Just a couple of days back got a chance to ride India’s first on-off road bike the Hero Impulse. These are my observations about this bike:
Pros: Looks awesome in person.
Super smooth engine.
Comfortable riding posture.
Good pickup and nicely spread torque.
Parts are of good quality, feels sturdy.
Cons: TALL, not recommended for the guys shorter than 5.8ft.
This is the first bike that Hero Moto Corp has launched after the break-up with Honda. Though it is more or less same as Honda NXR Bros which is sold in some other country. Moving on, the first observation about the bike was that it was very handsome looking bike and very tall at the same time. It really looks different from the slew of bikes flooding our Indian roads. Sit on the bike and you can feel that you are sitting on some different sort of bike very different and refreshing indeed.
Push the start button and you are greeted with the familiar engine sound, yes this is the same 150cc engine doing duties in other Hero bikes(Hunk and CBZ Xtreme).
The gearbox was pretty smooth and the engine was very torquey, the bike was eager to move forward, I opened the throttle and the pickup was very good though it felt much quicker than it really was. But the power was enough to pull off a wheelie and given that the bike I was riding was showing just about 20Km on the Odo the level of smoothness and power delivery was great for such new(Raw) engine.
The handling of the bike was pretty decent and its easy to chuck around in city traffic.
The suspension us neither stiff nor soft and felt just perfect on smooth roads as well as the broken sections.
Just while I was returning to the showroom I saw a plot where the soil and dirt was pied up and was looking a bit like a dirt track, took the bike there and it was completely at home, the handling was just perfect and it was really fun to ride it there.
To sum up the bike is a looker and a sure head turner. It has a good tested Honda engine delivering decent performance and should also return respectable fuel efficiency. The switchgear was also of decent quality.
And it was the smoothness of this machine that won my heart.
If I were out in the market hunting for a 150cc bike this bike is what I would have bought. I strongly recommend this bike.
Raxit