The Honda Gold Wing, lost on a dirt detour in Minnesota.Mark Richardson/The Globe and Mail
I rode and reviewed the $38,000 Honda Gold Wing last year, and you can read the details of it here. This July, my wife and I rode it almost 5,000 kilometres to North Dakota and home again, leaving our home east of Toronto to travel through Detroit and Chicago and up to Minneapolis and over to Fargo, before returning in a loop through Sault Ste.-Marie and Sudbury. Here are six things that stood out for it being the finest touring motorcycle you can experience, and four things that dragged it down.
Riding the Zen route, we find quality everywhere
The windscreen: The Honda’s screen raises and lowers electrically more than 10 centimetres at the touch of a button. At its lowest, it tucks down to be almost unobtrusive while at its highest, it’s probably taller than your line of sight. Most windscreens on motorcycles are not adjustable for height, and if they are, they need you to pull over to reset them. The Wing’s screen, however, can be adjusted on the fly to be exactly where you want it for the road: lower on a country lane, higher on the interstate. Don’t set the top edge above your line of sight and look through it though – that’s too high and you’ll just see a distorted, probably grimy view of the road ahead. That’s not why you ride a motorcycle. There’s even a pop-up deflector to send cool, diffused wind onto your chest on a hot day.
The view from behind the Honda Hold Wing's windscreen, which is adjustable.Mark Richardson/The Globe and Mail
Cruise control: A button and a simple toggle, which immediately takes all the pressure off your throttle wrist. No need for a Cramp Buster wrist-rest, and no concerns about inadvertent speeding. Once the button is pressed to activate the cruise control, your speed can be set and reset with the toggle-touch of your right thumb and the lightest brush of the brake lever. It would be better with an active cruise control setting for maintaining a set distance behind vehicles, like the BMW R18 offers, but this is surely soon to come.
Smooooooth suspension: The front forks are actually an inverted double-wishbone. When they’re combined with the electronic air suspension at the rear, and the whisper-smooth flat-six engine, the sensation is as close to a hovering Star Wars Speeder as you can get. You just don’t feel the bumps, and the suspension can be adjusted for the weight of a passenger and luggage with a touch of a button. There’s enough space on the heated (!) seat for two large people to be comfortable. I once asked a pillion passenger if there was a downside to riding on a Gold Wing; “only when the olive falls out of my martini,” she said.
Optional dual-clutch transmission: You can be a stick-in-the-mud and stay with a manual six-speed transmission, or you can spend another $1,200 to do away with the clutch and enjoy a fully automatic seven-speed transmission with four electronic ride modes to adjust the power and the braking distribution. It can be a little clunky sometimes when downshifting, though you can do this yourself with a thumb-button on the left handlebar. Trust me: you’ll love it when you’re stuck in traffic. I certainly did when we shuffled through a baking, stop-and-go Chicago rush hour.
Open luggage warning: There’s a little LED icon that shows you if the trail trunk or a saddlebag is not properly shut. As a motorcyclist who’s lost more than his fair share of cargo over the years, this is a godsend.
The Honda Gold Wing in North Dakota.Mark Richardson/The Globe and Mail
An airbag: Yes, really – an airbag. It’s an expensive, $2,600 option, but it will stop you and your passenger from flying over the handlebars if there’s a collision. You’ll still be vulnerable, but the added forward protection could be significant. Honda can fit this because what looks to be the gas tank is actually a cowl above the engine; most of the 21 litres of regular gas (burned on our road trip at an average of just 5.2 litres every 100 kilometres) are held low and under the seat, to avoid the top-heavy weight of competitors.
Honda Navigation: The in-house Navigation screen is not constantly updated over the air, which is why the available Apple CarPlay and Android Auto are better choices for directions from your phone. Don’t trust the Honda system. It can be set to avoid toll roads and tunnels, but not dirt roads and detours. I found this out the hard way. The system was set to show the quickest, non-interstate route to an address in Wisconsin and the map guided us along a side road that eventually turned to gravel. It was too far to turn back so we pressed on, and then found ourselves splashing the bike through four different streams that crossed the narrow road, deep enough to cover the wheel rims. The wet stones were slippery but the Navigation system didn’t care. Don’t trust it.
Too complicated: If you ride a motorcycle, you probably enjoy tinkering with it. Simple stuff, like changing the oil or the spark plugs. If you ride a Gold Wing, forget about that right now. It’s way too sophisticated unless you have a shop full of tools and an engineering degree.
The Honda Gold Wing burned regular gas at an average of just 5.2 litres every 100 kilometres on our road trip.Mark Richardson/The Globe and Mail
Idle stop: There’s nothing wrong with the engine shutting off at a stop to save fuel, as so many cars offer. It’s just that on a motorcycle, it feels wrong. You’re barely using any fuel anyway, and it’s disconcerting to sit on a stationary, non-running bike while waiting for traffic to clear in an intersection. The engine restarts instantly with a twist of the throttle, but I could never get used to this and disabled the feature every time.
You’re still on a motorcycle: The big Gold Wing offers all the pleasures of motorcycling: leaning around corners, pulling more powerfully than almost every car and just soaking up the sounds and smells of the open road. But when it’s scorching hot, you can still overheat quickly and there’s no shade from the sun. When it rains, you need rain gear to stay dry. And in a Canadian winter, you have to put the bike away. Even that heated seat is a bad place to be when there’s snow or ice beneath only two wheels. At least you can sit on it and dream of spring.
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