GVWR Reality Check: You’re Overloading Your Motorcycle

So let's start with a few different terms that are really important to understand when you're thinking about your motorcycle and how you're going to load it up when you wanna carry gear, passengers, anything that you're trying to do.

And the first one that we're gonna deal with is called GVWR.

Now GVWR stands for gross vehicle weight rating.

This is the maximum amount of weight that your vehicle can be while it is rolling along the road.

This includes everything.

This includes the bike's weight itself, any fluids that are on the bike, any fuel, any passengers, any accessories that you've added on, any luggage, everything.

This is the maximum weight that the vehicle can be.

Now, another term that we have to think of is what's often called wet weight or curb weight.

And this can be a little challenging to find for some motorcycles because some motorcycles will only list their dry weight without any fluids like oil or gas or coolants.

And of course, gasoline weighs about six pounds per gallon.

So a typical bike will generally have about 50 pounds of fluids.

over the dry weight in order to reach the curb weight.

Now, some motorcycles will actually include some of the fluids, but not all of the fluids.

And this has to do with marketing.

They're trying to sort of suggest a weight number that is lower than what you actually have of curb weight So when you're trying to compare like for like on different bikes, it will appear that this bike is lighter.

But it's really important when you're trying to calculate what you can bring with you on the bike in order to figure out what the true wet weight or curb weight of your motorcycle is.

Now, of course, one thing you could do is you could get a pair of bathroom scales, for example.

and assuming that they're able to support enough weight on each one, you could roll your bike such that each wheel is on each bathroom scale, measure how much weight is on each scale, sum them together, and now you have your actual wet weight.

The cool thing about this is that you can actually then measure the bike with all the farcals you might have added onto it, but before you add in any luggage or anything that you're adding into the luggage more than the point and passengers.

Now where this becomes important is we need to compare the gross vehicle weight rating with our wet weight.

And effectively, if we subtract the wet weight from the gross vehicle weight rating, this tells us how much payload we can do.

And this is sometimes also called useful load.

This is the weight that you can add to your bike across the rider, the passenger, luggage.

The thing is that this can disappear quite quickly.

You'd be surprised how little payload most motorcycles have.