Met Manik and Shamik in the afternoon, since all of us are bikers the subject of Hero Honda CBZ-X-Treme was bound to come up. While Shamik was quite enthusiastic about the launch of this CBZ-X-Treme and even contemplating selling his Honda Unicorn and buying it. He informed me that in a bike forum every one was cribbing about it. Apparently people were disappointed by the launch of the most powerful motorcycle in 150cc category!!!

This makes me wonder, are we expecting too much from our motorcycle manufactures these days? I mean the motorcycle segment has just starting heating up in past few year, before that we did have few good motorcycles like Yamaha RD350, Enfield Fury175, Yamaha Rx100, Suzuki Shogun and Jawas. However even at that time it was only limited to these handful motorcycles, rest of the segment was hardly worth talking about.

At present if we look at the 150cc segment we have the likes of Bajaj Pulsar 150 DTSI, Honda Unicorn, Hero Honda Achiever, TVS Apache and the newly launched CBZ-X-Treme. All of these bikes have little performance gap and they make excellent companion whether one is heading to market, collage, office or for that matter riding to the highest roads in the world. These motorcycles offer the best compromise between fuel economy and power and this is what a normal consumer in the market is looking for.

With the competition in this segment getting hotter with every launch it makes me wonders how much scope is left for improvement? Will we have a 150cc motorcycle that churns out 18bhp and at the same time delivers the same fuel economy of that of a 100cc economizer?