Hey everybody, it's Peter and this one's gonna be great. This is the 2023 Kawasaki Z125 Pro. It is the entry level bike in the Kawasaki lineup. But the cool thing about this entry level bike is it is fun for everybody. Whether you've never ridden a motorcycle before or if you have a bike, this thing's pretty cool. It's super inexpensive and it's a lot of fun. So here's the thing, I'm gonna do a full in-depth review on this bike and explain some of the bits and pieces that make this unique, make it fun. But if I don't answer the questions that you have, make sure you subscribe and then let me know in the commons section what you want to know about it. Because I'm here filming at Jim Gilbert's PowerSports, is the number one volume Kawasaki dealer in the country, and they give me complete access to their entire Kawasaki lineup. And I can continue to come back to this vehicle again and again to answer your questions in the comments, but also in future videos. So make sure you subscribe. Let me know what you think. Let's get going with the review. So if you've seen this channel before, you've seen a lot of bikes here. Something like the Big Vaquero, which is the massive 880 or 40 pound bike that was here. This one is gonna look small up next to this logo. So the first thing I'm gonna do is jump on it because although this looks like a small bike for very small people, I'm about six feet tall, certainly shorter people can be comfortable on this bike, but so can taller people. And if you sit here like this, you can see I tuck in, you know, underneath the tank here. I've got my foot, uh, on the pegs, brake pedals there, shifters right here.
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We'll talk about the specs of this. But if you are a full size adult and you're sitting, sitting there thinking, will I even fit on that thing? For the most part, you will. So in a couple minutes we're gonna talk about who this bike is for, but first of all, let's just talk about what it is before we go into all the parts that make it pretty special. This is a bike designed purely for fun. It is very approachable. We have people in the office here who are not motorcycle people who come up to this bike. They're not afraid to sit on it, they're not afraid to try it, and they get excited about it. It's one of those kind of bikes that when you come up to it, it's a conversation piece. You want to talk about it, you want to try it, and it's not intimidating.
So if you're a new rider looking to get into motorcycling, this is a great option. And of course here at Jim Gilbert's PowerSports, we also sell Piaggio, and Vespa scooters. And you can say, okay, what's the difference or why would I want this over Piaggio or Vespa scooter? Well obviously style this thing is sport bike in style. It's also sport bike in the way it rides. And the couple key pieces to it is it is a true motorcycle. It's a manual transmission with a four speed manual. It's geared low, so it feels very peppy. And of course, top speed according to what I've researched, is just over 60 miles an hour. So you can get out on those country highways and feel perfectly safe. And we'll talk about some of the safety pieces, some of the technology pieces and the design of this that makes it very fun. So let's dig into the details and then we'll talk about who I think it's for and why I think it's great. So let's start walking through the components of this bike. These wheels are 12 inch wheels. They are very similar and same, same diameter as a scooter wheel. Something like a Vespa scooter will have
The same size wheels. What that gives you though is a sportier attire here. So even though the wheels are small diameter, you still have a good sort of selection. And on a bike this size, you don't want too wide of a tire because you want that sort of immediate handling. So that's what this is really built for. So not a massive tire, 100 by 90, uh, 12. So 100, uh, sort of the width there. But again, not having it super wide makes it really flickable and hable or really handles well. So you've got a lot of nice things in here. These are upside down forks, which is usually what you see on the sport bikes. Instead of having the sort of suspension up here, it's down here. That lowers your unsprung weight, which is a kind of a nice thing to have, uh, just for handling as well.
And then you've got the disc brakes in here, which are extra powerful. So really good quality disc brakes. This one's of course styled up with the gold fork tubes, the gold wheels, the gold, uh, cal or gold pieces on the, uh, brakes there as well. But yeah, quality brakes and good handling tires along with those upside down forks. This fender, of course protects the, um, the sort of area here so your seals don't have the bugs and the dirt and all the stuff that sits along the front edge here and it can damage your seals over time. So all of that technology kind of built into here and uh, you know, they're thinking about how you're gonna use this. So I love this whole view here because there's a lot going on here that I think most people don't really see. First of all, you've got the single suspension here.
A lot of bikes will have two little, uh, suspension on either side. This one's single one, that's again, a lot like our sport bikes. It helps lower the weight. It has a preload adjustment here, so if you're heavier or whatever, you can adjust that by just, uh, spinning this around to make sure you can compensate for whatever, uh, weight the rider is at. You've got simple little metal pegs here with the feelers on the bottom. If you're corn and reel tight, those will touch instead of your feet. And then of course that compact engine. Now if you know anything about the Zed class of motorcycles, the Zed 400 for instance is the next step up. It's gonna have your pistons kind of running up like this. This one, it lays everything down. So it's an air cooled engine and your piston comes out the front there, single cylinder engine.And that again, instead of having parts the engine up here, it lowers it down here. So your center of gravity is really, really low here and that's part of what makes the bike feel extra light. Now it, it already is very light, but that also helps with handling down here. Your exhaust, no big pipe coming up the side, it's all tucked underneath. So basically down here, all that weight of your exhaust and everything down there is at the very bottom, which again centralizes the weight, moves it centered in the bike and keeps it down low, which makes this bike handle really, really well.
One thing to keep in mind, the weight of this bike compared to something like a Zed 400, which is considered to be a very light sport bike, that Z400 is 139 pounds more than this. So this thing is just crazy lightweight and that's part of what leads to that immediate and super fun handling. Having a bike with great handling to me is a safety feature that allows you to obviously stop and hurry with the great brakes. It allows you to turn outta the way of things. But another thing that is a good safetyFeature is right here. We'll see how well you can see it.
There you go. Check out those L e D lights, little zed pattern there. That is a bright L E d. And the nice thing about LEDs is they have an instant on, instant off kind of thing. It really does a good job of catching your attention and on a very small vehicle, especially when you might have newer riders on here, you want something that's gonna catch the attention of riders above. So both the pattern here, not only does it look cool, it catches their attention and that instant on, instant off uh, lighting there as well. Signal lights are just incandescent. That's probably good for a beginner bike that are gonna be a little cheaper to replace if you ever drop this bike. These are pretty durable though I don't, wouldn't expect you to have a whole lot of issues with them. But incandescent on the signal l e d on the brake light. So now let's take a look at the dash here. If I turn the key on, you'll see a couple cool little things. Does a full sweep of the tachometer. I like to have a analog tachometer. I think at a glance it's easier to tell than some of these digital displays. So again, depends on what you do. Of course the TFT display in Kawasaki bikes is very clear, but some other bikes don't have a really clear, uh, analog tachometer and that's pretty cool. Now one thing that's cool about this is you talk about this being a performance bike. Let's turn that signal light off. Talk about this being a bit of a performance bike. Again, 1 25 cc. This isn't gonna be, you know, rocket fast, but it is very similar to the ZX six R.
The ZX6R has a tachometer as well. We just did that video just a few days ago and zero through 4,000 on the ZedX. Six R are real scrunched close together. Why I used to say in that video, why? Because those lower revs don't matter. But this is exactly the same feeling as a higher revving sport bike. You're really getting your power in that 4,000 right up to 95 9,000 rpm uh, area. So you're living in these mid to higher revs there and that again gives you that bigger motorcycle feel at much slower speed. You can really kind of zip it up through the gears. Again, we mentioned it's a four speed transmission. We'll show you the shifter in a second here. But kind of a cool uh, thing and just part of what brings the experience in overall the uh, display here is pretty simple. It's not listing a gear indicator, but you can see there it says gear underneath there. It'll tell you what gear you're in, whether that's neutral or uh, 1, 2, 3 or four. You still of course have the green neutral light, the engine light's on because we're not running the engine right now. Uh, but simple display here. The other thing you have is down here, I dunno if you can read that clearly on your screen. Looks like you can, you have the odometer, you have trip A and trip B. Now just if you're a new rider, what I like to do with this and you can do whatever you want, is uh, leave the odometer of the, you know, if you wanna know a full mileage, I always set trip A for my um, how much fuel or sorry, yeah for my tank. So I reset that every time I have, um, every time I need fuel.
And then I have trip B for when I need the oil change. So of course you do still have a fuel gauge here. You can see when it's low it's gonna go down a bar graph to the last bar. When that bar starts flashing, you are quite low. It's actually a pretty good size fuel tank for this size bike. It also gets very good fuel efficiency. So it's one of those things you don't really think about This bike, although you would think it's designed for fuel efficiency is really designed for performance though. So it's not all about, you know, a total mileage el you know, at the expense of everything else. This is about fun first and because it's so small it gets great fuel efficiency. So if you want something that's fun instead of something that's just really miserly on fuel, this is your bike.
Take a look at the controls here. You can see this is a true motorcycle. You've got your little uh, high beam and low beam right there, signal lights right there. And of course the horn button down there, good loud horn, which is again what you want on a entry level type bike, smaller type bike. And also you'll find that the controls, they don't feel plasticy. They're really strong, really kind of, you know, good feeling. They don't feel like they're gonna break when you're using them. The other thing is clutch lever pull is pretty light. It's not a slipper and assist clutch like it would be on the Zed 400. But of course the smaller components here make a nice light, easy pull. You can really get used to how that feels and getting used to shifting. So again, whether you're a new rider or an experienced rider, you have that sort of fun feeling, uh, shifter, fun feeling clutch.
And again, you're gonna be zipping through the gears in this because you're driving through town, you're gonna have that fun. It's not, not like a big bike where you're can just keep it in the same gear. You're gonna have ton through the gears, which is part of what makes it fun to drive over on the throttle side. Pretty simple stuff here. You've got the kill switch up here. It's required by law on every motorcycle and then the start button down here. And of course your throttle, which you can use the whole thing on this bike. This isn't overpowered so you're gonna sit there and be able to use it. Go full throttle at times and have a lot of fun with that. I do wanna show you the shifter here just really quickly. Of course it's one down and three up neutral between first and second gear of course, mostly cuz that's required by law.
You could put it anywhere, but that's a whole other video. All right, I'm gonna try to sit on this bike, keep it in there. I have size 11 feet so a lot of people are concerned about the overall feel of this bike. Can we control it? You can see here I can easily get up to that shifter, no problem down there. Uh, not a problem. So there's full first gear, full lift there of course in the Kawasaki won't let you go into uh, second gear while you're stopped like this with the engine off. But uh, easy to reach, easy to come back. It's not like it's super compact even though it's a compact motorcycle. So it's very easy to drive. Very familiar to people who are used to riding larger size bikes. So of course we can all look at the styling of this bike from the outside, from the side.
But when you're in the riding position it the style matters as well. You wanna see something that's pretty cool. And down here you have that cool modern sport bike style, uh, uh, fuel tank cap here. You've got the sport bike style key down here. Of course we always have the spare key on here so it doesn't look as cool in video as it does to me. But the overall feel when you look down is this is a fully modern, fully cool motorcycle. Now let's see if we can go the same shot and come back over here. Camera work is a little sketchy cuz I'm moving the tripod. A lot of people don't expect this, but this is a two passenger motorcycle, fully legal. You have space here for a second passenger. It's actually a pretty comfortable seat. Probably, you know, similar size or maybe even a hair wider than something like the Zed 400 and you've got the rear foot pegs here, which to me actually look a slight little bit larger than the front foot pegs. So again, this isn't something that's gonna be a rocket where you can take, you know, a lot of heavy people over long distances, but to take someone around town to zip 'em around, totally doable, totally legal as
Well. So let's talk about who this bike is for. Well obviously the 125 cc if you're looking at riding a bike, this is obviously not intimidating, super cheap on insurance. It's easy to ride, it's great first motorcycle. Where I think this bike actually shines though, is maybe you're a household who has a motorcycle or other motorcycles in the family. This is just an awesome bike to add to a fleet of motorcycles. It's not that expensive. If you've got young riders or new riders who just want to get out and have a little bit of fun, zip through town, learn how it is and not be intimidated by it. This thing's pretty great. The reason I think it works in a household with other motorcycles is because this won't just be the bike that beginners can ride. This thing can wheelie. This thing's a blast of drive.
You can ride something full throttle, you can zip through the gears and all of that's super fun to do, but you can do it without losing your license. And you know, I've driven a lot of smaller bikes and I'm a big fan of smaller displacement motorcycles because I just find that they're fun. You can be amazed at the places they can take you. And that's what this is all about. It's not designed to be a practical commuter like a Vespa. It's designed to be a blast to ride. So this is something that if you're looking to have a lot of fun for not a lot of dollars, you can modify these up. There's an aftermarket, so community that supports them as well. There's so many things you could do with this. It just becomes something fun. The biggest thing that surprised me, and especially it just happened here today, is people in this building, there are some people who just, you know, they're not into the motorcycles as much.
They have other roles here and those are the people that are attracted to this kind of thing. It's such so non-intimidating. They'll jump on it, they'll be willing to give it a try. And that's what's cool about this. It's a great entry level bike, gets people into riding that is still enjoyable for experienced riders. So tell me what you think. Tell me, you know, is this something you would ride, is something you would add to your fleet? Uh, if you own it, tell me about how you use it. I'd love to know more. And again, we're sort of building a community here, so let me know when the comments, what you think. But make sure you subscribe and if you wanna know more about this bike, we're going to come back to it. I wanna do more videos on this. I wanna try to take it out here and ride it around a little bit. Uh, sort of do some riding videos of something like this and, uh, we'll get that back on here as well. So make sure you subscribe because I wanna thank Jim Gilbert's Jim Gilbert's Power Sport the number one volume Kawasaki dealer in the country and they're allowing me to come back to these bikes again and again. So let me know what you think. We'll continue to make more videos for you. Thanks everybody for watching.