do
uh
so i've just been out for a bit of a cruise around today it's a lovely
day got the harley-davidson fat boy for a couple of weeks we get a lot of motorcycles
and i test ride lots of bikes every week sometimes we do it from a dealership where we've got it
for two or three hours and that's just fine but often we get bikes for a week or two and normally
we do the test ride we um do the filming etcetera and put the bike away and there
it stays until it's collected but sometimes we get a bite that we absolutely love and this is
one of them the bmw r18 classic was another um i do actually prefer the original r18 as opposed to
the classic version but nevertheless it was an interesting bike to ride and we really enjoyed
going out on that as much as we could and the same applies to this harley davidson fat boy
the great thing about cruisers like the harley-davidson fat boy
is that you can really enjoy the ride it's it's just as much about the journey
as it is about the destination and that's what harley davidson saying a lot of their
promotional materials and that's very true it's really enjoyable to ride a bike like this it's
got tons of talk and that means you don't have to rev the nuts off of it all the time
and you can just enjoy where you're going and have a great look at the countryside and the
surroundings or the towns and villages wherever you find yourself um so for that sort of thing
cruisers are really the best choice in my opinion hello lovely day isn't it yeah quite warm
no it's not that don't scare the horse
thank you nice horse should we swap bikes like this aren't about
nailing it all the time and about going around corners as fast as you can and uh pretending
you're guy martin on the isle of man tt it's got nothing to do with that sort of riding and
it really is a sort of laid-back kind of style of riding with a bike like this and a lot of people
that don't have these bikes don't understand that they say oh my bike's faster and i've got more
power yeah well maybe you have but that's not the point of it it's not about being the fastest guy
from a to b it's about really enjoying where you are and enjoying the ride because they
are fabulous fun to ride and when you do open them up with all that talk you can get moving
pretty swiftly and not even go above three and a half thousand rpm so they really are phenomenal
as i said in our review of the fat boy it really is a very involving ride and with these big
fat wide tyres um you feel the terrain more than you do on a lot of the other soft tails
um and it's sort of particularly when the road is sort of uneven and badly uh surfaced um but that
makes an enjoyable ride and you're kind of at one with the bike and you're at one with the road and
you've got to be you know on your toes unless you're going slowly um it does keep you awake
it's a nice involving ride and involving rides as i said before are great fun come
all on come on
there are some new things coming with the channel um we're not gonna announce those
till it actually happens but there's been a bit of delay so we're kind of a month behind
what we had planned to do one of the things i can talk about now
that we're adding to our channel and that's on top of the things we ordinarily do is that darcy is
doing his a2 license and today he's doing his cbt which stands for compulsory basic training so
if you don't know if you're from another country in england and europe we have this
ridiculous tiered licensing system with four different motorcycle licenses that you can get
pretty much everyone bypasses the first two and they jump in at the a2 license which basically
means you can ride anything under 47 horsepower with a certain power to weight ratio and then
uh you if you have two years continuous experience you can take your a license which is the full
license but most people don't do that they sort of jump in right at the a license and
they so they wait they don't ride a motorcycle at all so they get to 24 years of age and when
when you can take the a2 if you haven't ridden before that so it's very complicated
and very stupid but it's designed to uh sort of allow progression but it hasn't done it's done the
exact opposite but anyway darcy's doing that uh a2 license so he's on his cbt today which is the
first step which you can do at the age of 18 if you're doing your a2 you have to be 19 um or above
so he's doing that and then he'll be doing the a2 license and you will be following his journey
uh in buying a new motorcycle it's going to be a harley davidson and it'll have to be restricted
so it meets the 47 horsepower requirement for the a2 license so we're going to go into all of
that and dusty's going to be doing lots of videos about the process and what he's got the bike about
riding that bike in different places and vlogs and that sort of thing so be very interesting to watch
if you're thinking about getting a fat boy now i've had time to ride around with it
and really get to know it it's really good on the motorway or the freeway um it cruises along
at 70 miles per hour just over two and a half thousand rpm so it's just ticking over really
and then you've got masses of torque to overtake if you need to in the country lanes in the towns
and the villages it's great a lot of people say well should i get the fat boy if i do a lot of
canyon riding and a lot of turns and corners and sort of faster stuff it's no sports bike don't
make any mistake it's not a sports bike but it's an enjoyable ride and when you're cornering this
uh you do have to work at it you do need to sort of use various techniques
in the corners to sort of really get it to sort of go where you want it to so it's not an easy
bike in the corners but nevertheless it's a fun bike in the corner so um i wouldn't let let that
put you off uh it's just got a characteristic of its own with the big fat wide tyres particularly
and it sort of stance it handles in a certain way but yeah if it's a cruiser but it's a fun
cruiser
my
this fat boy comes with the standard pipes as we went in into in our review and they are pretty
subdued you do sort of you can hear the power of the engine but um you can't hear the exhaust very
well personally i do like to be able to hear a harley or any bike for that matter especially one
with a big fat v-twin engine i'm not saying you should be ridiculously loud but it's nice to have
a good rumble so a sort of an aftermarket slip-on or something of that nature would be just fine
but now with these the new regulations that have come into europe and
even though we've left europe in england uh because of brexit
we still seem to be following all the rules all the way we have no say in them
so then now the pipes are um particularly quiet because you have to have a co2 sensor in them and
you can't just change them as you could before or you can't stage one the bike at the moment
which is a bit of a problem because we really do like the sound of a nice v-twin particularly
and um i'm not saying we should go mentally loud but it's nice to have a sort of slip-on that just
gives you a nice deep rumble um without being completely anti-social i'm not saying uh really
loud pipes are a good thing necessarily it depends where you are of course um but it's nice to be
able to hear the bike one for safety two for the enjoyment and three uh it's a harley why not why
shouldn't you better hear it but that's become more difficult now so that's a bit of an issue
yet another issue facing harley-davidson and other american motorcycle manufacturers importing
into the eu is that the eu have slept on a massive 50-something percent tariff on imports
now i don't know whether the uk are going to do that because we're not in the eu anymore
we've yet to find that out but that's a big blow because um that's gonna make harley's and
uh the likes very very expensive indeed they're already at the top of the price range so with
an extra 50 tariff my goodness me that's going to be almost completely an ongoer over the next
few weeks and months we've got lots of harleys lined up all the new harleys are coming we've
been promised some bikes from other manufacturers as well as they did last year and then suddenly
they go quiet on us again so i'm hoping that that's going to happen i want to say who they are
but that's going to happen there are some triumphs in the pipeline as well some of
the new bonnevilles they look really nice so we're going to get a variety of bikes to review
some manufacturers we've contacted and just they couldn't be less interested so
they're lost as far as i'm concerned we're going to concentrate on the ones that we really like and
thanks to harley davidson here we are with a fantastic beautiful fat boy
you