Z900 (MY2020)

This is the part of the bike I'd defend hardest. None of the suspension is premium hardware, yet the people who set it up plainly knew what they were doing, because that cheap spec never reaches me when I ride. Turn-in is light and honest: I commit to a corner and the front tucks onto the line I picked, then holds it steady without asking for a single correction. The real test comes on the way out. Roll the throttle on hard, the front unloads, and instead of getting nervous the chassis just stays locked on the arc and hooks up. Highway miles feel equally unbothered. Best of all is how wide its comfort zone runs, from a cautious crawl through a bend to a genuinely fast pass with the pegs touching down, and it copes with both ends like neither one troubles it.

Parked, these brakes promise nothing. The calipers are ordinary-looking kit, the sort of setup that signals no ambition under showroom lights. Get rolling and the impression inverts. The bite comes in crisp and easy to read, there's genuine authority in how fast they scrub off speed, and the modulation is fine enough to place the pressure exactly where I want it. Whatever the static look suggested, it badly undersold them.

What makes this bike hard to fault is how much ground it covers without feeling stretched. Nervous newcomers can keep it gentle and never get bitten, while riders who live on the throttle still find plenty to chew on. A few hardware choices betray the budget when it's parked, but ride it and that worry evaporates: engine, chassis tune and balance all pull the same direction, and nothing reads like a corner got cut where it actually counts.

Two engines live inside this one motor, and the gap between them is the whole appeal. Down low it's almost absurdly mild: I can hold a 20 mph (30 km/h) zone at barely any revs, ease the throttle back open, and it pulls without any scramble for a lower gear, though the first crack of throttle in 1st and 2nd gear can still arrive with a slight on/off snatch. The dual-throttle-valve injection earns the credit for that smoothness. There's real heft behind each roll-on too, the kind of unhurried confidence a smaller engine simply can't manufacture. Then the top half flips the mood. From the midrange up it sharpens, gets greedy for revs, and keeps reaching for more with no strain bleeding through to me. Below that it stays linear and easy to meter with one finger. One engine, two clearly separate temperaments, and the handover between them never shows a seam.

I didn't hand this one back after a quick loop. I kept it well beyond the usual test window, and the longer it stayed the firmer my read on it got. Nothing worked loose and nothing soured across months of hard use. If anything the extra time played like a quiet endorsement: every ride backed up the impression I'd formed in the first hour rather than poking holes in it. I came away without a single nagging doubt.

What strikes me first throwing a leg over is how the height actually works in my favor. I'm a tall rider, and this generation's higher standard saddle finally lets my knees settle into a relaxed bend instead of cramping at me after an hour. At the same time the seat sits low enough that I can get both boots down cleanly at a stop, so the added height never costs me any confidence when I'm stationary. Plenty of bikes get that balance wrong in one direction or the other. The grumbles all live in the calibration. The cushion has a forward tilt that slowly slides me toward the tank no matter how I plant myself, and the springs are set firm, so what feels crisp and purposeful on a quick blast turns into a steady nag on stop-start commutes. If most of your miles are urban, spend a full day on it before committing. Two smaller things bug me up close. The handlebar is too slender for a machine carrying this much muscle, and once I clocked that mismatch I couldn't unfeel it through my palms. And the cockpit, sharp as the readout is on the move, goes clumsy the second I reach in to change a setting, leaving me poking at the left cluster in a sequence nobody seems to have finished. None of it spoils the bike. It's the price of a chassis set up to thrill rather than pamper.

On the practical side the lighting is the clear win: it runs LED throughout as standard, with nothing I'd want to swap for more output. The companion app is the letdown. It gathers vehicle data and keeps simple logs, which sounds handy on paper, but the interface is stiff enough that I quit opening it inside a week. The finish tells the same story. Everything functions properly, it just doesn't carry the visual polish to match what the bike does once it's rolling.