Kawasaki India has pulled the plug on the Ninja 400 supersport motorcycle. The Ninja 400 sat above the ageing Ninja 300 and was recently joined by its successor, the Ninja 500 in the market. The Ninja 500 was always supposed to replace the Ninja 400 but Kawasaki waited to sell the remaining stock before taking the bike off their Indian website.
The Ninja 400 was a fun, easy-to-ride supersport that a lot of enthusiasts loved. Its design, refined and responsive parallel-twin engine, and agile chassis are what riders appreciated to quite an extent. What remained its proverbial Achilles heel was the high asking price. Kawasaki India imported the bike as a CBU which attracted huge tax rates and that pushed the on-road price of the bike in cities like Mumbai over Rs 6.5 lakh. That was simply too much for a 400cc motorcycle.
The Ninja 300, on the other hand, uses quite a lot of locally sourced components which has allowed Kawasaki to price it competitively and this is also why it is still on sale as there is demand for it. We’d have wished Kawasaki had taken a similar approach for the Ninja 500 which, like the Ninja 400 is CBU import and is priced at an astronomical price of Rs 5.24 lakh, ex-showroom.
While it has a fresh design, a new parallel-twin engine, and an LCD instrument cluster with Bluetooth connectivity, the price is going to be a hard pill for potential customers to swallow.