senseamidmadness

Motorcycles are not as dangerous as people think. What they are is unforgiving of mistakes.

My opinion is that the crash and fatality statistics are heavily inflated by the fact that risky people are drawn to motorcycles, and the evidence backs me up on that somewhat. Studies like the Hurt Report and subsequent NHTSA studies on fatal crashes show some absolutely baffling things, like over 20% of all fatal crashes involving unlicensed riders and almost 40% involving alcohol consumption in some way. Hell, in a shocking amount of US states, helmets are not required and every time I'm in one of those states I see people riding around on the interstate without any head protection. Absolutely terrifying and an incredibly stupid thing to do. I never ride without a full-face helmet personally.

There are plenty of ways to mitigate risk but most of the riders who die in crashes don't do them.

Oil processing is definitely bad for the environment, but think for a moment about the scales. Just in raw materials, ignoring the massive impact of battery manufacture alone, the average motorcycle weighs less than 600 pounds. The Prius weighs about six times that. That means six times the amount of shipping, forming, refining, finishing, et cetera...

The Prius still has an internal combustion engine that burns gasoline, and requires a significant amount of rare-earth minerals for the construction of its catalytic converter. Most motorcycles now have catalytic converters, but they are smaller and thus the environment suffers less damage per vehicle.

I agree that a Prius will burn cleaner while running than probably any motorcycle -- but the total amount of damage done just by being built has to be a whole lot more than almost any motorcycle and it can't be close.

Must be something pretty modern with fuel injection!

I was very heavily generalizing; there are so many different kinds of motorcycles and they vary so widely in fuel efficiency that it's really hard to average. Here in the US, the average new motorcycle sold is a 700-pound monster with an engine larger than 100 cubic inches of displacement. (Again, generalizing a bit, but Harley-Davidsons still make up over 4 out of every 10 new motorcycles sold here.) Harley-Davidson's largest model, the Electra Glide Ultra Classic, gets less than 40 MPG and weighs well over 800 pounds.

My understanding is that the motorcycle/rider combination in most cases has a very poor coefficient of drag and that's the largest issue at highway speeds.

Depends strongly on the motorcycle, however, as there are so many different kinds with varying amounts of bodywork. Some are absurdly efficient, like the Honda Grom, which routinely achieves over 100MPG.

Depends on the motorcycle. Anything loosely above 500cc and the fuel efficiency gets worse than a Prius.

That Prius, just by being manufactured, had an incredibly toxic environmental impact that it would take a motorcycle hundreds of thousands of miles to equal. Lithium battery manufacture is hell on the environment.