffe while you walk round and chat.
or the V4PP but we always go for the day out and to moan about lack of manufacturers, how expensive it is, how old everyone is and how there will be no one riding bikes in this country in 15 years..........groundhog day.......and i love the day out
I have just come back from the EICMA in Milan. Entered at 10am left at 6pm and still didn't see everything. BMW, KTM and Harley weren't there. No great loss Huge stands, interesting tech stuff and great food and drink.
It is what it is, if you’ve got the money and the time it’s still worth walking around a show with lots of bikes in it but it is a pale shadow of what it once was. I tend to go every second year so it’s an off year for me but there’s usually something to interest and the occasional ‘end of season’ bargain at the stands.
Dealers don’t have next years bikes in the showroom yet. And in some cases are unlikely too until next summer.
Apart from buying gear etc I struggle to see the point (apart from an excuse to go on an Italian booze weekend). If your in the market for a new bike then go to the local dealers when they've got one in, you'll have their full attention, maybe even a demo ready to try out rather than having to mingle with the unclean and the brush off from manufacturer reps who have lost the will to live having spent a week collecting contact details of people who have absolutely no intention of replacing their 1985 CB500 with a £30k Italian bike
You can’t see the point of being in one place and having multiple manufacturers bikes & multiple gear & accessory stands to look at? Well I can but each their own!
as hinted at, the only reason I would go these days is for the unreplaceable experience of having fun with your mates. Rob even took his wife that year.
To be fair the distance to travel to the NEC for you is possibly a 15 minute drive/bus train most other people have to travel much further. .
The actual factual reason was that the bikes were all stuck in Customs, because the V4 was so new they only had a few and there was one coming from Milan, they just hadn't allowed enough time to get through customs while the transitioning post Brexit was sorting itself out. Drinky will get all excited probably, the post is literally meant as a factual answer to the fact that a number of Ducati bikes were late. In general I'd say that the immediacy of the online content and videos has really meant the need to go to the show has reduced, and on top of that, the deals really often aren't much better than you'll get if you try hard online, and you know it's easier to return etc. I've got mates in the trade who work the show each year, hence I bothered to post this, one works for Honda, and one works for a few of the clothing places as a distributor. I ribbed my Honda mate last year because they had the biggest stand and the sexiest thing on there by a country mile was the RC213 road bike launched years back. At least they weren't filling their stand with Touring cars like normal though. It was really good about 6 years ago when they sort of relaunched it, they had H2R's being run up on the dyno and bikes running all over the place, the 500gp suzuki's from memory, that was pretty good.
Maybe this year they should call it the "Motorcycle Parallel Twin Show" seeing as that's basically what every manufacturer is launching? TBF at Silverstone MotoGP there was a bigger Piaggio group trade stand than there has been at the NEC for about 10 years... Maybe that's where they see the value? Especially as a 10x10 metre stand was something like £100k to hire some years back, that's a LOT of boots and gloves to sell.. or showroom bikes you have to have sold to pay for. Oh.. and the bikes, they are real bikes, off the production run, but not VAT/DUTY paid, so they literally go off into a WH in the UK (for the NEC bikes of a specific manufacturer) and they sit there for 10 years until they can be exported and crushed with no excise duty to pay as they can be deamotorised (or whatever it's called in the financial world), which is a shame, and expensive.
Interesting, this might have changed very recently then. Although I wouldn't want to buy a bike and find out it's been a show bike, having seen them getting kicked to shreds with people getting on and off
For sure so it’s either worth it or it isn’t depending on your circumstances but it’s an odd statement to say that it’s not worth it because you can just go to the dealers instead. Anyway like I say each to their own
Thanks to all for the replies. I've been wondering all week if I really should bother going, but today my youngest lad has found he can have a day off work next week so we'll head up to Brum together, possibly Thursday.
Me and my mate are going on Saturday. As our stores is a stones throw away (depending on how far you can throw) we’ll be parking there and walk over. The £15 saving on parking should buy a coffee and a sarnie.
