CBR125 good for freeway comuting?

Question

I'm looking at buying a new CBR125 to use for getting to and from work. It's 100km round trip. Probably 70km of that is on the freeway with a speed limit of 100km/h. Most people are going 100-110km/h. I was looking at this bike because it will save me $250 a month in fuel over my 4 cylinder car. The bike will pay for itself pretty fast. I thought about bigger bikes, but the feul mileage and more expencive insurance doesn't pay off.

So my questions are, is this bike able to keep up to traffic for 70km of freeway driving? Am I going to blow the bike up holding the throttle wide ofpen for 30 minutes straight on the freeway? And what type fuel mileage will I get holding the throttle wide open all the time? By the way, I'm 6 feet tall and weigh 140 pounds.

A bigger bike will cost too much to run/insure/buy and a scooter is too slow for freeways. This 125 seems like the ideal bike, I just wonder if it will handle what I need it to do.

Answer 1

I don't think so My 1st street bike was a 175 and I was a similar size & mass as you and I wouldn't go on freeways with it because of the effect of being blown all over the road by Semi's.  It was a little better with my Yamaha 2 stroke 350's which weighed around 300 lbs or so, and they certainly had the oomph to more than keep up with traffic but still not what you would consider comfortable for long commutes, (and I would consider 70 km a long commute on a bike).

As long as you aren't using a high strung crotch rocket ; up to a certain point (My W.A.G. would put that point at 500cc or so) you won't lose a huge amount of gas mileage (since fuel consumed is roughly proportional to the work being done, as long as the bike is running at an efficient work load) and most of the work done by a bike is pushing air out of the way, (and bikes have a coefficient of drag that is only slightly better than a barn door, well maybe not quite that good.) I also believe you are on the right track in thinking that a bike that isn't being run flat out for most of its service life will last longer. And just one last thing on my 2 strokes it didn't matter how I drove the bikes, If I putted around on them like I was on my brothers moped I got 35mpg, and if I drove around like I was Kenny Roberts on a TZ750 Gran Prix bike, I got 35 mpg , and I just didn't foul my sparkplugs.