Can-Am Spyder F3 Limited

Are you finding that your wife and usual pillion passenger is finding it hard to get on the back of your lovely Adventure Bike? Are your poor old knees not as reliable as they were 50 years ago? Funny you should say that, BRP (Bombardier Recreation Products) Can-Am have something to ease those problems. Enter the Can-Am Spyder. The Spyder comes with a 1330 cc 3 cylinder engine of 88 kw output, a 6 speed semi automatic gearbox and comfortable seating. The wide track (about the same as your ute) means the bike doesn't do anything weird when you and the missus climb aboard, it just sits there level and waiting. If you have been riding for years you will anticipate corners and bends as they come up, the bike doesn't lean, but you do, for your own comfort. Things to get used to:- 1. No foot gear change, instead it is a switch with up / down paddle on the left hand grip. 2. No hand operated front brake lever, instead a single pedal on the right foot peg / floor board applied force to the 3 Brembo discs via ABS and Electronic Brake Distribution etc. 3. No clutch lever see below. 4. Cruise control on the right grip next to the conventional twist throttle. It sets and adjusts easily with your thumb and a touch of the brake pedal and the cruise control drops out for you. The cruise control does not lock or grip the throttle twist grip in an open position. 5. Semiautomatic downshifts / upshift lockout, as your speed reduces especially under braking the gearbox downshifts to match your ground speed. At standstill the bike will automatically be in first gear ready to go. on upshifts 2nd gear above 20 kmh, 3rd above 30 kmh, 4th above 40 kmh, 5th above 50 kmh, 6th above 60 kmh. Downshifts are similarly scaled with a deadband included.

Why didn't I give the bike a 5 star rating? In 3 words TERRIBLE THROTTLE RESPONSE. Low end torque is negligible. Linearity is non existant. It encourages a style of riding that I'm uncomfortable with. From standstill holding on to 1st gear will mask the mess somewhat at the risk of overshooting the 60 kmh limit. When overtaking mobile roadblocks at 80 kmh it gets even worse. Open the throttle and apart from a large increase in noise not much happens for quite a while, then somewhere between 4000 and 5000 RPM whoosh. On rough current day unmaintained QLD roads the result is unnecessarily unpleasant, the time in the oncoming lane is longer than it should be and final speeds likely higher along with noticeable chassis dynamic degradation especially in the numerous QLD rough patches. After market work around devices do exist, called throttle controllers, however the correct and safe approach would be for BRP to recall all these bikes and properly tune the ECM for a linear response. They broke it, they should fix it.