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Feet-forward riding position? Low-speed comfort, lockable luggage and epic fuel range? Surely there can be but one solution – a mid-capacity scooter!

Scooters are much-maligned here in the UK, our past obsession with sports bikes often pointed to as the reason why we are apparently the sole nation on this continent not to whole-heartedly embrace this most practical form of two-wheeled transport. Visit a major European city and they’re absolutely everywhere, complete with massive windshields, huge top-boxes and leg-covering scooter skirts. Unfashionable? You may think so, but the Italians seem to disagree, and fashion is kind of their thing.

Cost could be a factor. The example frequently held up is the Yamaha T-Max, which starts at more than £11,000. Admittedly this isn’t exactly a pizza-delivery vehicle, with a spec list that includes 500cc twin-cylinder engine, radial brakes, upside-down forks, heated grips & seat and even cruise control. It’s less of an oversized Vespa, more of a two-wheeled luxury sedan, with performance to match.And other scooters are available. If you don’t need or want motorcycle-grade top speeds then there’s new growth in the 300cc scooter segment. Yamaha revamped its X-Max last year, Kymco and Kawasaki have been swapping badges and paint on their respective offerings and Honda’s latest 300cc Forza has just landed here in the UK. It’s a perfect opportunity to test out the concept and see if a 20-30bhp automatic could meet my needs as a low-speed tourer.

First impressions are good, but probably depend on your own aesthetic preferences. I happen to like the angular spaceship-with-wheels styling, but I’m sure it isn’t for everyone. The wheels are well-proportioned, although at fifteen inches are still considerably smaller than what most of us will be used to. Where the Forza begins to really impress is when you take a closer look and start to dig in to the spec sheet & features lists.

To start with you get full LED lighting from stem to stern – no incandescent bulbs to fail unexpectedly while on tour, which means no need to carry spares. They’re also a damn sight brighter, and do a great job of attracting the attention of perennially distracted car drivers. Next up, a centre stand comes included, something that – with fitting – often adds close to £400 to your average adventure-tourer’s price tag. Unfortunately, it turns out the real reason for this is that the Honda refuses to start or run while the side-stand is extended, a safety feature necessitated by the automatic twist-and-go gearbox on the Forza.

At the back we have a secure cavernous under-seat storage area, easily matching the capacity of an average top-box, while simultaneously keeping any luggage weight low to the ground. A top-box is available if yet more storage is required, with the added benefit of being linked to the same keyless access system the ignition uses.

That’s right – up front, there’s nowhere to insert a key, a proximity fob similar to many high-spec cars is provided instead. As long as this key is somewhere about your person, you can push the ignition knob to activate the system and then twist it to the relevant position. Setting the ignition to On wakes up the comprehensive dashboard tucked away inside the fairing. Road & engine speed are represented by large dials with easy-to-read numbers either side of an inverted LCD display. Here a bored rider could monitor air temperature, charging system voltage and instantaneous fuel consumption, alongside the usual twin trip meters and multi-segment fuel-gauge and coolant temperature.

Settings can be scrolled through using the left-hand switch-gear, which also includes the controls for disabling the traction control system (not really necessary with just 25bhp) and raising and lowering the electronically-adjustable screen. This last piece of equipment sounds great on paper, reacting quickly to the controls and allowing you to keep your view clear around town and dial in more wind protection on the motorway.

Unfortunately, in practice the windshield is at best ineffective and at worst downright awful. I’m 5 foot 10, and my choices were limited to where on my helmet I wanted the turbulent air directed. In the low setting I got a whistling noise and an amplified amount of air forced through the tiniest gaps in my visor’s seal. In the highest setting my head was batted around like a tethered ping-pong ball at anything above 50mph. A new shape and possibly a much taller screen are desperately needed. Either that, or a hacksaw to remove it entirely and let my Shoei’s aerodynamics do their job in a clear air stream.More useful is the small fairing cubbyhole on the left-hand side of the front fairing. Neatly integrated and otherwise invisible so as to avoid tempting casual thieves, it’s surprisingly spacious, large enough to hold a water bottle. It also contains a 12V power socket, although this will be limited to charging smartphones. Heated gear will draw more power than the meagre 24 Watts on offer, and would require leaving the cubby open to allow the cables to exit.

It’s very telling that we’re almost 1,000 words into this review and I have yet to mention the brakes, suspension or engine at all. Unfortunately, this where it all falls apart for me. None of those components do a bad job, per se. There’s just nothing remarkable or memorable about the experience they offer. The suspension, basic as it is with old-fashioned twin-shocks hanging off the end of the swing-arm, works fine, absorbing the undulations of our pock-marked road surface without too much difficulty. Pot-holes are to be avoided, especially with those smaller wheels, but given the superior quality of tarmac available on the continent shouldn’t present a problem while on tour.

The brakes are odd. Both operated by levers on the bars, the front brake is relatively tame and squishy, the rear biting so hard that it the ABS system can be triggered at will. I quickly reverted to my usual scooter tactic of squeezing both levers hard and genuinely wonder why a single linked lever couldn’t be offered instead. The rear is too sharp to be used for slow-speed manoeuvres, and the smooth engagement of the constantly-variable transmission and automatic clutch mean that U-turns can be executed using throttle alone.

The whole drivetrain, in fact, is utterly unremarkable. If it weren’t for the very faint vibration and low buzz at the edge of earplug-dampened-hearing you could believe that this was Honda’s first electric motorcycle. Torque off the line is smooth and plentiful, tapering off quickly as speeds rise towards the national limit. An indicated 90 is possible, or so I’ve heard from a friend, and if it weren’t for the atrocious windshield the Forza would be perfectly capable of crossing the empty expanses of northern France during the opening salvos of a longer tour.

At lower speeds the throttle response is perfectly judged and the added headroom over lower-capacity scooters means that overtakes are perfectly achievable, albeit with a little more forward planning than is necessary on the 150+bhp monsters many of us are used to. On the other hand, at an impressive 80mpg during mixed riding, as well as cheaper consumables and servicing, it will cost an awful lot less to run than such powerful machines.

While trundling along at 30-40mph is utterly effortless, it’s also utterly forgettable. Riding a bicycle would deliver a more memorable experience than this, and means that what I remember most about those stretches of road is the podcast I was listening to at the time. And that, I’m afraid, means that the Forza 300 fails a critical litmus test in my search for a family touring bike. In its attempts to create a two-wheeler to tempt bored commuters out of their anodyne four-wheeled boxes, Honda has succeeded too well. Even the colour options – mostly various shades of grey – match the soulless identikit cars clogging up our nation’s cities each morning.

All the practical stuff is accomplished with the usual efficiency, and as a way to get to work cheaply and easily I cannot fault it. But I don’t need a commuter. I need a fun-to-use low-speed tourer that will galvanise rather than homogenise every mile ridden, that will add flavour to my travels and become a memorable part of those future adventures. And I’m afraid the Honda Forza 300 fails hard here. My search continues…

Nick Tasker

First published in Slipstream April 2019

I rode this bike’s predecessor, the NC700X, back when it first launched in the UK in 2012. There have been several minor changes since then, not least the engine growing 50cc and 7 horsepower. But this year Honda, dramatically restyled the whole 750 lineup, eschewing much of the chunky black plastic in favour of gorgeous metallic paint, with stiffer forks and full LED lighting topping the list of functional updates.

Despite this, on paper the NC remains a cheap, boring motorcycle. 230kg in DCT flavour, the 750cc 270-degree parallel twin manages a peak output of just 54bhp, and a single, lonely two-pot sliding brake caliper tasked with stopping the whole front end. The frame is a low-tech steel-tube cradle, the swing arm a similarly basic extruded steel girder, and a low 6,500 RPM redline completes the apparent picture of sporting-motorcycle antithesis.

And the fact is, the original execution of this concept resulted in a bike rather like a toaster. It did exactly what it said on the tin, competently, efficiently, and with zero chance of raising your pulse. Plenty of people bought them, loving their easy 70-80mpg fuel economy and ridiculously low running costs, with screw-and-locknut valve adjustments and easily-accessible engine making servicing a cinch.

So why on earth did this mildly-updated model catch my eye? Well, aside from the fact that I think Honda’s styling team did a fantastic job, lots of subtle little changes have added up to make a big difference. For one thing, that small power boost actually represents a 16% increase over the original. For another, the new suspension, while not in the same league as Nitron or Öhlins, is surprisingly firm for a stock setup, and does an excellent job of making the NC feel light on its feet.

“If I didn’t already have the V-Strom, and if I hadn’t already spent so much time and money turning it into a ridiculous high-riding GSX-R, I might have put down a deposit this morning. ”

And then there’s the gearbox. Yes, you could buy the original NC700 with Honda’s optional double-clutch engineering marvel. And yes, you can conversely choose to purchase your new NC750 with a manual transmission instead, and receive a bike that is 10kg lighter, and leave your wallet £400 heavier. But this double-clutch automatic gearbox is a world away from the sluggish prototype we saw back in 2012.

A frequent complaint of the manually equipped NC series is owners accidentally running into the rev limiter, even during normal riding. With the automatic gearbox swapping cogs in fractions of a second with or without user input, you never have this problem, and the new Sport mode is happy to hold each gear until the bitter end. Every stop light becomes an excuse for a full-throttle drag race, the surprisingly rewarding exhaust note from the stock silencer egging you on.

The gearbox actually has four modes, Drive being the default, and Sport 1 through 3 providing progressively more aggressive shifting. For maximum contrast I stuck to Sport-3 for fun, twisty roads and then switched back to Drive for town riding, motorways etc. Riding my local twisty B-road at maximum attack back-to-back with my Street Triple, with the gearbox making the most of the 750cc’s low-end torque, I’m not sure I ever really noticed the power deficit. The rider of the Ducati Monster 1200 I overtook certainly looked suitably surprised.

One thing to be very aware of is that in Drive, the gearbox will seemingly only shift down to avoid actually stalling the engine. This means closing the throttle to slow for a corner will result in a complete lack of engine braking, the low-compression engine and high gear combining to give the feeling of a freewheeling bicycle. Gears can be overridden at any time with thumb and forefinger switches, but the first sharp corner I encountered while in the default mode certainly took me by surprise.

This also means that, when in Drive, the gearbox stubbornly refuses to kick down, no matter what, even if you demand full throttle just off idle. I know that this sort of riding behaviour should be reserved for one of the Sport modes that will quite happily drop several gears in response to such ham-fisted inputs, but finding myself completely ignored while in Drive was still somewhat bemusing.

So, compared to the previous model it’s a night-and-day difference. The new bike is fun and frugal (70mpg during spirited riding), and proves very much the less-is-more ethos that makes it so much fun to embarrass faster, more expensive bikes on apparently lesser machinery. But it’s certainly not perfect.

I applaud Honda for choosing too firm over too soft when it comes to the suspension tuning. All too often, sensible bikes are under-sprung and under-damped in order to impress buyers on a timid test ride, then let owners down once they turn the wick up. But while the NC750X feels nicely buttoned-down when attacking a fast, smooth road. My backside quickly became numb from the battering it was receiving over bumpier tarmac, to say nothing of drain covers and potholes.

What’s more, brake hard from higher speeds over a less-than-perfect road surface and you’ll find your stopping distances alarmingly long, as the ABS reacts to the forks inability to track the tarmac with any precision. As always, I’m aware that I’m pushing the running gear beyond its design limits, but its something I’d look to remedy before I found myself unexpectedly parked in the back of someone’s SUV.

I also wish that Honda had managed a nicer-looking swing arm. Extruded steel screams low budget, even if it happens to be a perfectly good engineering solution for lower-power bikes. With everything else about the NC750X now implying a retail price several thousand pounds more than the £7,049 of this DCT-equipped example, this one thing is a bit of a let-down.

Beyond that, we really are descending into pedantic nitpicking. Yes, the stock windshield is, like on most bikes, neither here nor there; it provides too little coverage to block motorway wind, yet is tall enough to push turbulence right into your helmet. Yes, handlebar-mounted switches for the dashboard would be nice, as would a temperature gauge. And yes, a practical all-round commuter like this really should come equipped with handguards as standard.

The seat is a little too firm, the bars could be a little further back, and having to unload a tail pack to access the under-seat fuel filler could become tiresome. The storage where the traditional fuel tank would normally be almost makes up for this, and keeping the weight low helps the bike feel far lighter than the specification suggests. If only fuel capacity were a little more generous than its meagre 14 litres, the impressive fuel economy could make for a real mile-muncher.

But honestly, that’s it. If I didn’t already have the V-Strom, or if I hadn’t already spent so much time and money turning it into a ridiculous high-riding GSX-R, I might have put down a deposit this morning. Honda’s weird, low-revving, double-clutch-equipped ugly duckling has finally grown into a sure-footed, sweet-handling, sparkling blue swan. Go ride one!

First published in Slipstream, September 2016

Tag: honda

A Different Type of Riding (Part 2: The Honda Forza 300)

Honda NC750X DCT Review