Spoiled for choice: Jawa Motorcycles are back!

Spoiled for choice: Jawa Motorcycles are back!

Starting at ₹1.55 lac, the forever bike aims straight for cross-generational nostalgia. Many hankies were needed

I’ll be honest. Two years ago, when we all piled into the small press briefing room in Mahindra Towers, Mumbai, I was skeptical, and more than concerned about my car getting towed, since there’s absolutely no parking in a 5km radius. The briefing was about Mahindra Two Wheelers — makers of wheelers that fired nothing in me. They chatted about their past challenges, but looked forward to resurrecting two international bike brands. One for international markets, and another for back home — Jawa. “Well, shit.” I thought, expecting another weird contraption that answered a question nobody was asking. Evidently, I was wrong.

The 90-year old Czech marque had a good run in India from the ’60s to the ’90s as “Ideal Jawa”, making motorcycles under the “Yezdi” brand. They were simple — two-stroke, single cylinder, twin exhausts, tough and comfortable. You could get them to run on any mildly flammable liquid. You needed the knack of a savant, or the foot of Thor to kickstart the things, but as is wont in a world with few choices, they embedded themselves deeply into our culture. Certainly, the Yezdi/Jawa community were out in full force at the launch event — friends, even — so I can vouch for the cachet the brand still commands.

The new Jawa bikes come in three flavours: the Jawa (just Jawa), the Jawa 42 and the Perak “factory custom”. The Jawa and 42 will be available first, running a 293cc, 27hp/28Nm single-cylinder, liquid-cooled motor. The sexy-looking Perak bobber will come later with a bored-out 334cc mill making 30hp/31Nm. Equipment is basic — an analogue dial, a tiny little LCD within, single-channel ABS and a drum brake out back (disc for the Perak). The cycle parts comprise standard forks up front, twin shocks out back (mono for the Perak), and that’s about all there is to it. The story is in the story spun, and the way they look.

They are beautiful, undoubtedly. The Jawa harks straight back to the 250cc bikes we saw as kids, with a metal shroud going all the way around the headlamp. Naturally, the show bikes were the signature maroon colour with gold pinstripes. The Forty Two takes a mildly different approach (and adds three more colours) by eschewing the shroud, using an off-centre dial and different mirrors. It’s also slightly different in the rider geometry. And finally, the Perak is quite different, mostly in the rear with a longer wheelbase, monoshock and all-black, sinister look. We’ll be keen on seeing how this finally turns out, but things looked production-ready at launch.

The Jawa brand is being reintroduced by a company called Classic Legends, founded by Anupam Thareja, also founder and managing partner of Phi Capital, a private equity group. Other collaborators include Boman Irani, CMD of the real-estate developer, Rustomjee Group and Anand Mahindra, who owns a majority stake. Irani’s father, Rustom Irani was the co-founder of Ideal Jawa in 1961. That’s a diverse set of stakeholders for a motorcycle company, and they’re taking a leaf out of the Royal Enfield playbook by focusing on brand first, and taking a lean approach by contract-manufacturing the bikes. Thareja is reported to have initiated the turnaround at RE as well.

So the bikes are here in the sheet metal, and they look better in person than in the spy shots. It’s a different approach to building a motorcycle, and is relying heavily on nostalgia for uptake. The Jawa will cost ₹1.65 lac, The Jawa 42 ₹1.55 lac and the Perak ₹1.89 lac, to come later. There will be a claimed 105 dealerships for launch, starting in December so we can expect customer bikes to be on roads in early 2019.

One can generally suss out a fair bit from the way companies organise launch events, and this one looked like they wanted to do it right. Money was spent on location, scale, social outreach. They’ve been talking to the right people and hiring familiar faces.

The new Jawas definitely look like answers to questions a lot of us have been asking, and come in at sweet price-points to go directly against Royal Enfield products. Announced the very day after Royal Enfield themselves took the express elevator to another segment and then burned it for everyone else.

Ballsy, but I remain cautious.