Gas tanks are too small.... or are they?

Great things are done by a series of small things brought together. Welcome to the Throttle and Roast podcast. I'm your host, Niels Meersschaert. In today's episode, I'll look at something that every keyboard warrior revels in complaining about with motorcycles, tank capacity. I'll look at what capacity actually exists on bikes today and explore some reasons why manufacturers might choose to have smaller tanks. I'll also look at how economy combined with capacity might change the equation. I'll share several examples of real world range and look at how this might affect riders. so I'm going to give a little bit of context of where I'm going to focus my attention for this episode. I'm not going to be covering dirt bikes. Now dirt bikes in general have very small tanks, both to keep the weight down and because they don't tend to cover a lot of distance. They're riding in a local area for a relatively small period of time. And they're not trying travel hundreds of miles in a given day. So the tank capacity is a little bit less of an issue for a dirt bike than it would be for a street motorcycle. So I'm going to really focus on street motorcycles for this episode. So I want to look at where we are in terms of the extremes, because I often see all these various posts, especially on social media, the various Facebook, the Instagram, all these posts where people will complain about the newest bike and say, Oh, good bike, but the tank's too small. And And really, we have to kind of level set of what we're looking at. So I looked and did a bit of research, and I found that of bikes that are still available today, the smallest motorcycle that's available, and again, this is looking mostly from a US perspective. So it may be different in your local market, but the smallest tank that's available on the market today is with the Honda Grom, and this is a 1.6 gallon tank. Now, these are US gallons, just to keep in mind. And the largest tank on the market today is the BMW R1300 GS Adventure, which has 7.9 gallons. So we're really looking at a spread between this 1.6 gallons and 7.9 gallons. It's not really that big of a window that we're looking at here. But really, we're talking about it's about a six-gallon spread between the smallest and the largest tank on the market today. Now, these bikes are really presenting the extremes, if you will, on the market today. And many riders are really complaining about the bikes that they see as being too small. And they're usually bikes that are fitting somewhere between these two models. They're not saying, oh, we just got a brand new huge cruiser and it's got a two-gallon tank. That's not really what they're complaining about. are really somewhere in the middle of this range. perspective, they feel that that is too small. So why do manufacturers produce these motorcycles with tanks that are making people react as though they are too small? Well, it really comes down to, I'd say, that there's two major factors that are defining why a manufacturer might choose to equip a motorcycle with this small tank. The first one is aesthetics. Now, Now, unlike a lot of other vehicles where they're really more of an appliance, we're just looking at them to get us around in the most efficient way possible. We don't necessarily do that with motorcycles. We're really looking at the way the bike looks. And that's a large bit of what attracts us to that particular motorcycle. And when you have a larger tank, it does affect the view of what that motorcycle looks like. If we go to that GSA, which is the largest tank on the market today, it physically looks much more massive than the base GS model. It's the same bike underneath, exactly the same bike. The only difference is fundamentally it's the tank that's going to be causing a major difference. And visually, you see this, it just looks enormous compared to a regular GS. Now, the other thing when you think of how enormous it is, is just that visually, the tank is taking up a lot of the space And remember, as the bike's tank gets larger, the bike will have to either be taller or wider or even both in some cases, like in that BMW GSA. And people often focus on what a bike looks like. So manufacturers are trying to balance the appearance with having a practical bike that will actually allow you to travel some reasonable distance with it. Now, the second big thing that's going to affect manufacturers and why they may choose to have a bike that has a smaller tank is weight. Now, we talked about these tanks where the larger the tank, the bike will tend to be taller and potentially wider. The other thing is that the tank tends to be fairly high up. On most bikes, the tank is higher than the seat. And the only thing that's higher generally than the tank is pretty much the handlebars. And maybe you might have a little bit of, your cockpit area, which is where you may have your instrument cluster. That's the only thing typically that might be a little bit higher than the tank on most bikes. But in general, it's really visually one of the highest parts of the bike. And having that weight up high can affect how your low-speed handling is. As you're going really slow, That weight is going to then be very easy that once it gets a little bit off of center, make it much easier for the bike to want to fall down. And especially if you're a newer rider, this can make it more difficult to handle that bike. Now, the other thing that you think about is that this weight of the large capacity is also affecting itself, not just because you have a visually larger tank itself, but there's also the fuel that you are containing inside of it. Now, most gasoline weighs about six pounds per gallon. This is U. S. gallons. So the R-1300 GSA, the bike has nearly 50 pounds of fuel when it's fully filled up. Now, as bikes have needed to add in things like ABS or electronics that modern riders really seem to desire, things like ride modes and a TFT display and integration for audio equipment. All of these are adding weight to the bike, and if you're going to have those and still maintain the weight of the bike, what it had been in earlier iterations, something's got to come. And usually the fuel tank is one of the easiest ways to shrink some of that weight. So now we understand why manufacturers might choose to include a smaller tank than perhaps you might wish that bike had come with. But the thing is that the fuel capacity isn't the only thing that tells the story here. There's also fuel economy. And when we look at the fuel economy combined with that fuel capacity, this is really what determines range. And when people complain about fuel capacity, it's usually what they're thinking of is this bit of range anxiety. They're worried that they won't have enough range for that motorcycle to allow them to travel in the realm of what they're interested in doing. But if you don't understand what the fuel economy of the motorcycle is combined with the fuel capacity, and you just look at the fuel capacity, it's not telling you the full story. So let's look at the two extremes that we discussed. So we've got the Honda Grom is the current motorcycle on the market with the smallest tank. if you think of the purpose of what the Honda Grom is really intended for, it's a fairly small capacity bike. It is not meant to be riding cross continent. It is really meant for urban travel. It's a small 125cc engine, but it's very, very frugal. In fact, it can return as much as 160 miles per gallon, according to Honda. Now I like to use a tool called Fuelly and I'll put a link to this into the show notes. But what's cool with Fuelly is Fuelly actually records every tank that you fill up on your vehicles and then allows you to research those vehicles and see, well, what's everybody else getting on this specific model, be it of a car or a motorcycle, et cetera. They've got a huge amount of data that is actually presented by real world riders. So when I look at the Honda Grom, I find that on average, the real world fuel economy is about 125 miles per gallon, not the 160. And if you think of it, it's probably that a lot of the riders are maybe a little more aggressive on the throttle. And therefore that's not going to be quite as frugal. no matter what, even if we think of that real world use all the way up to what Honda claims, a Honda Grom, even with that small 1.6 gallon tank will get about 200 to 250 miles of range in real world usage. Now, if you go on the other extreme with the BMW R1300 GSA, this is expected to get somewhere between 48 and 50 miles per gallon, according to BMW. Now, of course, how heavy you are on the throttle can have an impact. And of course, looking at Fuelly, we can see that there are a little different numbers that people are actually achieving. sample, but of those riders who are using it, they're getting on average about 40 to 44 miles per gallon. So given that an R1300 GSA is a real world range is about 315 to 395 miles. So not much more than what you got on the Honda Grom. You're looking at it's about 100 miles more range to 150 miles more range than you got from the Honda Grom, which is the absolutely smallest tank. This is not as big of a difference as we might think just looking at the raw tank capacity. And all this boils down to is that range is the real question. And when a lot of people are complaining about these small tanks, they're really oftentimes looking at bikes that are really middleweight bikes. The thing with middleweight bikes is that they are really there to offer an alternative to the ever-growing capacity of engine capacity that we've been seeing in a lot of bigger motorcycles today. And by offering something that's kind of a little bit smaller engine capacity, we get a bike that is lighter, easier to manage, and oftentimes has better fuel economy because it's a smaller capacity engine. And so when you have a smaller tank on these bikes that are a smaller capacity, it may not be as big of a deal, especially if you're maybe comparing this to a 20-year-old bike that gets 10 miles a gallon less than the current model. and you might rightfully complain about the tank being smaller. But the real thing is if it's getting 10 miles a gallon, more fuel economy, the range may not be as big of a difference as you might think. So let's look at a few personal examples. Now, as I mentioned earlier, I've been using Fuelly to track every tank on every vehicle I've owned since 2011. So I have a lot of personal experience with what my real-world fuel economy has been over this 15 years roughly that I've been tracking this. So I'll look at a few of the different bikes that I've been tracking on there. So the one that I have that is the smallest capacity tank that I have in the fleet is a Vespa GTS 300. Now, this has a tank that is just 2.2 gallons, but but I've actually achieved an average over many years of owning this bike of 67.6 miles per gallon. this is over roughly 8,000 miles that I've been riding this bike. And this gives me nearly 150 miles of range. Now the reality is that in my use case, most of this is to run errands into town. So 90% of my trips are less than 15 miles round trip. having 150 miles of range doesn't have any impact on me whatsoever. I can do many, many, many trips before I even have to worry about refilling the tank. So that 2.2 gallon really doesn't matter because it's combined with a very high fuel economy. Now, it's not as good as the Grom of course, but still for real world use of what I'm using the bike for it's absolutely fine. Now I have had GSAs in the past. In fact, I had a 2012 BMW R 1200 GSA, which actually had a larger tank than the current R 1300 GSA did. Now that bike actually had 8.7 gallons of fuel capacity. It's a really enormous tank. When people look at the new bike and they say, "yeah, but it's smaller," it's true, it is a smaller capacity tank. But they also had added in all the water cooling. This was adding a lot more weight onto the bike that gave them more power. They had to figure out a way in order to not be massively growing in weight. And that's why they had a smaller tank. Now over 30,000 miles that I had that bike, I only averaged 39 miles per gallon. This gives me a range of about 340 miles on that bike. So if we compare my older GSA to even the current one, even though the tank is smaller on the current generation, the range that you'd get is roughly equivalent because you're getting better fuel economy on the newer bike. Now across all of the bikes that I've had, the bike that had the absolutely worst fuel economy bike. And this was a BMW S1000R Now this bike only had a 4.6 gallon tank. and I averaged 36.7 miles per gallon over more than 16,000 miles that I tracked on that bike. This gives me a range of just under 170 miles. So it is just a little bit more than what I got with the Vespa, but you know, still something that is not necessarily just for running into and out of town. but again, we have to get back to what is the intended use case for the motorcycle. This is a sport bike. I'm not usually doing cross-continent runs with it. So the fact is you're going to want to stop more often on a sport bike because it's not the most comfortable bike under the sun. So having that range of only 170 miles doesn't really matter in the real world. I'm going to want to get off of that bike far before that 170 miles of range has even been used up. Now listeners will know that I traded in that R1200 GSA for a more off-road friendly bike, getting the F900GS last year. Now it has a much smaller tank. I went from 8.7 gallons to just 3.8 gallons, losing more than half of my capacity. But this is the big difference. My economy jumped from 39 miles a gallon to 49 miles per gallon that I've actually tracked real-world use on my F900GS over the past year since I've owned it. This is a much smaller motor. It's a 900cc versus a 1200cc engine. And it's a more modern motor where they've been able to make effectively improved economy that you're going to get out of the bike. So this still gives me a really good range. I have about 185 miles of range to matter? Yes, I have less range. I'm not going to do the 340 miles of range that I could do with my R1200 GSA. But in real world, I never did that. I would want to break long before I got to that 340 miles of range. So it doesn't really realistically matter. Now I do want to talk about a couple of other examples, because of course in the bikes that I've just described to you, I've covered scooters, I've covered sport bikes, I've covered adventure bikes, both a full size and a mid-sized. But if we look at cruisers, which is a really popular form of bikes here in the US, these are going to be a little bit different. Now I personally own a BMW R18 Classic, and this bike has 4.2 gallons of capacity. And a lot of people have complained about this tank saying, it's too small. It's way too small of a tank. But here's the thing, I mostly ride backroads with that bike. And I ride it in a, shall we say, spirited manner. I'm not just chugging along on the highway and just, you know, maintaining traffic speed. I'm really aggressively kind of getting on and off of throttle rather regularly. And even with that, I've still gotten an average of 45 miles per gallon over, what, more than 15,000 miles that I've had on that particular bike. And this gives me a real world range to empty of 190 miles, essentially exactly the same as I get with my F900GS. It's a slightly larger tank, but slightly less fuel economy. Still works out to be about the same range within five miles of range. So it doesn't really matter. Now, if we look at one of the more popular bikes that's here in the US, this is something that a lot of riders, that's there for the real ride. partners who may want to go on these extended trips and longer distance travels with, and have the full accompaniment of a fairing, lots of bags already mounted onto it. You can look at the Harley Road Now this bike has six gallons of fuel capacity, and they claim about 44 miles per gallon of fuel economy. Now, Now, this bike is really good for a lot of US style riding. We have these really long stretches of highways that are relatively straight. And especially as you head further out west. And these are really made for cruisers. Now this Harley Road Glide, they claim 44 miles a gallon. But when I look at Fuelly, I see that most riders are getting somewhere between 40 and 44 miles per gallon. So a little bit less than what they claim. And this is not an unusual situation. Most manufacturers will claim a much higher fuel economy than you get in real world, which is why I like to use Fuelly and see real world numbers. So this gives a range for that Harley Road Glide of about 240 to 265ish miles. it is definitely more than what I get on my R18, but not massively so because it's not getting quite as good fuel economy as I get on my bike. So you may hear some of these numbers and say, yeah, that's all well and good. And maybe that works for you. How do you think about it? Thank you. But I need more range. And I hear this many times from riders, and I get it. But let's just say that your destination for today is 250 miles from your start, which is a pretty common thing that choose to do as they're going on an extended trip. They might say, hey, 250 miles a day, that's a reasonable amount of distance to travel in a given day. Now very few bikes that are on the market today would make that range without having to stop and refuel. And you usually don't want to run the tank fully empty anyway, as the fuel pump is often cooled by the fuel. So reserving half a gallon to maybe a gallon is pretty common, and of course this is going to reduce your actual range to when you want to refill the tank. Now I always like to be pessimistic when I'm looking at my expected range, so if I assume only 40 miles per gallon on the Harley, and keeping that one gallon in reserve, I only have 200 miles of range. So I'm going to have to stop within the confines of my trip because I cannot make it the full 250 miles of range. The R1300 GSA will now have a 276 mile range, so I could make it, but that's the largest tank on the market. So this sounds like a problem, right? Well, but is it? Are you really going to ride straight through with no stops the entire day to your destination Now for many bikes, the seat provides its own limit on how many miles you can ride between breaks, just due to comfort, or more specifically, lack thereof. Add in fatigue, traffic, weather, and you may want to stop even more often. Now highway riding is also different than back roads and perhaps less of a strain. So you can go further, mileage wise, when you're riding on a highway opposed to when you're riding on the back roads. So after nearly 30 years of riding, I have a rule of thumb that I stick to. And this is I stop for a break every two hours or every hundred miles, whichever comes first. the beauty of this is it works really well. If I'm on back roads and maybe my average road speed is 40 miles per hour, I'm only going to do 80 miles before my next stop. Whereas I might on the highway stop when I hit a hundred miles because that's going to be less than two hours. time that I'm going on a trip, I'm going to stop at about a hundred miles at the most. And if I'm stopping for a break anyway, why not go to a filling station and just refill the tank, grab some drinks, take a little bit of a breather, some snacks from the convenience store, whatever it is. and just take a break, the range on the tank is no longer my practical consideration. It's no longer my practical limitation since I'm refilling every a hundred miles anyway, because I'm taking a break every hundred miles. So it doesn't matter. Now my old GSA. I typically got about 300 miles to when I hit my personal reserve, when I'd want to refill at about a gallon remaining. So even if I stopped every hundred miles, I might only refill the tank every second or third stop. And I had the range, but I never really needed it. It was there. But most of the time, all I was doing was just carrying all this excess weight around that really didn't give me any real world value. Now, of course, you're going to find some riders who will say, yes, but I live in a part of the world where the filling stations aren't that close together. And we see this very commonly in the Western United And this is probably the most reasonable explanation for why someone might say they need more range. Now, most of the country, certainly in the more populated areas, it'd be very unusual to find stations that are more than about 35 miles apart. So even the tiniest tank isn't going to have any sort of issue of leaving you stranded. Now, there are some sections out west where there are bigger gaps. And the largest gap that you can find in the lower 48 is between Tonopah and Ely in Nevada along US 6. And this is 169 miles between where you'd have possibilities to get refilled on gas. So there are situations there where you would have that. Now, both my F900 GS and my R18 could make that distance, although they would not fit within my personal fuel reserve of where I want to reserve at least a half gallon to a gallon. So both of those bikes wouldn't work for that specific leg, which is the largest leg in the United States in the lower 48. But am I riding that route regularly? No. Worst case, I grab a 1-gallon giant loop armadillo fuel bag, and now I have 4.8 gallons of range on my F900GS, or 235 miles of range. Plenty for even that stretch with my personal reserve. Okay, but you want adventure, so you decide to take the Dalton Highway in Alaska. And this road really exists simply to supply the Alaska pipeline. So there is a stretch of about 240 miles between gas stations. So what do I do? Well, I switched to the 3-gallon fuel bag, and now I have 285 miles of for my personal reserve. It doesn't matter. The reality is that there's a handful of times when you're riding along these stretches where fuel service wouldn't actually be available. It's not an everyday occurrence. No one is sitting there and, "Oh, my regular ride is riding between Tenopa and Ely" That's not really the typical case. You're usually going to be riding in areas where you have more fuel options. But even if you do use them more often, you can just add a fuel bag. And the reason why I bring up specifically the Giant Loop Armadillo fuel bag, and I'll add a link to it in the show notes, What I like about this, as opposed to maybe one of hard tanks, is that when you're not using it, when it's not actually filled with fuel, you can roll it up. It takes up basically no space in your pack. It's really tiny. and now you have a option for carrying fuel when you need it and not when you don't. So this gives me a huge amount of flexibility of when I may choose to say, "You know what, I just want to have a little bit more range." And whether you need it or not, like even if you're not going there, but you just feel you want to have more for your own personal reserve to have more room, fine, then get one of these. And they have them in a couple different sizes, so you can get like a one, a two, a three gallon, etc. There's different sizes of capacity to whatever your own personal reserve is that you feel is right for you on your specific bike. But again, I may not be the typical rider. I do tend to ride a lot each year. if we look at the actual distance that riders complete each year, it may not even make any difference whatsoever to all of these complaints about fuel capacity. There was a research done via a survey a few years back, and that found that nearly half of all riders in the United States completed fewer than a thousand miles in a year. And only 12% said that they rode more than 5000 miles in a year. Now, if we assume that most bikes can do easily 150 miles on a tank, then 50% of riders would refill less than seven times each year, on each trip, each year, or roughly every two months. And 90% of riders would need to refill less than 30 times per year, or less than weekly. So are these complaints about fuel capacity and tank capacity really relevant? Well, there is a small subset of riders that actually do love to ride long distance all in one go. And the very top tier of these riders complete more distance in a day than many riders do in a complete year. The Iron Butt Association can certify riders that have completed some of these insane distances. And here's a small sampling of a few of the certifications that they offer. So you can do the Saddlesore 1000. This is a thousand miles in less than 24 hours. Keep in mind, this is more miles than half of all riders in the United States actually complete in an entire year, and these riders are doing it in one day. They also have a Bunburner 1500, which is where you do 1,500 miles in less than 36 hours. So roughly the same pace as what you saw with the Saddlesore Now they also have versions in kilometers for our listeners and other parts of the world, such as the Saddlesore 1600 K and the Bunburner 2500 K. if you kind of do the math on there, you'll find that they're roughly the same distance, obviously just adjusted for the, range variation between a kilometer and a mile. Now, beyond the distance in time certifications, they also have a few other ways that you can get certifications, such as like hitting coast to coast rides or hitting 48 states in 10 days and many others. And the riders who complete these types of rides are always on the go. And like our Yala Habibi episode, sleep is something that they often hold off on as they're doing these long trips. So let's look at one of these. Let's look at the Saddle Soar 1000. Now, the average speed across 24 hours to complete a thousand miles in those 24 hours is more than 40 miles an hour. Add in fuel stops, food stops, and rest stops will absolutely kill their momentum. And there's a reason why a sizable percentage of these riders who do the Iron Butt Association use the GSA is simply because of the enormous stock fuel tank. And for these riders, even the stock tanks sometimes may not be enough. Many of them actually add auxiliary tanks where the pillion seat would be to avoid stopping at all for many, many hours. And remember, if you're doing IBA, you're not usually doing this with a pillion. So you're riding on your own and they'll really keep on pushing it and pushing it. But again, this is not the norm. This is not the average rider. And if you are an iron butt rider, then maybe you are absolutely justified in saying, hey, this bike is too small of a tank capacity for me. That's great. But you're probably going to be adding in an aux tank anyway. is it really that big of a deal? And and that's the thing that I hope that we can kind of come away from this episode of looking and saying that when we look at it, honestly, and we look at the real world of where this capacity comes in, it may not be as dire as it seems when you hear that number, because you have to look at the real world range and the real world distances you actually travel. But let's say that you really want to push it and you're really aiming to say, I want to go the furthest distance that I possibly can on a single tank of gas. Well, I talked about how that Honda Grom is a street motorcycle with the smallest tank currently on sale. Now, it has a sister bike, which is called the Honda Monkey, and it's basically the same bike, but it's with styling that makes it look like an old Honda Z50 from the 70s. And this was actually the first bike I ever rode was a Honda Z50 back in the 80s and really cool, fun bike. But it's a really tiny, tiny bike. It's not meant for going long distance, certainly not cross country. And so Acerbis actually, which is a company really well known for making bigger tanks for off-road bikes, did something really special for their 50th anniversary back in 2023. They built a huge tank for the Honda Monkey in an effort to set the Guinness world record for distance on a single tank of fuel. And they ended up grafting a 108 liter or 28 and a half gallon tank onto this 125 cc Honda Monkey. Now, the process for how they did this is really fascinating. And I'll share a link in the show notes so that you can see a little bit more details. But in the end, they managed to travel nearly 4,200 kilometers or about 2,600 miles without refueling. So if you really want to compete in a coast-to-coast IBA certification without refueling, this might be the way to do it. So let's wrap up. We looked at the range of capacity with the Honda Grom on the low all the way up to the BMW GSA And we also looked at how fuel economy can make bikes with different tank sizes have similar range. We looked at why riders think they need more range and how the cases where it's actually an issue aren't really all that common. And finally, we looked at IBA riders who probably are the ones who have the most reason to complain about capacity. But many of them are adding aux tanks anyway. And the ultimate long range bike was built by a Acerbis, grafting a 28 gallon tank to a Honda Monkey and traveling nearly 2,600 miles in a single tank. So my question for you this week is, what is the smallest tank on a motorcycle that you would ever consider buying? Share your thoughts through the text to show link in the show notes or leave a voicemail at throttleandroast.com/voicemail. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you next week.