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Come on, admit it. This one was inevitable. The day Honda decided to sell a sporty 150cc motorcycle powered by a single cylinder liquid cooled motor in India, the Yamaha R15 was the bike to take on. After all, the R15 was the king of the hill at the time, and when it was first launched in 2008, it rewrote all the rules that motorcycle manufacturers were to follow there on.
And those were steadfast, non-bendable rules, I must remind you. Before the R15, it was almost a belief that liquid cooled, fully-faired sporty motorcycles could not be had for below Rs 1.5 lakh. The R15 went on and did just that, banishing the naysayers into oblivion.
But even the greats run their course. And being the best of the pack comes with its own set of problems. Nobody wants to be an also-ran, and it just makes the competition work harder to up their game, it makes them desperate to usurp the crown, to come up as the top of the lot. So then, has the R15, now in its Version 2 avatar, finally met its match in the CBR 150R? Well, there is only one way to find out – dissect every aspect that contributes to the whole of both motorcycles and then compare them with each other. So let’s first look at the acceleration figures. The R15 Version 2 clocked a 0-60 kph time of 5.7 seconds, while the tonne on the Yamaha came in at 15.01 seconds. The Honda, on the other hand, did a 0-60 kph run in 5.9 seconds while 100 kph came at 15.08 seconds from standstill. It must be noted that the Yamaha had about 20,000-odd kilometres on its odometer, while the CBR had done a mere 535 kilometres.
Numbers are one thing, but that seat-of-your-pants feeling is what largely matters when it comes to motorcycles. Gut feel, if I may say so. Without much ado, here goes...
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