The Yamaha Rx 100 And The Kinetic Honda Dx - BFFs For Life

College life in the ’80s, relived through the haze of 2T smoke from the era

- Kartik Ware

‘Are these electric bikes?’ That was the last thing I expected to hear around these two. What made it even worse was that the gentleman who posed this incongruous question looked like he must’ve been in college around the same time as these two were busy throbbing hearts around the country. Perhaps if he’d seen the clouds of smoke exhaling from their ringing exhausts, he might’ve remembered memories lost to time and grey hair. But then I thought he definitely must’ve been a nerd back in the day, leaning as he was against his BMW SUV. No self-respecting college dude or dudette would mistake these two for anything else, even if they went extinct. Well, maybe ‘extinct’ was too strong a word around these particular machines — the Yamaha RX 100 and the Kinetic Honda DX.

Back in the good old days of protectionism, parents were the rules that made the exceptions. Against this stuffy social backdrop, Yamaha entered India with the misleadingly- or aptly-named Escorts, first with the legendary Rajdoot 350 in 1981, and later with the more sensible RX 100 in 1985 which was derived from a design originally from the 1970s. Meanwhile, Honda collaborated with Kinetic Engineering Limited in 1984 to make the DX based on the NH 100; presumably, Honda always wanted to make scooters for India first, as the Activa proved with the Japanese giant’s full Indian debut. Yamaha, on the other hand, seemed to think back then that we needed a two-stroke parallel-twin first. You can imagine which company has my undying admiration. And I’m not — never was or will be — the only one.