Here’s Why Every Motorcycle Should Come With A Reverse Gear

Riding a motorcycle is one of the greatest thrill rides you can experience this side of strapping yourself to a rocket or flying a plane. What’s not so exciting is when you get into a situation where you have to back your bike up. If you’re lucky, you’re on flat ground and it’s no big deal. But if you have to back it up an incline, it’s super awkward at best — and at worst you may hurt yourself as a machine weighing hundreds of pounds falls on top of you. It’s high time all new motorcycles came with reverse.

Now, before I continue, I’ll be quick to note that this isn’t exactly a new idea. A number of motorcyclists have been saying the same thing over the years. My former colleagues at Jalopnik published their own take on this back in July.

However, I’ve been on the fence about this. I’ve been riding for over six years and have owned over 30 motorcycles. There has rarely been a time when I shook my fist at the clouds, damning motorcycle manufacturers for not including reversers of some kind. I’ve always sort of thought that you could easily avoid the problem of not having reverse by just planning ahead.

Then, last weekend came around. On Saturday, my parents asked me to move my 2012 Volkswagen Jetta SportWagen TDI and my 2005 Triumph Rocket III out of their garage so they could grab some stuff to take to a flea market. Alright, that sounds super easy, barely an inconvenience, right? Sure enough, the Triumph fired right up, all 140 horses and 147 torques throbbing, waiting to destroy some blacktop. I then took it for a short ride before returning back to base.

The Jetta also fired up with ease and I moved it into the driveway, clearing up a ton of space. While I was okay with leaving the Jetta outside, I wanted to put the Triumph back into the garage. Specifically, I wanted to park the bike with its right side against the wall. There’s some logic to this. My brother frequently brings his kids over to my parents’ house and they often climb over things they shouldn’t. I don’t want an 800-pound British muscle bike crushing a nephew, so parking it with its right side against a wall means it cannot accidentally be tipped over.

Now, I didn’t get a picture because of everything that was going on, but my Triumph and Jetta live on the left side of this garage while the smarts live on the right side. The Saturn now lives in my warehouse:

Unfortunately for me, the only open wall space left required me to back the heavy beast into the garage. But hey, I’ve done it before so I thought nothing of it.

Honestly, I’m not even sure what happened but about a minute into backing the bike up one of my feet slipped. I couldn’t recover my balance and the bike came down, throwing me directly onto my back. Now, I’m built like a 1982 Mercedes-Benz 300D, so I fished myself out from under the motorcycle, brushed myself off, and muscled the machine back onto its side stand. The bike gained a scratch on its brightwork, but that’s it. I finished wheeling it into the garage and went on with my day.

I came out worse for wear than the bike. On Sunday, I felt a bit of a weird tingle where I landed on my back. By Sunday night, this became full-blown excruciating pain. If a doctor showed me one of those pain charts with the faces, I would have shredded it in combined anger, fear, and sadness. I hadn’t felt pain like this before and it practically stopped me from functioning like an adult.

The only reason I was able to get any stories published on Monday was that I took the maximum dose of a generic pain reliever all in one go. Tuesday was another interesting day as I had a press event in Tennessee. The pills wore off and the pain came back with a vengeance. I had to apologize to folks for my visibly distressed demeanor. I wasn’t mad, just beaten! Sadly, this continued through Wednesday and finally, today is the day I can say that my pain is down to about a one or two on the scale. Tomorrow, I probably won’t feel any pain at all.

Still, I come back to remembering that I’ve been through a lot in the past couple of weeks. First I put gashes in my left hand after eating gravel while trying to take this picture of a train:

Then I slammed my left eye into something and I looked like I lost a fight. If that wasn’t enough, I started bleeding from a place that’s a bit too unsafe for work to write here.

Dropping the Triumph destroyed me for a whole four days. I cannot imagine what it would have done to someone who, unlike me, isn’t 200-plus pounds of pizza and sushi—my wife, for instance. Having a reverse gear would have prevented the misery.

But that’s an extreme case. Not everyone is dropping a 2.3-liter muscle bike on themselves. Still, if you’ve ever ridden a motorcycle before you know what it’s like to back your ride up a slope. It’s terrible regardless if you’re on a little 400, a Harley-Davidson Street Glide, or an Indian Challenger. Scooter riders and Honda Grom owners are probably a bit smug right now because those are just about the only two-wheelers that are easy to roll anywhere.

The Solution

Thankfully, the solution already exists and has for years.

In fact, Harley-Davidson first started offering a reverse gear back in 1931 on the VL. For a more recent motorcycle, Honda offered reverse in 1988 starting with the Gold Wing GL1500 (that’s the bike in the top graphic). The Honda Valkyrie was also offered with reverse in Japanese models. Over here at home, Harley’s big trikes also have reverse, as do Can-Am’s trikes.

What I’m getting at is that reverse isn’t all that rare, but it tends to be offered on the most porky of motorcycles. What’s pretty neat is that for gas-powered bikes, reversing systems often just consist of a starter-like motor running through a Rube Goldbergian sequence to eventually drive a gear to move the bike backward.

Electric motorcycles have given reversing to the masses. Once you use an electric motorcycle’s reverse function you’ll immediately realize how helpful a reverser would be with almost every motorcycle, not just chunky tourers. The 2023 Zero DSR/X that I’ve been testing for a year and two months has a reverse function and it has been a game-changer.

All I have to do is hit the kill switch, hit the bike’s menu, select Parking Mode, put the switch back into Run, and then I’m off to the (backward) races. It’s super simple, takes no effort, and the torquey electric motor pulls the bike out of any weird spot I put it into. Remember those GEICO commercials that said getting a quote is “so easy, a caveman could do it”? I’m pretty sure a poodle can handle this. The solution to my back pain is right there with a flick of a switch.

Yet, not even every electric motorcycle has a reverse function. Remember how Harley-Davidson built a $30,000 electric motorcycle and then later spun the bike off into its own brand? Yeah, so the LiveWire One may cost a slightly more palatable $22,799 today, but it still doesn’t have a reverse.

On one hand, I get it. Most people with something like a Yamaha R3 aren’t going to have that much trouble, so Yamaha doesn’t need to spend the money for the extra complexity. On the other hand, I would argue that the majority of motorcycles on the American market could be using horsepower or electricity for reversing rather than foot power.

So, motorcycle manufacturers. For my back and every exhausted biker out there, pretty much all new bikes should have reverse!