When is a 500 Not a 500? – Question of the Day
When it's a 451, d'uh.
In our last Question of the Day, we asked about some of the more… questionable names given to motorcycles (Hondas seemed to come up fairly often in the replies, which is both interesting and somehow not surprising.) I mentioned how it’s generally safer for a manufacturer to stick to a combination of letters and numbers.
While that’s generally true, apart from the occasionally comical practice of tackling on another “R” to make a model sound sportier ( looking at you again, Honda), it does bring the focus onto yet another common pet peeve: motorcycles with misleading numbers in the name.
The latest culprit is Kawasaki’s Ninja 500, which reviewer Sylvia Houston called “borderline egregious”, as its Twin-cylinder engine’s displacement is only 451cc. Along with the Z500 and the Eliminator (which is also marketed as a 500 in Europe), we have a range of models all rounding up instead of going by the more accurate and marginally less marketable 450.
This example is more than what we typically see, but Kawasaki is hardly alone. Honda’s 500s are actually 471s, and the Ducati Hypermotard 698 Mono is actually a 659.
But maybe it’s just me. Like men listing their heights on their online dating profiles, maybe we should come to expect a bit of embellishment, and can look past a bit of marketing fluff. After all, it’s not the size that matters, it’s what you do with it.
So, for our Question of the Day, does it bother you when model names are slightly misleading, or do you just accept that marketing is part of the game?
Become a Motorcycle.com insider. Get the latest motorcycle news first by subscribing to our newsletter here.
Dennis has been a part of the Motorcycle.com team since 2008, and through his tenure, has developed a firm grasp of industry trends, and a solid sense of what's to come. A bloodhound when it comes to tracking information on new motorcycles, if there's a new model on the horizon, you'll probably hear about it from him first.
More by Dennis Chung
Comments
Join the conversation
This is nothing new! According to my memory of useless trivia way back Yamaha sold a '305' . it was a 2 stroke twin. but other makers sold 350 cc models, so Yamaha enlarged it to a 315 and labeled it a 350!! Back at that same time Sportsters were called 900 s. Later the same size engine was called an 883? odd I thought
In the later '70s Ducati 900 s were the hot item, haha, but they had only 860 cc.
Years later I bought a KTM 690 Enduro, but it is really a 650, wow a few years later KTM enlarged the engine to actually be a 690.
I imagine there have been more egregious exagerations of displacement, these few just come to mind.
More recently an even more peculiar oddity came along, I admit to forgetting the numbers but BMW was selling 2 models (were they 700 and 800?) but both had the SAME displacement, one was just tuned for less power.
We are served what the marketing departments decide we want and charged accordingly.
my kawasaki ninja 1000SX has 1043 cc - it's still called 1000SX .