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> Can't be too many.
Depends what you call "too many." It's certainly several times MCN's number, which is about how many sold here the first year alone.
Personal anecdotes from a geographically limited sample hardly give the big picture.
I could, for instance, point out that we have TWO '05 Rockets right here in our little town of 2000 people, And we're 100+ miles from the nearest Triumph dealer! On that basis, I could therefore extrapolate that there "can't be" less than one Rocket per thousand people, and so there must be about 250,000 of them in the States.
Or, I could take your own data and observe that you and two other guys own/are aware of a total of five Rockets between you. So if three riders out of the million-plus motorcyclists in this country are aware of five Rockets between them, then there must be 1.666666 Rockets per rider of all makes, or nearly 1.7 million Rockets in total.
Clearly, those would be silly numbers, but consider that the United States of America is an enormous place. You can disperse a very large number of rather conspicuous objects here and simply never see most of them again.
There are something over 5000 towns having over 5000 population, and if you went to each and every one of those towns and rode back and forth over the city streets every day, you wouldn't see a significant sampling of the Rockets that are there. And you would miss ALL those in smaller towns, because you aren't even looking there. People just don't leave their Rockets sitting around in their front yards!
Heck, a lot of people don't leave ANY Triumph just sitting around in the open. When I lived in Georgia, I thought for a while that I had the only Triumphs of any kind in all of Meriwether County, because I never saw any others. When people saw me riding mine, they gradually began telling me about so-and-so who has a Thunderbird or a Sprint or whatever, but they keep them garaged and only ride occasionally. Still, on several occasions when I was back in Georgia over the last two years, not a week went by but what I saw one or more Rockets on roads near my home, many with Florida, Carolina, or Alabama plates.
Go to any RAT event. Or park alongside any of the popular bike roads in hill country and watch for a while. You'll see Rockets all right--more in some parts of the country, fewer in others, and of course not as many of them as Harleys or Yamahas--but they're here.
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John
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