john riley said:As I mentioned over at BROL, since Larry _owns_ a TE I thought there
might have been some comparison to it. Larry's defense was that the
TE was an older model and thus not representative of the current line.
I would submit that the TE is something of a living fossil (hey, when
its right, don't mess with it) and that its handling and performance
envelope haven't changed significantly in oh, say, 20 years. ;-) A
newer bike might have different components, (although even there, TE
is not famous for jumping on the latest trends), but I think speed and
handling impressions might be fairly compared.
The Easy Racer bikes are more or less the gold standard in this class,
and are more expensive than anything in this class, so when any new
bike enters this class, I think the question of how it compares to the
ER bikes is going to come up.
John Riley
To clarify this a little, part of the reason I didn't compare the RDX
to a TE is that I like to restrict my comments to the bike in question,
and not open the can of worms that would result in comparisons. For
instance, there would be bikes that I might not mention, and people
would want to know about. And really, I would rather a bike be judged on
its own merits, and not on how it compares to another.
And comparisons can be awfully subjective, unless actual, objective
tests were done to each bike, at about the same time. Otherwise, a
comparison of handling, speed, braking, etc., would be an exercise in
memory, in how we suppose that other bike would be doing. Would a TE
have gone down the hill faster than the current bike just did? Would it
have handled the bumps better? Hard to say. Well, no, it's not hard to
say, but it's hard to say it with anything objective to support it, usually.
It would be really neat to get together a bunch of bikes and do a
real comparison test, like we see in some of the car magazines, with
each rider swapping bikes frequently, making notes, etc.
--
Larry Varney
Cold Spring, KY
http://home.fuse.net/larryvarney