The war of the 250’s

For years now the Japanese 4 (Honda, Yamaha, Suzuki, Kawasaki) has set a trend in the two wheeler industry across the world. Every where in the world one created a segment and every one followed. During tough times , they have helped each other as well.

2008: Yamaha jumped out like a Phoenix in its India operations. It was a do or die situation for them in India, and they picked up the Vixion as an idle/economical platform to work with, created a beautiful product and rolled it out. This revived the once dying Yamaha India. It unleashed a new wave the ‘sports riding’ culture in India. It changed the state of affairs for Yamaha India. The once deserted dealerships were suddenly swamped with people.

2010: Honda created a new segment, a single cylinder 250, but with the looks of its ‘best’ design. The CBR250 was born. Whether it deserves the CBR tag or not is debatable, but it has left the world in awe of it. For the matured markets it offers the legendary Honda reliability, and comes out as a nice potent learners machine. Its backed with C-ABS to comfort the apprehensions of the new riders. It aimed at killing two birds with one stone as everywhere else in the world, where the automobile industry has still not reached that state of maturity, it created a affordable quarter litre for them. Considering the sheer volumes of sales that one could expect from these machines in South Asia, its going to be a no brainer that this would be a proud chapter in the history of Honda.

2010: Yamaha,
Coincidence or not, but Yamaha created a ‘new’ Fazer, again a single cylinder 250. This sadly is not as competent as the R15, but a little bit of tweaking and it should be a good challenger to the CBR.

2010: Kawasaki,
The proud parent of THE MOST popular 250CC sports bike aka the Ninja 250 also has a different 250CC single cylinder up its sleeve in the KLX platform. The machine is aptly powering a dual sport bike. I have a strong hunch that our Pulsar shall mimic traits from this machine for sure.
Unlike other single cylinders this machine dishes out BHPs like none of the others in this comparison. Now whether or not would Kawasaki bring this in a retuned form as a CBR alternative is for time to tell, but its a definite win win for them to ensure this engine is made available as a ‘Pulsar’ along side the Smallest Ninja!

2011 Suzuki?
Ah! The almost written off Japanese giant, which is ‘confirmed’ to be bringing the baby b-king to India by the zillion ‘have internet, will copy, and paste’ blogs. No one ever thought if the present dealership of suzuki (try finding one around you)
could ever service a bike like that! Parallel twin, liquid cooled, lol! Suzuki India hasn’t even seen such stuff in their wet dreams! So what next?
Remember the old FXR platform? Very similar to our desi Fiero (now derive your assumptions), sometime back in 2008 there were rumours of a couple of bikes in the FXR series which will ape the gsxr. The GSX125R. A small image leaked on the web, and eagle eyed readers promptly spotted the magic number on the cylinder! (Check Motoroids forum for the image)
The (visibly) single cylinder, one the Gixxer styling looks HOT! My money is on this coming to India, sooner than later!

KTM250:
Firstly, if this is coming, I am booking one BLINDLY! Secondly, it may not be as jazzy as the Japanese bikes, but it is reputed to make some mean, tough machines. Its not exactly a racing bike, but more of a street+super moto combo, but its going to be torquey and enough fun to kill you if not respected! Check the
earlier post about whether or not will we see the Duke125 in India. And it did turn out, the fanpage did confirm that there would be bigger ones for asia 🙂
My best bets remain the same, either the existing smt250, or a new bore stroke spec!

So which one are you saving for?