[honkhonkpants]

Cars are a lot more efficient than they were a few years ago, and motorcycles have gone the other way. You can still get a motorcycle that gets 60 MPG or better, but the mainstream has decided to use their thermodynamic budgets to build engines with very high specific power and hold the line around 40 MPG or even less.

Nobody should buy a motorcycle imagining that they have lower operating costs. Aside from fuel, motorcycles have high budgets for tires, engine maintenance (due to the aforementioned appetite for high specific power, and relative lack of scale in their manufacturing), insurance, likelihood of theft or other total casualty, need to continuously refresh your riding apparel on approximately 5 year basis, expensive consumable items like drive chains and sprockets, and so on and so forth. Also there is generally a lack of miles over which to amortize the time-denominated costs like insurance.