I'm hoping this will get me back and forth through the next three + years of college at least! At my current rate it looks like I'll probably put somewhere between 15-18,000 miles on it a year, so I'm trying to be very conservative with maintenance and care. I'd love to see it go a couple of more years after that if possible before I replace it. I've read a few 500 owners have gone well over 100,000 miles on their bikes. I know a lot of folks say that they cost more to operate than a car, but what new car could I buy for Five grand? So far, with the GZ250 and this Vulcan 500 I can honestly say that they have been much less expensive to own and operate than any four wheel vehicle I've ever owned. Of course some of that is just that bikes are basically bare bones transportation compared to the average car. I mean there's no AC to go out, no power steering pumps or electric window motors to die and my bike doesn't have a CD player to go bad or any of that other stuff that seems to always crap out on cars and pick up trucks. The only thing I actually see that seems to cost significantly more than on a car is the tires. At my current rate of wear I'm gonna need new tires at about 18,000 miles and that's gonna run about $200 installed. Now I realize that's only two tires on a bike compared to four on a car or truck but even if you double my mileage to account for four tires that means it compares to replacement of 4 automobile tires at around 35,000 miles, so not an enormous difference if you usually averaged around 45-50,000 miles out of a set of car tires, plus, I don't have to rotate my bike tires every 5,000 miles and the front end never seems to need an alignment!
