Whatever you will read in the forthcoming lines please note that I HAVE NOT considered the Royal Enfield’s, liter classes and CBUs/CKDs and anything over 2 lakh rupees in India.
HISTORY: If we peep back a few years when 2 strokers gave way to more efficient 4 strokers, new manufacturers kept coming and offering those volume selling 100 odd cc bikes. Let’s chuck Indian manufacturers for the time being and talk about the more experienced, more powerful Japanese.
To start with, Yamaha, the makers of legendary RD and RX series of bikes were dumbstruck with 100cc Cruxs and Liberos till a change of guard took place at the top level and we witnessed some fine machinery in the form of technically supreme R15 and ravishing looker FZ. The R15 did set some benchmarks of its own and it still continues to be an untouched avenue for its competitors.
But moving away from Yamaha, Honda, the ‘always safe playing shrewd company’ started with 150cc giving us bright hopes that very soon we would be able to see some of the fine machinery they are famous for in the foreign world; but sadly the cc ladder in place of moving up has descended to 100ccs! In fact, with an existing collaboration with the volume churning, entry segment concentrated Hero Honda, already selling like crazy, almost everyone expected Honda to travel the way up as they might not want to advent to a region they are already present in. Another whizz, Suzuki has also kept itself limited to 150ccs. Simply because it is a huge risk involved in case the whole concept of bringing in a BIG bike fails, foreign manufacturers have always desisted themselves from offering what the biking aficionados always wanted.
To the contrary, Indian manufacturers took the lead and offered some fantastic products. The max which we have in India currently in single cylinder form is the 220cc 21PS Pulsar 220 from Bajaj Auto which incidentally is the Quickest and Fastest straight line production bike in the country today. It was Bajaj which broke the 20PS jinx which we were struck to for many years together. And here we have another Indian company coming in and pitching a product which I am sure would have set pulses racing for every performance biking enthusiast, Mahindra, the company and MOJO the product!
Mahindra which has set true benchmarks in the 4-wheeler UV (Utility Vehicles) segment, acquired the ailing Kinetic Motors and forayed into the World’s second largest 2 wheeler market. We have already seen the 250cc marvels in the form of limited-edition Kinetic Aquila and Comet which were brought in by the collaborator Hyosung in limited numbers as CBU’s.
MOJO – The Product
I always expected Mahindra to come up with new 100/125/150cc offerings as all the other companies do. But Mahindra did not want to be called as ‘just other’ company. They were courageous to even think on those lines and had those guts which propelled them to start proceedings with a product which is not set to add any significant numbers to the sales tally.Taking a closer look at MOJO brings in a lot many questions in my mind, which I am sure, would settle down with time. Let me pen down a few glaring features of the bike first.
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