That's our Skoda dealer. To be fair they did let me have a go in the car I was interested in - a first-gen Octavia RS wagon, fairly rare beast - but the salesman was not interested at all and nearly slapped me when I got enthusiastic with the throttle and steering. Compare that to the test-drive of a brand-new Scirocco turbo, where the salesman pointed me to a twisty empty road he knew and told me to make sure I open the window and listen to the exhaust note as I floor it...

Well, I test-rode a CBF1000 that was for sale locally. Clean, straight, well-equipped with a full set of panniers, priced to sell. Went on a twenty-minute ride and returned understanding that while it's an incredibly stable and comfy bike - start in Hammerfest and don't stop till you hit Gibraltar - it was also entirely boring and generated no emotion in me at all.

By contrast, the shop where I bought my VFR... this is a complete mea culpa, Don't Do What I Did, Children, but I showed up there on Monday morning having gone halfsies on a liter bottle of Jim Beam Red Cherry the night before. The test ride confirmed what I thought before from just sitting on other bikes - that it may not be as maneuverable and tractable as the Gladius I'd sold a few months earlier, but goddamn if it doesn't make you feel like a hero. (It helped that I'd been bugging the shop for weeks over email, looking for a day when they were open and I could come to the other town - the definition of a motivated buyer. No haggling, but they gave me a great deal on a Kappa set.)

Most local new bike dealers will accommodate some form of a test ride. The KTM dealer will just straight up rent you any of their demo bikes for a day at anywhere between 120 and 200 euros. The Honda dealer had an open day where they collected five euros per ride for a charity; they'll also let you rent a demo bike for a day for 39 euros if you are a known customer (i.e. had an oil change done there). The Yamaha dealer was the most difficult to deal with, but apparently more because they didn't get as much factory support as the others, and didn't have demo bikes in my town.