2020 Kawasaki Z Range Review, from the learner legal Z125 to the crazy ZH2

Welcome to this 2020 Kawasaki Z model range overview. From the A1 licence friendly 125 to the very much licence unfriendly supercharged H2. I spent the last couple of days riding the entire range so that I can share an informed opinion with you. No, they're not choppers, they're motorcycles. And no, Z's not dead, baby. Quite the opposite. And it's Z, not Z for all you merkins. Bloody Z. Like this, Z-E-D-Z. So before I get stuck into sharing my thoughts on the little 125, I need to just let you know that there is no Z1000 in this range. Kawasaki UK didn't have one available for us to ride so we've just left it out. I've ridden it loads. If you want to know about it, drop me an email. I can share thoughts on the used versions going back over the last 15 years. I can share details and opinions on the latest one. But what we can't do is show you any footage so we're not going to talk about the Z1000 for the next 15 minutes or so. Let's go for a ride on this little Z125. Now, if you're of a certain age, probably a couple of years older than me to be honest, but I can still very much remember them. You're probably looking at this and wondering how it would fare against a Kawasaki AR125 from way back in the day. I can tell you it probably wouldn't in straight line performance terms. This is 15 horsepower. The old AR was 22. Zingy, revvy. This isn't that kind of thing. This is a single cylinder. It loves to rev but it's a different kind of bike. AR125 was like a baby GPZ back in the day. This little Z125 sits perfectly in the Z family which means it's not sat in the Ninja family. It's not trying to be a baby ZX6 or anything like that. The little Z125 was no different to any of the other performance singles that I've ridden. There's a pocket of power way further up the rev range than you'd expect. On this one, if I remember, it was between 10,500 and 11,000 revs. There's not much going on in between anywhere else really. But hang on to the revs, get it zinging, fire a few gears into it. There's six, all of them perfectly placed. It's doing everything that big bikes do, it's just taking longer to do it. I don't know if it was on purpose or not but the producer handily dragged me onto the M40 by accident, he said afterwards. So I can quite confidently state that that bike will do motorway speeds with me and my COVID 19 pound baby that I'm lugging at the minute. There's almost 15 stone on that poor little bike. We were doing 70 miles an hour quite happily along the M40 for a couple of junctions. The Z125 is the most powerful A1 license compliant motorcycle that money can buy. So if you are a power hungry teenager and you just want to be able to say you've got the most powerful bike that money can possibly buy if you've got an A1 license, that's the one to go for. As with all Zs, there's a little bit of mechanical attitude. They love to be revved. They love being chucked into corners. They love going nuts basically. This one just goes nuts at a much, much lower rate of knots than any of the other Zs I've ever ridden. Now as I said in my helmet, if you are the parent that's being asked to buy this bike for a child or you are indeed the child asking a parent to pay for it, you're getting a quality piece of kit. The little digital dash, the little rose petal discs, all of the things that you would associate if you've been a Kawasaki owner for the last 10 or 15 years. You can look at these bikes straight away without any colour on them, any badges, any stickers and know that you're looking at a Kawasaki. And then when you jump on it, there is a tactile and quality feel that Kawasaki's have that's quite unique to them. It's a quality little piece of kit that starts at 3,499 quid for the base model in green and it goes up about 500 quid for the performance pack or one of the other variants of colours available. Excuse me, supper and a drink. It's the hottest day of the year. When you're riding all day, I'm absolutely boiling. Just to summarise my thoughts on the Z125, I'd be quite happy boffing around town on it and if one of my many children, if you haven't heard me banging on about them before, I've got four daughters. If one of the girls ended up on a Z125, I'd be more than happy for them to ride it. I don't think I'd go for that noisy exhaust though, I don't think it really does anything for the bike apart from annoy the neighbours. It's fun, it's good fun. Moving on, the Z400, the real star of the show for me. Wasn't expecting to enjoy that bike at all and I'll give you my order of which bike I would take home first at the end but that's a properly cool little bike. 44 horsepower, it actually makes more power and weighs less than the Z300 that it's superseded. So I jumped on it having lots of experience of riding. Do you remember years ago I rode the Ninja 300 Cup bike with Chris at Brands Hatch. I've ridden the 300 quite a bit in various guises, Ninja and Z. A bit meh, a bit meh with all of the 300s from all of the manufacturers actually. But when you make that step up to 400cc, you just seem to be making a little bit more of a shift into like a middle weight performance. Proper performance, usable, zingy, get yourself into trouble performance. The clock set on the 400 is very different to the 125. Reminds me a little bit of the old ER6F and N from a couple of years ago. There is a gear position indicator, that's quite a handy addition. Speedo's very easy to read. The 400 really surprised me in as much as as soon as I jumped on it. I probably underestimated a little bit how much power that it had. It makes usable power all the way around to the red line. Wow, that's different. I'm going to say now, I don't think I had it off the limiter. I expected to be bouncing that thing off the limiter everywhere. And on the little test route that we devised out in the Chilton Hills, we tried to do the same loop with every single bike to give a feeling of the difference in performance and capability of each of the models in the range. But also to help you understand visually how different these bikes look when they're doing the same thing. It's a lovely little test road that we found. It's just bumpy enough to give you a feel for what the suspension is doing. And again, if we have a look, there's no adjust like most bikes nowadays at the kinds of price points that we're at. And with the kind of focus that these bikes have, they don't need adjustable suspension. Front brake feel is good. The little 400 absolutely surprised me everywhere. And I'll save where it is in my little pecking order of Zs until the end. So although you might think on paper, looking at the differences between Z4 and Z650, that they're fairly similar bikes, both parallel twins, both green, both Kawasaki's, blah, blah, blah. I think there's a gulf of difference in performance and just how they make you feel between Z4 and Z650, which we'll move on to in a minute. The Z400 starts at £5,099 and it stops at £5,599 for the performance version that we've been riding. I'd definitely go for the performance one. Unlike the 125, I think that bike suits having a fruity pipe on it. It makes a lovely noise. Zing the nuts off it. Have some fun. I could keep talking about that bike all day, but just a beautifully balanced machine. Great brakes. Trusted the Dunlop tyres. Don't care that the suspension is unadjustable. Apart from the shock, I think it's got a five-way preload adjuster on it. Just a great bike to jump on and have some fun. We're definitely into kind of mid or big bike territory with the way this bike feels. And the fact that we're cutting along at 40 miles an hour in fourth gear and I know I can roll the throttle off and immediately get drive if I need it. That's the big difference that you get and probably the biggest difference that you'll see when you step from a 125 that you've done your CBT on up to the next bike, whatever it is. So as long as the bike that you're upgrading to when you're finished with your 125 is about this size, you're going to see and feel a massive jump in performance. So to the Z650, another parallel twin. It's actually the second generation modern Z650. They've cleaned up the emissions, they've made changes to inlet and exhaust valves. So it still makes the same 67 horsepower at about 8,000 revs as the previous version, but it's getting through EU45678. Take your pick, whichever one matters the most at the minute. They've also made a couple of changes to the ergonomics. The passenger seat is a little bit wider and thicker. They've added the TFT dash. That's a really welcome addition for me and one that when I was leaping from, leaping, it's hot. When I was kind of sliding from one bike to the other today, the family feel between 650, 900 and ZH2 was very much apparent in the TFT dash. It's a really nice touch and it lets you know that you're on the trajectory to the big boy stuff in the Z range when you're on that 650. But it feels like you might be on the 900 ZH2. The riding position is a little bit more extreme than I expected. The pegs want my feet a little bit closer to my ass than I expected. But it's still a very easy and comfortable bike to ride in as much as the seat height I think is about 780 millimeters. The standover is tiny. It's such a narrow thing. It's really easy to grab hold of. So if you're a new rider and you're thinking about making that step up to your first kind of big bike, that 650 is going to tick a load of boxes for you. It's got stacks of power. You can rev the nuts off it and it just seems to enjoy being anywhere in the rev range. There's torque at the bottom. There's nice driving in the mid-range and you can also hang on to gears. So if you're looking for that bike that's going to allow you to just start taking a few liberties with the throttle without showing you massive numbers and getting you into loads of trouble, the Z650 is definitely a place to go and have a test ride. I enjoyed the entire ride on the 650 but as you can probably guess based on what I was saying about the 400, I think I'd probably prefer the smaller capacity parallel twin in this range than the 650. It does do everything. I just don't think it does everything as well as its smaller brother or its bigger brother. If you think that's me saying it's slow, type in Ryan Farquhar Mini Twin Isle of Man TT and then send me an email complaining about how slow you think that bike is. Unlike the 400 and the 125, we're into the realms of adjustable levers now. Tiny little extra touches of quality. Simple suspension, quality brakes. Let's get around this corner and just stick the brakes on and see what happens. I'll tell you what happens. All the water you've been drinking all day tries to come out of your mouth. The Z650 starts at £6,649. We rode it at £7,749. That's the performance version. And then for £7,849 you can have the black and white one. Much like the 400, I'd go for the performance one as we've ridden it. The Z900. The star of the show for me. It would have been before I rode them all back to back and I don't mind saying now it still is after having ridden all of them for the last couple of days. This bike at this price point I think offers A, fantastic value for money and B, just a mega ride. It's so good at everything. In tech terms you get the TFT dash, you get this Bluetooth Rideology connectivity with your phone. I've tried it with a couple of manufacturers and I'm yet to be convinced. Maybe that's because I'm getting old and I've got grey in my beard now. You get power modes, you get traction control, you get slipper clutch, you get six really well placed gears. You get just loads of stuff for your money. But what you also get for your 124 horsepower is the ability to just flatter the riding talent that you might have, flatter the wheelie ability that you might have. I've tried not to pull any over the last couple of days. I did say in my helmet earlier on that I'm making a concerted effort to relieve the tension on the NHS by delivering this 15 stone sack of wine to an A&E department because I've looped a wheelie. So no wheelies over the last few days. I have done some though. Cut to the launch. But trust me, this bike will honk wheelies all day long. It's a real struggle to find holes to pick in this bike. I know I've only been on it for five minutes, but I spent a long time riding it on the launch. And I know the evolution of this bike pretty intimately, having ridden all of the others quite a lot as well. By others I mean its predecessors. Bumps on the inside of this road, swallows all of them up. Let's have a little zap of acceleration in this National Speed Limit Park. More than enough. I think I said in the original video, the launch video, that the amount of power that this makes in real world terms, for me, is just about perfect. 123 bhp. More is obviously better and gooder, because more power is always gooder. But, speaking realistically, 125 bhp, that'll do me. Yeah, that bike isn't just a one trick pony. It really will do little bits of everything, but it does them all really, really well. Whether that's touring, scratching, commuting, sitting in the garage and just staring at it. I think for a Japanese bike, the design approach, for me, has been properly considered. Not always something that you could say of all Japanese bikes. Particularly one that just sits in the almost plain Jane, middleweight, naked sector. Yeah, on a day like today, I'm smiling just cruising along on this. For a sports bike or somebody that was on a hot one past, I'd be happy to go with them. If not, I'm just going to carry on mooching and enjoy this ride. They've put loads of effort into it and it's really paid off. The base model is £8,849. The performance version is £9,749. I think that is great value for money. In today's climate, wherever the economy is about to go, let's not go there yet. In today's climate right now, all that bike for that kind of money, I think, is a bit of a steal. And now to the biggest exercise in restraint from any motorcycle manufacturer ever in the history of time. The ridiculous Kawasaki ZH2. You're probably looking at video of me right now riding around the Chiltern Hills, riding on the UK roads. This is my first ride on this bike since the press launch on February 7th this year. It was my 40th birthday. I went to Las Vegas. It was a real treat. I rode this bike on track. Two kinds of track. The NASCAR overly thing and this kind of testing, proving facility circuit. It wasn't a racetrack like Donington. It was a weird, flat, featureless set of corners with no speed limits. That's what I'm going to call it. So as much as I'd like to have had an opinion about how they perform in the UK, I hadn't had one until today. I can tell you it's really, really, really, very, really, really hard indeed to keep your licence dry when you're riding this bike in the UK. The only way that I can make safe progress on this, and by safe I mean keeping my licence safe, is to find the highest gear possible and just touch the throttle as little as possible. If you're anywhere near second gear and anywhere near 40 miles an hour, this bike is just waiting to throw you at the horizon. Faster than a text message. I don't know how to even explain how fast it is. Aside from the legalese of numbers, it's incredibly composed everywhere. As with all Kawasaki's, and the Z range in particular is a great example of bikes on paper that appear to weigh more than they should, but once you get a ride on them, that weight just disappears. This ZH2 is a great example of that. I found out doing the filming today, sticking U-turns in, there isn't enough steering lock for me. There isn't enough steering lock for the kind of riding we do where we're zipping up and down the same road over and over again for pictures or video, and also for the kind of riding that I always end up banging on about back at home in London. Cutting through traffic, I think, might be a bit of an issue because of the steering lock, but the simple fix that I realised with this bike is, rather than doing a U-turn that takes three or four goes, it's so fast, you can just ride all the way around the world and come back to where you started from without having to do a U-turn. Ta-da! They thought about it all. Horrendously, horrifically, amazingly fast. I love it, and I would never tell anyone not to buy one because that would be ridiculous, but get a test ride and just get an understanding of, A, how much power this bike makes and how easy it is to use, and B, the demonstration of torque that's available. I did give, or try and give, a practical demonstration while I was wearing my onboard stuff. Put the bike in top gear, let the speed drop down to single figures, nine miles an hour, no clutch slip, nothing, just stuck the thing on the stop. There wasn't a shudder, there wasn't a judder, it was just clean drive, and within a couple of seconds it was doing 50 miles an hour, and within a second or two I had to put my hand over the clocks and hide the speed that it was doing. There is a couple of questions about the looks. There's a Sugomi style that all of the bikes in the Z range have. Now, Sugomi, if you haven't heard me talking about it before, is kind of equal consideration is given to how something looks compared to how it should perform. I've said on the Z900 launch video the easiest way to describe it is to look at the tail light. It's the letter Z, but it also functions as a brake light. In Sugomi terms, when you consider the ZH2 and the performance that it has, and the way that it goes about delivering that performance, some people think this bike is ugly, but I think for it to look as equal as it performs, this bike could be Margot Robbie naked on a trampoline doing backflips, juggling two packets of Hobnobs and a bottle of Corona, and it still wouldn't look as good as this bike goes. It's the fastest thing I've ever ridden on the road, and I don't mind admitting it'll be the first time I've ever done it as a journo. This bike's too much for me on the road. I could feel myself today getting frustrated at not being able to go as fast as I want, and then other times just wondering what the hell I was doing, doing the numbers that I was doing where I was doing them. If I had the choice, this wouldn't be my first choice in the Z range. Obviously I want one, and I'd be more than happy to own one, I just don't think my license would appreciate it at all. The cheapest ZH2 you can buy is £15,149. The most expensive ZH2 you can buy is £16,799. If you can afford one, you can afford the other. Go for the best one that you can. Go for the biggest, fastest, loudest, most ridiculous ZH2. They're both going to deliver exactly the same thing, which is probably you to the nearest jail within about five minutes of owning the thing. It's brilliant. There you have it. A fairly concise overview of five, I think, sector-leading motorcycles. Whichever area of the market each of these bikes sits in, I think they would be in the top two or three of that sector of the market. I've had a brilliant couple of days, not least because I got to watch the producer pushing bikes in and out of the van. Trusty Ford Transit has been on hand over the last few days, helping us shuttle these bikes to and from Kawasaki UK here up into the Chiltern Hills. I say it after all of my reviews, but now matters more so than ever. Thanks to coronavirus and lockdown and people not getting out and riding and buying bikes, your dealers need your support as much as possible. Get yourself along for a test ride. Steal their coffee, kick their tyres. You don't even have to buy a bike. I can guarantee, much like all of the other manufacturers, there are some scorching hot 0% finance deals going around at the minute. You might find that you can treat yourself to any one of these five bikes and I guarantee you'll be happy with what you buy. Oh yeah, just to finish, I said at the start that I would list my favourites in order of favourite. So I'm going to start with the Z900, obviously. And then it's a toss-up between ZH2 and Z400. I think heart says ZH2, head says Z400. So let's go Z9, ZH2, Z4, Z650, Z125.