Report: Kawasaki building a minibike that looks to steal Grom sales

According to a report from Thai website Motorival.com, Kawasaki is about to release a minibike that competes with the Honda Grom.

Since its introduction in 2013, the Honda Grom has gone basically unchallenged in the market. No other mainstream manufacturer has built anything like Big Red’s 125 cc minibike, with its split personality of cute runabout and grin-inducing hooligan bike. Now, apparently, Kawasaki is taking a stab at it.

Historically, this makes sense. Although Honda’s monkey bikes are the best-known of all the undersized two-wheelers that thrilled buyers in decades gone by, every manufacturer had a stab at that market. It’s surprising it’s taken this long for the rest of the Big Four to catch up — it’s not as if the Grom features complicated technology or anything.

Speaking of technology, it’s hard to deduce much from this photo except that the bike (allegedly a Z125, in the same family as Kawasaki’s Z800, Z1000 and Z300 naked bikes) has upside-down forks and air-cooled engine.