{"id":246260,"date":"2023-11-24T11:49:39","date_gmt":"2023-11-24T11:49:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/automotobuzz.com\/?p=246260"},"modified":"2023-11-24T11:49:39","modified_gmt":"2023-11-24T11:49:39","slug":"living-with-a-superbike-5-years-of-owning-maintaining-a-ninja-1000","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/automotobuzz.com\/news-features\/living-with-a-superbike-5-years-of-owning-maintaining-a-ninja-1000\/","title":{"rendered":"Living with a superbike: 5 years of owning & maintaining a Ninja 1000"},"content":{"rendered":"

The average running cost of the Ninja 1000 has been around INR 14.3 per kilometre of usage over the years.<\/h2>\n

BHPian KarthikK<\/strong> recently shared this with other enthusiasts.<\/p>\n

Time flies. It really does. Five years have flown by since the Ninja 1000 has been a part of our lives. It just feels like yesterday that we were excitedly taking an Uber cab to the Kawasaki showroom to receive the delivery of a litre class sport tourer bike that we so fondly desired to add to our garage to enhance our travel experiences.<\/p>\n

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While I have been touring on bikes since 2008 with friends or solo, our erstwhile Karizma helped to set the ball rolling when it came to 2-up touring on bikes with my better half from 2015. Getting the Ninja 1000 in 2018 was a big step up for us to change our (predominantly car-biased) way of touring, to exploring travel in a different light – on a not-so-practical, high-power sportbike. It is a different matter that we later expanded our touring bike arsenal to include the RE Himalayan and later the Honda CB500X to maximize our touring capabilities and remote location reach and enjoy this (road tripping-on-bikes) hobby much more comprehensively for our tastes.<\/p>\n

Fast forward 60 months, and I have to say the Ninja has not only met all the dreamy and rosy expectations we had of this ownership and travel style of sport-touring, it also surpassed most of them and never failed in putting smiles across our faces every time we took it out for a trip.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll just infuse this post with some lovely collages of memories accumulated over the years, along with some useful statistics and useless statistics too. Maybe some of the expense-related statistics and splits will help to provide some insights into ownership costs of a big bike in this genre for readers seeking out information on those aspects. In general, I tend to collect tons of usage-related and travel-related data mostly because I like doing so, to observe and infer patterns from historical data later. I\u2019ll probably add some brief inferences from each set of the data gathered. Some of it may seem ridiculous, so feel free to call me crazy, laugh at the posts and move on.<\/p>\n

The Ninja has conquered almost all types of terrain in the southern part of the country, barring maybe hardcore off-road trails<\/p>\n

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Mountains, beaches, forests, grasslands, tea or coffee plantations, lakes, rivers and everything else in the geography textbook and the Ninja happily munched through them for breakfast<\/p>\n

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Gathering statistics on the total usage of the Ninja over the past five years, split by genre.<\/p>\n

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~70% of the Ninja\u2019s usage came from 2-up trips with the wife, while the remaining came from day trips and group rides. This trend has been shifting a bit more over the past few years and will continue to let the 2-up sector take up a bit more percentage of the pie-chart going ahead.<\/p>\n

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This bar chart shows the trends of usage in terms of kilometres covered per year. 2018-19 was my very first year and I was still evolving as a rider, plus had some personal challenges when I lost my dad. 2019-20 and 2020-21 were the COVID-era pandemic years and many rides had to be cancelled, shelved or postponed due to the uncertainty with numerous lockdowns and restrictions, the lesser said of that era the better. In 2021-22 and 2022-23, the usage has picked up pace and should remain steady from now on.<\/p>\n

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An interesting observation when looking at the cumulative rides done across months of the year –<\/p>\n