In a world of increasingly specialised machines, Kawasaki’s Z900 is a classic do-it-all motorcycle at a please-em-all price

Kawasaki has draped the letter ‘Z’ on bikes since the Z1 in 1972, an era when one bike had to do it all: tour, scratch, race, commute, rally and more. Those early Z bikes did ‘engine’ very well, and ‘bullet-proof’ pretty well too. Handling, not so much. But no one cared about handling back then – it was all about tuning them to a standstill and vision-blurring grunt. Kawasaki Z bikes did that well.

These days, bikes have gone into niche mode, with a different model for each purpose. There’s a growing number of riders utterly oblivious to bikes sitting outside their perceived domain – a cruiser for cruising, an adventure bike for going off road, a tourer for touring, etc. The only two-wheeled genre that remains ‘do it all’, mostly anyway, is the nakedbike. With this in mind, Kawasaki has produced a bargain bike that will be many things to many people: the 2017 Z900.