None more black

These days it's quite a major thing when one of the big four Japanese manufacturers releases a new bike into the cruiser/ factory custom/call-it-what-you-will market, as cruisers don't really appear to be a big part of their ethos anymore

- Nik Samson 

Kawasaki Eliminator 500

In fact, these days only two of them, Honda and Kawasaki, do any form of cruiser: Honda the CMX500 and 1100 Rebels, and Kawasaki the Vulcan S 650 (which is, apparently, one of its biggest selling bikes in the UK). There was, therefore, as you can imagine, a fair amount of excitement in the biking world when it was announced last year that, for 2024, Kawasaki was going to be bringing out a new one: the Eliminator 500.

The A2 licence-compliant Eliminator takes its cues from the Eliminators of the 1980s, the ZL900s and 1000s and, later, the 600s, too, and there are some very definite styling cues in the rear mudguard, back light, and fuel tank to the new bike's drag-strip inspired predecessors, but the 500 is an all-new bike with a purpose-designed steel trellis-type frame based on that of the exquisitely handling Ninja 400, and a 451cc parallel twin engine developed from the Ninja, the Z500 retuned, of course, for low and mid-range grunt 'cos cruisers don't need power at high revs, do they? It puts out 45PS (44.8 horsepower), which makes it suitable for those who've just passed their test and are on an A2 licence and, thanks to a class-leading low weight of just 176 kilos, feels faster through the gears than perhaps a bike with just 44-and-a-bit hp would do normally (Honda's Rebel 500, its main rival, tips the scales at 191kg - some 15 kilos heavier). Incidentally, if you're struggling to get your head what PS figures are, and how they relate to horsepower, basically, PS is the metric form, named after the German word for horsepower, Pferdestärke, while horsepower is an imperial form. PS is, without a load of complicated maths, a metric 98.6% of an imperial mechanical horsepower. Got that? Good, there'll be questions later.