[Carbide]

I just looked at Minnesota on google maps... your state looks like a grid. Where are the twisty roads?

Edit: After some google searching for "curvy roads in Minnesota" I see the SE corner of your state has some reasonably curvy roads.

Yes there are some curves. But plenty of lame straight roads in between.
So cruise control is nice to have for sure.

 

[vito]

I never thought about it when I was younger, but as aged I found that my hand would start to ache on long rides. A throttle lock helps, but it is a poor substitute for electronic cruise control at best. The last three bikes I have had all have had OEM cruise control and I would not buy a bike without it. On the Interstate I use the cruise control more than the throttle, just as I do with my cars. Tapping the control up to add a mph and down to decrease a mph lets me change speed as needed without touching the actual throttle. I always have the option of clicking it off, tapping on the brake to disengage it, or actually turning it off so I do not feel that it makes my riding any more dangerous and it sure helps with the arthritis in my hands.

 

[Calculon]

It's somewhat rare for me to do longer rides(over a hour with stopping), so for me holding the throttle open has not yet been an issue. I would think there'd be an engineering cost associated with doing this for every bike that some, including myself, would prefer not to pay, particularly as the CCs go down meaning the bike will be less likely to be used at higher speeds.

 

[BillF6531]

My Kawasaki Voyager had factory cruise and was a joy to drive. I installed a automobile cruise control unit on my Suzuki M109 and it was a great highway bike.

 

[Leroys73]

My 1st MC, Honda VTX 1300R, after I returned to MC riding after 26 years didn’t have CC. I put a Break-A-Way throttle lock on it. It was great but not CC. My Yamaha Royal Star Venture had the old fashion vacuum operated CC. Better but not good. Then I graduated to real CC. Man, I will never have a long distance motorcycle without it. No modern CC, no buy. If it is supposed to be a highway use motorcycle. where is the CC. I am addicted. All of my cages have it, except my 1973 Corvette.

 

[vito]

I installed an automobile cruise control unit on my Suzuki M109 and it was a great highway bike.

What did that cost you?

 

[tyrellaholidays]

I recall a mate telling me that his BMW bike had cruise control some years back and that he loved it. I thought that was just weird and could understand it.

A couple of years back I bought my first bike to have cruise control, an Indian Chief Dark Horse. I really appreciate it on long trips with light traffic, so im sold on the idea, so much so that I regularly look to turn on the non existent cc on my newly acquired ST1300. A bike that would definitely benefit from having it fitted.

 

[Jmacd62]

I'm going to get a Tesla Bike when they come out.
So I can have a nap on long rides.

My bike has cruise control. The new ones have adaptive. It wasn't really something I was looking for, I don't think the base mode or the cop version have cruise control. The bikes got it so, Nice to have I guess.
I've never used it. The only time I contemplated using it, I couldn't remember how to turn cruise control on.
I consciously avoid interstates or major highways if time and other options exist.
So most of the time it's of little use to me. My car has the adaptive version again so rarely used. Memory issues.
I wouldn't by a car without.
Bike? Depends on the bike. Available option, I would choose the bike with rather than without.

If a nice bike without cruise control option was otherwise interesting, certainly not deal breaker.

 

[XLMark]

My bike doesn't have cruise control. I've never had it on a bike, so I guess you can't miss what you've never had. One of our cars has adaptive (or assisted?) cruise control and i like it and use it. My wife does not.

 

[BillF6531]

What did that cost you?

A few hundred dollars if I recall correctly. Here's a link to the details:

https://www.m109riders.com/threads/rostra-electronic-cruise-control-install.166597/

 

[Jack Klarich]

My Harley trike has cruise control, I use it almost all the time on the super slab, rarely around town on surface streets

 

[CanadaJack]

Never have had a bike with cruise, ABS, GPS, stereo or any of the other new fangled stuff. Hell, I just got some real luggage a couple of years ago.😁

 

[Joel_The_Mole]

South Texas it is practically a necessity, I use the heck out of it all the time, my recent ~10 hour trip each way to Hot Springs Arkansas was probably 90% cruise control in Texas.

Used to use a throttle lock, and the ~ $10 go cruise style ones you can get off ebay work great for what they are and take seconds to install or switch between bikes so I often bring some on rides with others.

For sore/numb hands/wrists keep in mind the best ergonomics have some downward slope, if you bars hold your knuckles very close to flat you are asking for long term trouble, especially if your wrists are bent too.

As a side point the people saying the stay off interstates to be on the slow scenic highways always cracks me up as someone who lives in Texas, apparently freeways are far too socialist for Texas, so all we have is highways for most of Texas, and they are usually neither scenic nor slow. 🤣

 

[Matt8995]

Ironically the bikes that would benefit the most from cruise control are the ones that are least likely to have it. Sports bikes benefit more than any other type of bike, since the cruise control allows you to sit upright and relieve the stress on your back.

Many people trailer their sports bikes to and from the track/twisties because they aren't comfortable on long highway trips. Cruise control is an answer to this problem and recently manufacturers have been picking up on this. Aprilia, BMW, Kawasaki, and most recently Ducati are now making electronic cruise control available on their 1000-1100cc sports bikes. My hope is that more and more of the sports bikes have this feature available.

 

[Joel_The_Mole]

I would think there'd be an engineering cost associated with doing this for every bike that some, including myself, would prefer not to pay

He did mention he specifically meant bikes with throttle by wire:

It still amazes me that there are modern bikes with electronic throttles that dont have cruise control!

By the time you have throttle by wire you VERY likely have a speed sensor feeding data back into the computer, so at that point adding the programming and input buttons to tell the computer "maintain this speed" is trivial, it isn't like old school cruise control that took a fair amount of additional hardware and complexity exclusive to the cruise control system.

 

[XLMark]

As a side point the people saying the stay off interstates to be on the slow scenic highways always cracks me up as someone who lives in Texas, apparently freeways are far too socialist for Texas, so all we have is highways for most of Texas, and they are usually neither scenic nor slow. 🤣

My sympathies. Here in MN, we have both and the interstates are indeed boring and fairly straight. The highways tend to follow a river or body of water and pass through quaint little towns. I don't like riding the interstates but if I'm just in a hurry to get somewhere, that's the way I go. The highways are better for group rides or riders who haven't been there before.

 

[Joel_The_Mole]

My sympathies. Here in MN, we have both and the interstates are indeed boring and fairly straight. The highways tend to follow a river or body of water and pass through quaint little towns. I don't like riding the interstates but if I'm just in a hurry to get somewhere, that's the way I go. The highways are better for group rides or riders who haven't been there before.

Yea, I am from Washington State so I get how road hierarchies are supposed to work, they just don't really exist outside cities in Texas. Mostly how you get around rural Texas is on highways that are boring and usually pretty flat and straight doing 80+mph outside towns then hitting the brakes and slowing down to 30mph as you pass through every little podunk one horse town where that highway is the main road through town. There is VERY rarely alternate routes that are not all basically the same thing.

 

[Calculon]

These days how much it costs to produce bears little significance to how much money corporations will try to extract from your wallet.

 

[Joel_The_Mole]

These days how much it costs to produce bears little significance to how much money corporations will try to extract from your wallet.

I think manufacturers also do it to separate out their more expensive bikes as well. A good example is the Honda Transalp which is about 2/3rd of the cost of the Honda Africa Twin. Even though both have throttle by wire, so adding cruise control would have been trivial, the Africa Twin gets cruise control and the Transalp doesn't. Yet the Honda Rebel 1100, which is about the same cost as the Transalp, DOES get cruise control. In this case Honda isn't competing the relatively cheap Rebel 1100 against one of its own higher end products, so adding the cruise control to the Rebel 1100 is a minimal effort for them and adds a selling point to buy the Rebel 1100 over other brands cruisers. However, adding cruise control to the Transalp, or other features the AT has that the Transalp does not, is narrowing the function gap between the cheaper and more expensive Honda adventure bikes and might encourage some buyers to get the Transalp, when they otherwise would have spent more on the AT.

 

[RogerC60]

Years ago while I was a design engineer at Keithley Instruments, a product I was designing was not going to be profitable enough to continue on through product introduction. The marketing department decided to make two versions: the original design, and a slightly defeatured one by removing $8 worth of parts. They kept the defeatured one at the original price point, and set the price for the fully featured one $400 higher. That change made the product hit its profitability targets and so we continued on. The task fell to me to modify the firmware to automatically detect the absence of the missing parts and disable that feature in the UI. I did it and hated every moment of it.

That is the reason I never made the jump from engineering to marketing, even though I probably could have made more money.