There is an assumption that anyone who is learning at a motorcycle driving school will be riding a bike with a manual gearbox.

This means that as part of their learning and development, they will not only have to learn the basic mechanics of riding and the rules of the road but also how to manage the unintuitive mechanics of a clutch and sequential gearbox. 

This is also true with cars, but whilst a growing proportion of four-wheeled vehicles are either automatics or have no gearboxes at all due to the rise in electric vehicles, very few motorcycles are the same, which might be the result of one of the most ambitious failures in recent motorbike history.

In the late 2000s, the biggest motorcycle manufacturer in the world had a bold new idea to change the industry forever; Honda wanted to bring automatic gearboxes to two wheels. Whilst Yamaha and Aprilla had automatic bikes as well, Honda had an ambitious plan.

Known as the Human Friendly Transmission, Honda had developed a continuous variable transmission (CVT) system that used a novel hydrostatic drive rather than the belt-driven systems commonly associated with scooters.

This meant that they could develop a CVT system that could act like a manual gearbox, and to showcase the system in the best possible light Honda developed the DN-01, which was a mix between a scooter, a cruiser and a sportbike.

It was positioned as a jack-of-all-trades, and like most bikes that try to do too much at once, it ended up being a master of none of them 

It was too heavy to be a sportbike, too uncomfortable for long rides to be a cruiser, and lacked the storage to be truly effective as a scooter, with a load capacity of just 147kg.

Whilst it could have potentially found a market in between the extremes, the asking price of over £10,000 was far too much to convince too many buyers and it was discontinued within two years.