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As we reported at the beginning of this month, fuel prices are sliding rapidly downward, as demand for gasoline and other petroleum products drops from the worldwide stay-at-home orders.

As a result of this at the start of April, the national average for fuel prices in the United States crossed the $2/gallon mark, and currently prices are being tracked at $1.77/gallon in the USA.

That figure is likely to drop even further though, as the price for a contract future on a barrel of oil has actually dipped into the negative figures (-$37.63/barrel) – an historical first and an alarming event.

Episode 17 of the Two Enthusiasts Podcast a show we’re pretty proud of, as it tackles some meaty subjects.

As such, Quentin and myself get into a healthy discussion about the EPA’s recent statement that it intends to change wording to the Clean Air Act in order to close the “race use only” loophole for aftermarket equipment for motor vehicles. We hope our arugments spur further debate amongst your own circle of riding friends.

We then shift gears and answer a listener’s question about whether or not he should become a mechanic, and per usual it takes some interesting turns as we discuss the current trends of education, labor, and economics, which eventual devolves into a more philosophical discussion on life, the universe, and everything.

We think you’ll find the whole show highly engaging.

As always, you can listen to the show via the embedded SoundCloud player, after the jump, or you can find the show on iTunes (please leave a review) or this RSS feed. Be sure to follow us on Facebook and Twitter as well. Enjoy the show!

If you’ve been debating whether or not to get a Polaris Slingshot, your indecision may have just cost you $1,200. Just posted to the company’s website, Polaris has raised the MSRP on both its Slingshot models by $1,200.

The price hike is a simple matter of supply and demand, as Slingshot dealers cannot keep the three-wheeled not-a-car fun machine stocked on their showroom floors. With many dealers sold out, and Polaris capped on how many units it can produce a year, the only economic choice then was to raise the prices.

This price increase is already effective, as of the beginning of this week, and any further Slingshot orders this year will come at the more expensive. As such, the base model Slingshot is $21,199 and the Slingshot SL is $25,199.

Dorna took Suzuki’s departure from MotoGP at the end of the 2011 season badly. After bending over backwards to accommodate the Japanese factory during their final few years in the class, Suzuki finally pulled out of the series altogether, though they promised to return at a later date.

This of course was after Dorna gave Suzuki an exemption from the (now defunct) Rookie Rule, allowed the factory a larger engine allocation, and finally accepted the reduction from a two-rider effort to just a single entry, that of Alvaro Bautista.

Coming on top of Kawasaki’s withdrawal ahead of the 2009 season, Suzuki were the second Japanese factory to depart the class after a string of broken promises.

With the announcement of the introduction of price caps for brakes and suspension in MotoGP from 2015, the Grand Prix Commission, MotoGP’s rule-making body, appears to have finally found an effective way of controlling costs in the series. Instead of trying to control costs indirectly and seeing their efforts kicked into touch by the law of unintended consequences, the rule-makers have decided to attempt to go straight to the heart of the problem.

Will capping prices unleash a whole set of unintended consequences of its own? Will, as some fear, the move to cap prices lead to a drop in quality and therefore a reduction in R&D in the areas which are price-capped? And will the price cap act as a barrier to new entrants, or stimulate them? These are hard questions with no easy answers, yet there are reasons to believe that price caps are the most effective way of controlling costs, while the risks normally associated with a price cap, such as a reduction in quality, are lower in a racing paddock than they are in other environments.

In case you haven’t been to a pump recently, gas prices are getting more and more expensive lately, thanks mostly in part to the civil unrest in the Middle East (Libya in particular). While the current sticker shock on gas prices is due to temporary issues, the United States is still bracing itself for $5.00/gallon gasoline this summer, which our friends abroad would love to see in their home countries as they pay nearly double that price for only a litre of fuel. Curious to see how gas prices breakdown by state and by county? Check out this cool widget that Brammo is hosting on its website.

Spanish news site AS.com has an interesting story that breaks down the cost teams will have to bear in the new Moto2 600cc prototype series. Moto2 replaced 250GP for one main reason: money. The series was designed to be cheaper to enter and cheaper to compete in, as well as having bikes that were more analogous to what is making it into consumers’ hands on the showroom floor. So did Moto2 live up to these goals? The answer as AS.com found out is a resounding yes. Click past the break to see the price breakdown and comparison to 250GP.

It’s been a few weeks since Harley-Davidson announced the immediate closure of its subsidiary Buell, where dealers began slashing prices both to liquidate stock and to cash-in on Harley’s $5,000 sale incentive. Basic economics dictates that any time a price is raised or lowered it has repercussions to the product’s resale value, and in the case of Buell’s sudden price drop and dumping of basically new bikes into the market, the consequences for current Buell owners seem dreary. Or are they?

In order to find an answer to that question, we asked Joshua Minix, former government think-tank Economist, and current John M. Olin Fellow in Law and Economics at Harvard Law School, to wade through the implications of Buell’s closure, and how it affects the used Buell motorcycle market. Click past the jump for his analysis.