Yamaha, Suzuki and Honda make great bikes.  I would own any of them, but as far as automatic motorcycles.  They are all the same.  This post has nothing to do with any manufacturer.

But my opinion on the automatic bike?  Not much. The benefits of an automatic motorcycle are that you do not have to shift.
I am living in Vietnam and everybody drives automatics or what I call semi automatic motorcycles. I thought they were pretty neat until my wife crashed one.

The benefits of the automatic motorcycle are:

• no shifting
• no clutch
• your feet have nothing to do, but hold you up when you are at a stop light.
• Your left hand will not get sore and tired from using the clutch in traffic.

That is it.

What do you lose with an automatic?
You lose a lot of control of the bike.
First, instead of a clutch on the left hand you have a rear brake.
You lose the clutch.
There is also no kill switch.
You also lose power when you are driving from a stand still.

The rear brake on a vehicle only give you about ten percent of your stopping ability compared you your front brake.

Let me describe to you my wife’s crash scenario.

She was sitting still waiting to park next to me. The curb was steep. Since the curb provided a lot of resistance she had to give quite a bit of throttle to get the bike moving up the curb. When the automatic transmission did finally engage, she took off like a rocket. Her first instinct was to hold on tight and she grabbed onto the rear brake as hard as she could. The engine was way more powerful than the rear brake so the bike kept going. Had that been the clutch she would have disengaged engine and the bike would have not gone anywhere. If she had had a clutch the bike would not have crashed.

There is no kill switch on the bike. I don’t think that this feature would have kept here from crashing, but it is a good feature that is not on an automatic motorcycle.

The clutch, the throttle and the rear brake provide a lot of fine adjustment to your speed and balance when turning. The ability to control your bike is greatly minimized in my opinion to almost nothing when turning. The only control I have is using my rear brake and using my throttle when making tight slow turns.

So… don’t buy and automatic motorcycle?  Maybe it’s a little harsh.. I don’t mind the automatic bikes,  I just think that they are more dangerous to drive that a regular bike.