MZ lives

[Zorge]

I think MZ could be the most underrated motorcycle.

As I see it, MZ was some sort of "China bike of the '80's", with same pros and cons.

If in the early seventies if you had placed an MZ trophy along side Jap 250cc bikes and reviewed them the MZ would have been laughed out of court

ES was always a strange two-wheeler. You needed a... refined taste to like his design. Back in the days, those slash-two ESs, in Yugoslavia are nicknamed "Televizor" ("Tellie").

I have a question..Do you think MZ would have survived so long if it wasn't based in a country with a Communist regime where there local market had no choice????

IMO, in conditions of planned economy, some things are easier, and some impossible. For example, you could buy at affordable price ETZ, and then, after a decade, again at affordable price, buy that same ETZ. It's good to have a fair price, but for heaven's sake - it's the same kind of basic, to put it mildly, not so contemporary bike you bought decade ago!

I'm sure it's not the lack of expertise and ideas of east German engineers, but the bureaucrats who are interested in numbers rather than motorcycles. If they were not so rigid, we might have seen MZ's street-legal bikes with engines such are those 250 and 500 cc enduro prototypes, to try to keep pace with other manufacturers.





It's the least we could expect from MZ.

Perhaps more drastic example is Jawa, and even Russian IZh - in their museums and old technical documentations are dozens of elaborated projects that did not get the green light. And then, when you miss even the last train, you will not get far on foot. I think that their last train is left in the first half of the '90s.

Well, I was an idiot.

My English is awful, you all know that, so I wish to know - is "was" past tense?

Great story, Mikko! Makes me think there should be a special class of psychoanalysts who deal specifically with motorcyclists!

You have not seen it all. He like bikes, that's OK, but he is crazy about cars. Just google - Mikko Hirvonen Citroen.