A bike ModeL(OL)!

 2010 – The 150CC scene

 The 150CC audience in India is considered as a class ABOVE the economy i.e. the entry level 100-135CC segment and below the Oxymoronic ‘performance’ class of bikes ranging from 160-225CC bike.  

There is an audience that buys the 150CC bike for a plethora of reasons, from style to affordability, from mileage to power. Chalk and Cheese.  

To put it in some kind of model we will split the ‘preferences’ into axis.  

Say that a consumer is ready to pay x money for style till a y point where he cannot affords the style anymore (ZMR owners its ok, you have like 10 sensors!). So you have two poles, Style and Price  

Another dimension is that a consumer is willing to forego x levels of mileage for y levels of power. Of course there are a handful of out and out extremist who would buy an out and out powerful bike not bothering about the mileage, and there are others who don’t mind a ridiculous bike with an unbelievably good mileage, but they are a minority in the market so lets shoo them off. Sadly some of us belong to this minority!

 This is what our neat little confusing model looks like…. 

Now you have a small Yamaha sitting in this segment and ridiculing everything else in the performance segment as a total package. 

In my opinion it sits 3/5 the performance mark, up there in the style mark, midway the affordabilty mark, and probably 2.5/5 the way in the mileage mark. 

That quadrant is available to you for INR98000, so now you plot the other bikes in that quadrant and find out what the manufacturer is offering to you, and is it indeed VFM. 

Juxtapose the P220 there, 3.8/5 on the power mark, 4.5/5 on the affordability mark, 2.5-3/5 on the style part,  3.5/5 on the mileage front…Sweet if you ask me! a whole new quadrant for 30k less! 

Ofcourse there are other parameters that you could crib about or introduce them as a gap in the model, but I would settle for an easy option of suggesting that THIS gap of 30k is the opportunity cost for the either of the manufacturers! 

This surface plotted by the R15 is the area which probably Bajaj needs to explore and a possible ‘price to customer’ to it is that 30k! 

The surface plotted by the P220 is the area that probably would make sense to Yamaha if they intend to go on an affordable power bike segment etc. 

We could do this for other bikes as well, do let me know what you think they would look like. Please remove the fanboyism before you make this model 🙂

I would do this again soon for very hot 150CC segment once the bikes are rolled out.

What can we look for in the near future?

The SZ coming in soon as a premium executive bike, it will bring a lot of competition to the P150, Unicorn and GS150R (most of this segment is dominated by bikes hasn’t seen a fresh avatar for some time now) Besides Honda calls Dazzler a new bike. By all logical means, the SZ would be powered lower than the FZ. Otherwise it would start cannibalizing into FZs share! This means even more fresh looks, but a small sacrifice in power! 

Any takers for the under powered – new look SZ? (Psst plot it on the ModeL(ol)) 

 

Another potentially upgrade is the P150 with a 4Valve head. I have personally seen a P150 being road tested on NH4 more than once. It had no change in the looks, so it would be interesting to see if it gets anything fresh in the looks department or will Bajaj chose to give a ‘performance’ upgrade a la A220 jack shit to this bike. 

Any takers for the same old styled – more powerful P150? 

 

Third interesting product could probably be the RTR HE, (Hyper Edge in short).  TVS has made clear that they look at the brand RTR as a brand for racers, and brand by racers. So undoubtedly it will be an out and out performance bike. How much – is a question yet to be answered. 

Knowing TVS it would be fun, but it would be safe (for them) as well. 

Not a lot of design updates coming in for this product as well, I am sure the design team is working its arse off (albeit again) on a bigger sibling. It would definitely be compact, race bred machine. I just hope it would be much more refined.

Oh and the ones who joke about the RTR being small and blah blah blah, remember a horse is more agile and nimble than an Elephant on roll. Elephant is more ‘powerful’, but then bring both of them in a game of polo and it would shows what its agile-ability all about. Ofcourse you can barge into the game knocking out others and what not, but if you ventured thinking so far, then you obviously missed the point thanks to the fanboyism, and before I do the same… back to the topic: 

So, any takers for a bit of rehashed RTR– and a lot of performance tweaks, but essentially the same old looks?  

 

 

 

Sweet, Now we could ‘realistically’ demand what we want and at what price using the model we built!