Hi everybody.
This is my first review on MouthShut. Any comments are welcome.
Sadly, all good things must come to an end!! So they say. Just like the foretune which befell Yamaha after the days of rx100, now it is the turn of Hero Honda to take the axe.
Hero Honda first hit the roads in the ’80s. With CD100 & SS, they won the hearts of the communities. Then came Splendor, the wonder-machine. Boosted sales like hot cakes. Everything seemed going well. A good competitor in Yamaha died down owing to government norms. RXG destroyed the RX100 image, and RXG was so bad that no one was willing to buy RXZ, which had better features than Shogun.
That was when Bajaj attacked the motors with DTS-i definitely male, and everything else had to bow out of the market. Baja had every blow in it’s armoury. Pulsar for power, Boxer for mileage. Though Kinetic and LML came up with some good models, no one was willing to even recognize them.
So why does this come in the review for Karizma?
By the 2000’s, it became clear that there were only two leaders of the pack. Bajaj and Hero Honda. TVS was not far behind, but it definitely had a long way to go. And the Honda is popular only now.
Bajaj’s advantages: Held the upper hand in 150cc and 125cc category
HH’s advantages: The ever-selling Splendor+ and the Karizma.
Now, the 2-pronged advantage of Hero Honda is gone. Bajaj has unveiled the Pulsar 220. With more power than the Karizma (20bhp, against 16.8 of Karizma), it would definitely have better mileage too since it is always the case.
So the battle for the number1 bike producer boils down to this:
If Hero Honda has to stay as a number1 bike manufacturer, it would have to increase the power of their machines. And remove suicide techniques like stopping the production of the CBZ* and bringing a useless Achiever (you can aount the number of achievers on your fingers). Yet another silly thing was rolling out both the Super Splendor as well as the Glamour almost coincidentally. They competed against each other!! Worked to the advantage of the Discover. Stopping the Ambition too wasn’t the right move.
The strategy for Bajaj is imple. They have won the battle in 150, 125, and now in the 220+ cc’s. If they can only create a bike which can outsell the Splendor+, Hero Honda would be dead.
And if HH doesn’t do anything drastic, they could join a long list - Yamaha / Kinetic / LML etc.
Thanks for reading the review folks. I do hope my prediction does not come true, though it seems evident!!
PS: The writer is a Hero Honda enthusiast, doing this only for the good of Hero Honda. After all, if the company does bad, I will struggle for spares in a few years’ time!!