2021 Kawasaki KX250X Full Review | Should YOU Buy This??

hey there it's kyle brotherson this is dirt bike channel and i'm going to review this 2021 kawasaki kx250x i've owned this bike for a little over six months i bought it last november and i've had the opportunity to ride this bike in a wide variety of conditions everything from sand and slick rock and muddy conditions and snow conditions mountain conditions desert conditions i've taken this in a lot of different places and i've owned it for a long time and you get to learn a lot of things about a bike when you've owned it that long and that's why i like to do my reviews i have not watched a single minute of anyone else's opinions on this bike online i just haven't all of these thoughts are my own i have compiled them over months and i'm going to tell you what i think about it and this is how i do things consequently this bike is also a sweepstake spike which in very very short order will be given away to somebody out there watching it if you haven't entered go to dirtbikechannel.com and get enter to win this motorcycle it ends june 30th so if you're watching this review after june 30th of 2021 forget i said that because that's already over but i also want to say that i really really enjoyed having this bike i put it earlier in this year i put it in my top 10 of like updated motorcycles of anything that i've had i would also say that i liked this 254 stroke better than any orange 254 stroke that i have personally ever owned i haven't owned an orange 254 stroke since the 2016 model and i put some time on a 2018 orange bike but not enough to know if i liked it better than this one i have had some recent experience on a uh yamaha yz250 fx and some recent experience on the sureco 300 sef factory those bikes i would compare this to you know quite a bit and this bike has some virtues on top of those other bikes whereas it has some downfalls on those other bikes as well i'm going to say the things that are great i'm going to say that things are good i'm going to say the things that need improvement and i'm going to say the things that sucked and i maybe even will throw in some additional stuff in there they and yes i'm doing this all in one take the hey kyle your videos are too long give me the straight stock on this bike did you like it did you not yes i really really liked it again i put it in my top ten of motorcycles it has a few downfalls but overall they did a lot of things right they got this bike very light it's we'll get into that later it's very light it's got electric star it's got a hydraulic clutch it's got some places on the bike that you can configure it and adjust it to your liking and it's a really really good bike and i think if you're looking for a 254 stroke you would be doing yourself a disservice if you didn't look hard at this bike i really liked it now let's get into the full review of the good the great the good the needs improvement and the things that they whiffed on and really screwed it up just so we're clear i paid full price for this motorcycle out of my business checking account i this is in no way connected to any dealer or cows hockey or anyone that's how i do my reviews i pay full price for the bikes and i say what i think about them okay so let's talk about the things that are great i'm going to start off with the motor and i do this on a lot of different bikes and i don't even apologize for it the motor on this thing is super snappy and it's my favorite thing about this bike i can't tell you how many times i was on this bike when i was like why would you want the 450 version of this now i haven't ridden the 450 version of it and it has its place for some things but for me this thing has so much power i'm just like it is amazing and it's a very snappy power see the shurco 300 that i had uh last year it was a more mellow toned down power and that was good but this one is lively and just like boom pop through things and pop you off jumps and you can tell this is a really race-bred motorcycle and i really really enjoyed the motor something else that is great on this bike is the suspension so on the 250 model they went with the kyb front fork i believe they went with the showa fork on the 450 version of this bike but this kyb actually had a really good balance of go fast and a little bit of go slow in fact i think it had better go slow valving than in fact i know it has better go slow valving than the yz250 fx that i had a year ago it was more in line with the shurco kyb valving so it's funny because you can have all these different bikes with the same same front fork but they're valve completely differently and then the frame uh you know differences in the frames and stuff they can actually have a really different feel but i really liked the front fork on this it was a good mix of being able to go fast desert bike but also be able to handle some of the choppier stuff in the slow stuff so kudos to what they did did on the front fork without valving just so that we're clear i actually went all the way out on the compression clickers on the front i'm about one click away from the stock rebound like the standard rebound and then on the rear i took three clicks of compression of the low speed correct compression out of the shock on the rear and that was a pretty good spot for me i'm 160 100 and you know 164 pounds but then i have like i don't even know 30 pounds of gear i'm not sure how much i weigh but anyway i was able to find a really happy spot on this without changing any of the springs with all of my riding gear on something else great about this bike and i know this is just like an ethereal concept but it actually just gives me a lot of confidence i feel like a hero sometimes when i'm on this bike and i can't say that about every bike this one gave me the feelings that i felt while i was on the yz250x where i just felt like i had great abilities to corner no i'm not a great cornering guy but it just made me feel like i'm a better rider than i really am when i was doing drops and jumps and corners and stuff so i really really liked it super super stable that way and then the last thing i would say about how the great thing i would say is i just think the bike looks stellar i i loved seeing this bike in the back of my truck i would do a double take half the time when i saw this thing in the back of my truck i think the styling is really really good i need to use a magic eraser here on the bike to get that to freshen up i can do that later before it's given away but i just think the bike is really really sharp looking so now let's talk about the things that are good i'm going to say the price is good it's about 8 500 msrp which is basically the exact same price as the yz2 yamaha yz250x so i think it's priced right it's about 12 or 1300 cheaper than an orange bike although you do get some things on the orange bikes that you don't necessarily get on this but we're not going to go into the apples and apples i think that the 8 500 is a great uh kind of price point for a lot of people so that's a good thing something else i think is very good is the chassis has a very narrow feel to it i really really like how narrow it feels when you're on the bike it's super narrow up here at the top and it just feels narrowed down by the foot pegs and it felt kind of like you're just riding a knife which was really cool something else i really enjoyed was the fact that kawasaki lets you move the foot pegs you can't really see it but you can move this up and down i actually moved them down they go forward just slightly but i move the foot pegs down on this bike just to kind of open up the rider cockpit a little bit more obviously you can do that up on your handlebars on a lot of bikes but the fact that they're allowing you to kind of customize the rider cockpit here by dropping your foot pegs down i think that's great and i think more manufacturers should be doing that another thing that was good is the nissan brakes now i'm showing you the rear brake here because one of the things i noticed is that i have a little bit harder time getting the feel down on a brake like this on the nissan brakes when i was using my foot brakes sometimes i had a little bit of a hard time to actually just feather the brake and not keep the rear wheel from skidding but overall the neeson brakes were good and they worked pretty well i just prefer the brembo brakes mainly for the feel but not a reason not to get this bike another good thing here was the hydraulic clutch by nissan this clutch actually performed really really well it's the first time that kawasaki has put a hydro clutch on one of their bikes at least they're 250 so welcome to this century and i prefer the hydraulic clutches over the cable clutches and so i really like this guy so don't kill me if i'm wrong but i believe this is the first time that they put electric start of course it doesn't start when i go but it's the first time they put electric start on this bike there we go started on the second time hey the engine's super cold but i'm su i'm really glad that we've got electric start on this 250. it starts pretty reasonably it once it gets hot sometimes you know it's a little slower starting there's kind of a sweet spot on this but it started for me basically every time something to know is it doesn't bump start unless you start the electronics so if the bike has been off for a few minutes and then you try to roll it down a hill it will not bump start until you just at least hit the starter once to wake up the electronics and then the thing will bump start so just something to note something else i really like about the bike is it's pretty light it was 240.5 pounds when it was full of fuel on my scale now it doesn't have a ton of fuel so we don't want to go too far into that but it was for about four and a half pounds lighter than the two yz250 fx some of that is in fuel but they actually put electric start on the bike and it's pretty light and so they're doing some things right in that form but we'll talk about the fuel a little bit later i don't have a really great way to show this to you other than this kind of angle but you can see how the radiators are kind of like canted forward or they have a little bit of a angle to them angle forward to kind of make the whole front of the bike feel like it's more narrow i like that they've done a few things here to kind of make the bike feel narrow on the top and on the sides and then also here up in the front those angled radiators kind of make the whole bike feel a little bit narrow that's pretty cool oh i forgot to mention about the motor that i feel like it doesn't stall quite as easily as some of the other high strung 254 strokes this one seemed to kind of just tractor through things a little bit better although maybe that's just because i'm getting more careful about how i approach things and giving a little bit more clutch modulation and feathering the clutch a little bit better when i'm riding these 254 strokes but i do think this thing has a little bit less of a stalling characteristic than some of the other 254 strokes that i've personally ridden before i get too deep into this review i should just mention if you want to support support derby channel and keep these reviews unbiased please go to my website dirtbikechannel.com and use my links for companies like rocky mountain atv amazon motorsport it really really helps me out and it doesn't cost you anything you can click on the links for rocky mountain atv down in the video description when you're getting gas not gas but when you're getting tires or parts or skid plates or whatever else for your bike getting gear and those funds a little bit of referral bonuses sent to me and that helps to fund these dirt bike reviews and everything else we're doing here on dirt bike channel and now we move to some of the areas that i think this thing needs improvement the first thing that i'll say is this does need a six-speed gearbox it actually has the the standard kx 255 speed close ratio motocross gearing and although sometimes it works pretty well there were several times that i was riding this bike in the desert and in the mountains when i was like these gears are too close together and there's not enough of them i'm running out of gears on this thing i need one more gear to be able to stretch this thing out because we're doing off-road with stuff with this thing and you're doing a lot of stuff sometimes when you've got a mile or two of transition roads in between trails and even sometimes when you weren't doing that you're just like out in an area where you know you had some higher speed stuff i would find myself in fifth gear quite often with this bike trying to click up to another one it needs a six-speed gearbox it even prompted me to it even prompted me to wonder if my son's 85 cc has a higher top speed than this it didn't because this thing rubbed to the moon but when that 85 gets a bigger wheel on if you put the same size wheels on the bikes that 85 might actually be faster than this top speed it needs a six-speed gearbox something else that needs improvement is i had a hard time finding like protective parts for this bike now i know this isn't the manufacturer's fault but it just seemed like it was harder for me to find skid plates or aftermarket other things that i'll get into and so that's a concern for this bike it just seemed like it was harder to find stuff now i think some of that stuff is going to come online it already has started to come online but it's a brand new model for 2021 and i ended up finding some things for this bike that i could get to fit and i just said it was a 2020 kx 450 and a kx450x and it actually worked uh so just know that some of the parts were a little bit harder to find on this bike so let's talk about the silencer for a second and man that's a stretch to even call it a silencer this thing is so freaking loud [Applause] [Music] [Applause] it's funny because i would i have two different helmets and sometimes i'd go with my helmet that's a little bit tighter and sometimes i'd go with the helmet that is not quite as tight on my ears when i would go with my boys and when i'd wear the helmet that wasn't quite as tight i'm like dang this thing is loud i had to remix all the videos that i had on this i ca i kind of have like a certain uh audio level that i know that i go with on a lot of the other bikes but when i'm riding this bike i have to use a different audio leveling thing in post production because the thing is so stinking loud i would want to replace this with an aftermarket silencer first off that was spark arrested um don't tell anyone and some of them that's a little bit quieter because that thing is stinking loud another thing i think needs improvement see these little dfi modules there's a yellow one a white one and a black one and they just differentiate them by different colors of tape let me tell you what the manual says they do you put in for soft track conditions you put in the white connector for standard track conditions you put in the green connector and for hard track conditions you put in the black now i thought i knew which one of these things i thought i knew what they did and i thought i knew which one i liked best and then i went out a different time and i tried them again and i'm like wait i'm confused on which one i like and i can't even exactly tell now what it's doing so i started to ask some other writers i asked several other writers what they thought these things did and i was getting different answers and people were confused i'm confused about what this is what constitutes a hard track condition a standard track condition or a soft track condition when we're riding off-road could you just tell us what this does to the power characteristics of the motorcycle and i know that you have like like a kawasaki power tuner but it's like six or seven hundred dollars i think this needs to be changed and updated yamaha allows you to change your character power characteristics and mapping on your phone with an app that i think is great and so that needs to be improved and that's where kawasaki needs to go is the same direction that yamaha went and by all means all the manufacturers need to do that because this is a little bit corky and dorky and i didn't like it and it was pretty confusing to me and other riders something else that needs improvement is the engine guard i wouldn't even call it a skid plate that came with this bike it's like an engine guard it was an absolute piece of trash i threw it away because it was so bad and then i found this the only thing i i could find was this a chair b skid plate that has a little bit of a linkage guard down here it's not great i don't think it's going to last for somebody long term if they want to go desert race this bike or something so that was a little bit harder but the engine guard sucked like if you're going to put an engine guard on or a skid plate on just actually do it right another thing i think needs improvement is this kickstand it's got a nice wide foot on it um but it sticks out like an outrigger it's got this super ugly spring on it and it sticks out super far like you're gonna like drag it reminds me of those hooks that they have on like the end of like the back of a fighter jet where they hook and they grab the cable when they're landing on a deck of an aircraft carrier that's i think what this actually is that needs to be if i was going to keep this bike long term i'd probably change this out for a fast way kickstand uh just with that so oh the other thing is because it kind of tips over a long ways when it's on the kickstand so and that can make it so it'll fall over i don't love the kickstand while we're on the subject of the things that need to be improved the fuel tank this is only 1.64 gallons the other bikes in its class are 2.22 gallons or 2.2 gallons and 2.5 gallons the yamaha has a 2.2 gallon tank and it's like under the seat somehow like the ktms have a 2.25 i think the honda 250 rx also has like a 2.2 gallon tank so this is the smallest fuel tank in its class and it's just not big enough for serious trail riding i think or even some of those longer desert loops i don't think that is a big enough fuel tank and they should fix that let me show you something i've noticed that needs to be improved see these are the two seat bolts here and if you're playing with your seat and taking it on and off it's very easy to actually lose that nut out here and see how that dropped out it just dropped out and it fell on my tire here this can happen out in the wild now on the trail and you can lose these things and it's just a pain in the butt why not have these things captured inside of here so that that knot can't fall out because again you lose this this isn't just like something that you find in your average bolt kit this needs to be improved because that's pretty stupid so the air box sucks it's going to take an eight millimeter socket here it's going to take a 10 millimeter socket up here and through the magic of film editing i'm gonna take this off for you now i went on one ride with this bike and i wanted to show you how hard this is to change so this air filter box there's not enough room in here not only do we have two different bolts but now i've got another wing screw in here a wingnut screw i'm going to have to take this out and there's just not enough room in here to actually do this but watch this so i'm going to try to get this out so it'll be damaging this now notice how hard this is it's because you don't have enough room to even get your hand in there to pull this screw out now here's your bolt out and now we're going to wiggle this out and it is freaking tight by the time i pull it here it's jammed up on the bottom and so i kind of wiggle this thing out and it's like you have to use way more pressure than you should you're pulling this plastic off you're pulling that off you're gonna and i almost tore this filter right here i was as careful as i could possibly be and yet there is not enough room inside of this air box to reliably get this filter out without tearing it and putting it back in similar deal look it's closed off so far down here it doesn't even like this part of the filter isn't even doing anything this air box is way too tight and you can easily knock dirt down in here when this thing is clear full of dirt it is the worst design i've seen on a modern dirt bike air box isn't big enough it's too easy to tear even when you're putting this back in which i'll do in just a second it's easy to kind of tear the filter off this filter cage here and now you're going to suck dirt in the motor and boom bye bye motor this whole area right here sucks and needs to be redesigned okay now we're going to put our filter back in now i've looked at this multiple times this has to kind of go back behind there and then pull this way and so i'm going to try to finagle this thing back in without tearing it off tearing the air filter off of the that cage and it's just like oh there's not enough room in there to get that done without i just i'm so okay so i'm able to get it but i'm using so much pressure there against the filter and then i have to reach back in the back and see if it's still on all the way because it's easy to pull that off i think i've got it but there's not nearly enough room in there see if i can get my little bolt in maybe i'm gonna get that there are times where it's like i can't even get this this little wingnut bolt screw to go in i think i've got it and i think i think it's secure but i'm not 100 sure and if you're a teenage kid or if you're just in a hurry the chances of you screwing this up that's a failure now i've got the air box out of my system the only other thing on the bike that i would say sucked was the chain it has a non-o-ring chain and it was a cheap chain after one hour the thing had stretched quite a bit and so i adjusted it and after about two two and a half hours it was so bad and i i had adjusted it three times i just swapped the whole thing and went to a quality o-ring chain i can't remember the last time or if i've ever had to change a chain on one of my big bikes like that so kawasaki you can do better on the air box and the chain the rest of the stuff i can give you a pass on so that's my review of the 2021 kx 250x i really really love this bike and there was a lot more right than there was wrong there was just a couple little things i had to nitpick on some of you might have already seen my video where i compared i said would you rather this bike or the blue bike the yamaha yz250 fx if you watched that video i'm still gonna stick by that i would probably choose the blue one over this one and it's for several different reasons it's the engine management it's the engine management there's a few different things you can go watch that video it's down in the feed here it's like yz250 fx versus the kx250x a lot of that has to do with the transmission you can go over there and do that this bike does have some virtues that i really really like and again in my top 10 of bikes one of the best four strokes that i've had of all time so that's my review of this thing uh those are my thoughts and i'm sticking to it again use my links for rocky mountain atv you can always send me an email if you have questions and i will try to get to those and if you're one of those people that's watching this before june 30th of 2021 you connect steel ender to win this fight go to dirtbikechannel.com all the details are over there but don't delay because you've only got a short amount of time because this is going to go out to a lucky winner the the ktm 125xc is going to go out to a lucky winner and the ktm 1290 super adventure s is going out to a lucky winner so that's what i've got for everyone today until next time leave a single track thanks

Channel: Dirt Bike Channel

Views: 39,988

Rating: 4.9475985 out of 5

Keywords: enduro, motocross, dirtbike, ktm 2016, ktm motorcycles, shootout, ktm, range, erzberg, graham jarvis, johnny walker, best dirtbike, 125, 200, 250, 300, 350, 400, 450, 500, 525, exc, sx, how to, 2 stroke, 4 stroke, video, review, ktm, husqvarna

Id: zvRNolOWeTY

Length: 21min 55sec (1315 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 24 2021