Opinion: Will We Ever Get A Versys 400-X?

[advrider]

Earlier this summer, Kawasaki once again dashed the hopes of many ADVrider inmates and released the 2023 Versys-X 300. That doesn’t sound like a particularly bad thing, especially considering the little adventure bike is quite well-liked by its owners. But, a 2023 300 model means—we’ll have to wait at least one more year before seeing the machine that so many people want, a Versys-X 400.

It sounds like a no-brainer. When Kawasaki brought the Ninja 300 out for 2013, then the Z300 for 2014, and then the Versys-X 300 for 2017, it looked like a pattern was forming. Team Green was going to build a whole series of machines around its smallbore parallel twin, right? But when the Ninja 400 came out for 2018, and then the Z400 for 2019, we got no Versys-X 400 following. Why?

You could speculate that Kawasaki may have planned such a move for 2020, and then COVID-19 interfered. This sounds sensible, until you remember we never saw any prototypes, no leaked images, no patents. Kawi could have kept such a project under wraps for a while, but now it’s 2022. Surely we would have seen such a bike leaked by now. We have a long-running forum thread about speculation over a Kawasaki Versys-X 400, with thousands of posts, and we’re no closer to a new bike than we were when the thread was started, back in 2017.

There’s definitely lots of interest in a larger Versys-X, so why hasn’t Kawasaki made such a machine? And will we ever get one, in the future?

I think the Versys-X 400 idea hasn’t happened because of a perfect storm of market factors.

First off, COVID-19 probably did have an impact, if Kawasaki ever did have plans for a project like this. With all sorts of supply chain issues and general mayhem in factories and production lines, the last couple years haven’t been conducive to lineup changes. Kawasaki is certainly willing to introduce new machines (we have the new ZX-4R and a couple of electric motorcycles coming in next season), but no doubt it wants to focus its industrial capacity where those efforts make the most sense.

Second. Kawasaki’s management isn’t dumb. They know that governments, particularly in the west, are pushing hard for an end to gasoline motorcycle sales in coming years. Why not extract maximum profit from the 300 machine, instead of investing into a 400 platform that might be banned in many western markets in a decade or so? Customers in the rest of the world are much happier with their existing 300 than North Americans and Euro riders, so why mess with a good thing?

Third, there’s way more competition from China. Chinese manufacturers are pushing hard into the 300-500cc adventure bike space, which would undercut a Versys-X 400 on price. Why battle it out with Chinese manufacturers in a race to the financial bottom, when Kawasaki can instead focus on electric motorcycles, a market the Chinese are unlikely to challenge them anytime soon?

Put this all together and I suspect we will never see Kawasaki sell a Versys-X 400, as much as I and many other riders would like to see that happen. As for a potential timeline, if Kawi actually did release such a bike? Well, we know now that it won’t hit the market until at least 2024…

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