Unicorn Has A New Name. Review on Hero Honda Achiever

Sounds unbelievable, does'nt it? So it is. The Achiever is actually a bike having its own skeleton but a Uni heart.

CBZ was rapidly losing its market cap to Pulsar . It just could'nt help it. It just could'nt return a promising mileage.I would say the CBZ was'nt built for the indian market at all in the first place. It was a bike for serious bikers. The ones who did'nt give a damn about the fuel consumption issue. It was india's first truly performance bike(and it still remains).It wanted to be ridden hard.It was just a superb machine.

So the guys at HH were getting really despo. They desperately wanted a bike that could rival the Pulsar primarily. Then there was also the Fiero which was snatching a chunk of the market every fiscal.

So,these guys at the HH prepare a new chassis(looks very much like an Ambition one,not sure) , and fit it with a Unicorn engine.Yes! a ditto engine. I know such things keep happening in a tie up (Hero<->Honda).But seriously I was'nt expecting HH to rip-off a Unicorn engine for their Achiever.

The Achiever rides very much like the Unicorn. Stable and vibration free, to be precise. Tyres are skinny(Mileage!), but traction is good.

The Achiever really loses the game in the gearbox category.No doubt, it is smooth and silky. But the HH guys have done a big mistake by borrowing even the gearbox from the Uni. Even the ratios have been kept the same(i own a uni so I know it).Some shame. The result? The machine goes out of power pretty early than expected.Although there were a couple of false neutrals here and there ,the transmission did little to dissappoint me.The saving grace ofcourse was that HH atleast did not steal the monoshocks from the Uni.

A kind of a return for the HH. I hope they ''achieve'' their sales targets.But personally I feel that the HH guys should have waited for some more time and built their own bike. That would have been more like it.