Back in January, we asked you to tell us how many motorcycles you own as part of our ongoing efforts to improve the choice of insurance cover available to Irish riders. Insurance companies can be a conservative bunch, and it is sometimes difficult to get them onside where bikes are concerned. This is partly because the motorcycle insurance market here is relatively small compared to that for cars, and partly because most insurance company executives are non riders and find it difficult to see things from the riders point of view.
Multi-bike cover is a typical example. It’s frequently difficult for someone who has never ridden a motorcycle to understand why any of us who do would want more than one bike. Coming from a culture where one car does everything, the idea of having one bike as a “winter hack” or a “commuter” while the other only sees warm sunshine on the odd weekend is something of an alien concept.
Part of the problem though is that nobody had ever asked the question of just how many bikes we own. There was simply no hard data on the subject beyond the anecdotal evidence that many of us had two, sometimes more.
So we posed the question: “How many motorcycles do you own?”. The criteria were that it had to be road legal, so no competition bikes or track bikes, and you had to be resident in the Republic of Ireland. In total, 657 of you responded. Here’s how the numbers break down:
Survey Results
In percentage terms the numbers look like this;
- One bike – 168 votes – 25.6%
- Two bikes – 240 votes – 36.5%
- Three bikes – 128 votes – 19.5%
- Four bikes – 45 votes – 6.8%
- Five bikes – 27 votes – 4.1%
- Six bikes – 17 votes – 2.6%
- Seven bikes – 9 votes – 1.4%
- Eight bikes – 5 votes – 0.8%
- Nine bikes – 4 votes – 0.6%
- Ten or more bikes – 14 votes – 2.1%
MAG Ireland extends our thanks to everyone who took part. We now have some solid data to substantiate our efforts to improve the choice of insurance available to Irish riders.