Mahindra Mojo BS6: Why would anybody buy this thing?

My waifu worked in Tech Mahindra for a few years, it’s a typical “Indian” IT company, running mostly on a recipe of overwork, underpay, bullying, and the secret ingredient of industrial scale human suffering.

Of course Mahindra’s automotive division is an entirely different business entity, but the same strands of general stupidity and willful exploitation seem to run through it as well.

The History

Take their weird fetish for buying nearly dead automotive brands, and then making sure they are done by shooting them a few times in the back. Kinetic, BSA, and Peugeot Motorcycles would be a few examples relevant to us, although their purchase of Reva, Ssangyong, and Pininfarina are also fun to look at.

Their business strategy can be compared to that of a vampire, who for some reason doesn’t enjoy the warm blood of young maidens, but prefers digging up graves of long gone grannies to suck away on any remaining unholy juices of spiritual or physical existence.

How royally will they fuck up the Jawa revival remains to be seen.

Also, remember when Mahindra had a Moto3 team?

Dead on Arrival

Mojo could have been a great motorcycle, and a commercial success, but as you would expect from a company managed by 100% certified dickheads, Mahindra made absolutely certain that they missed every opportunity, made every bad decision, and never learned from any of their mistakes, to get us where we are now.

When I reviewed the Mojo some 4 years ago, my disappointment was rather crudely obvious. This is all you could do after 5 years of fucking around in the name of “testing”, and allowing the competition to launch far better products?

Since then, Mahindra have added to the party, in the form of a dealer network that’s slowly shrinking because they’ve got nothing to sell, and a marketing strategy that tries to copy every mistake from Royal Enfield’s book.

In case you need proof, here’s a screenshot of their massive 0.01% market share and sales figures, they can’t even beat Harley for crying out loud.

The problems

It’s in the backdrop of this orgy of idiocy that the Mojo BS6 is launching. Here also you can see just how incompetent Mahindra are, while others have had BS6 vehicles for months, they’ve just woken up recently to try and valiantly defend their second-to-last place in sales, by repackaging a product that needs major hardware changes, and not just some spit and a rub.

The important thing to understand here is that for any motorcycle above 100cc, the buying decision is almost never logical, as much as I would like it to be. It depends on a huge number of factors, looks are a big one, brand perception is another, existing community might be important if you’re an RE groupie.

The Mojo has exceptionally good basics, the engine and transmission are by far the best of the competition, the chassis and suspension were not bad, but every other thing of even minor importance has been steadily ruined by Mahindra by sheer dedication and hard work.

Take the looks department, if some random dude can just plonk in a new headlight, and make your bike look objectively 1000% prettier, some heads must roll in whatever joke of a design department you have. But, as you would expect, they haven’t. The BS6 Mojo still comes with the same spawn from design hell for a headlight as it did before.

But obviously that’s not where Mahindra stopped, they decided to get rid of those beautiful USD forks for the new version, probably the only element that otherwise saved unluckly onlookers from immediately slicing their wrists when forced to look at a Mojo up front.

Thank fuck for small favors, it appears they finally decided to ditch the moronic dual silencer setup, although it appears that for some people, that was the only redeeming feature of the bike after all.

The biggest change by far, seems to be a rather steep fall in the torque figure of about 2 Nm. BS6 bikes usually drop power by a small fraction, but I’ve not seen such a substantial one ever. The Mojo was never a lightweight machine, so it would be interesting to see what change this brings to the overall character, especially with the single exhaust.

And this stew of bad ideas and worse implementation can be now yours, with a price increase of roughly 11,000 bucks.

Why would anybody pay to buy this thing when they could instead buy better bikes? Just a few alternatives I can think of right now would be:

1. Dominar 400/250
2. Duke 200/250
3. Gixxer 250
4. FZ 250
5. Himalayan

Sure, none of the bikes above have that complete focus on touring as the Mojo does, apart from Dominar maybe, but that actually restricts the use cases for it, and hence the number of potential buyers.

At this point the only possible reason I can see for someone buying the Mojo, would be the same disease that compels others to buy an Intruder 150, the overwhelming urge to be different.

The biggest problem I see with the Mojo is that it didn’t sell well when it had only a few competitors, there’s no reason why it would sell now that it has a whole circle of them waiting around for the gangbang.

My prediction for the future of Mojo looks something like this:

1. Mojo BS6 won’t sell well
2. Mahindra’s entire 2 wheel business seems to be slowly collapsing like a house infested with termites
3. Number of Mahindra dealerships and SVCs will inevitably go down
4. Sales and profit will go further south

Touring by definition requires you to go to remote areas, and get into dangerous situations. Why would anyone want to tour on a machine that will need to be transported a few hundred kilometers if something went wrong?

Endgame?

Yes the Mojo is a great bike for touring, it has great fundamentals in its engine and gearbox, and it’s relatively well priced for what it offers. But that’s not enough.

Very few brave souls could repeatedly be exposed to that comically demonic headlight without becoming serial killers. The only viable alternative is to behead the bike as soon as you’re outside the dealership gate, and replace it with something less embarrassing. Who could do that to a new motorcycle, even one as ugly as this?

With Mahindra’s sales numbers crashing through the ground, and the Mojo not selling, they will be forced to make hard choices, and I won’t be surprised if they just discontinue it entirely. What then? Who will handle the maintenance and support stuff? What will that do to the resale value of your BS6 Mojo?

It would be a valid argument to accuse me of catastrophizing this whole scenario, perhaps things will not become this bad. But why would you take the chance? What special feature or feeling can the Mojo provide you that none of the million other options would?

Mahindra needs to get their shit together, or just give up. This whole thing of half-assed mediocrity is getting beyond funny.