The Energy and Adreno mark scooter maker LML's maiden attempt at breaking into the world of motorcycles, or as LML supremo Deepak Kumar Singhania and his team prefer to label them - mobikes! I wonder where lies the difference between the terms beyond the abbreviated version being definitely trendy in this age of yuppies and geeks. Using technology from Daelim of South Korea, the new LML motorcycles are the first affordable multi-valve engined motorcycles manufactured for sale in India. Note the terms 'affordable' and 'manufactured', because the BMW F650 Funduro from Hero Motors was the first four-valver on two wheels which was sold but not manufactured here. But that is deviating from our story here which is that of road testing the two spanking new bikes from a maker predominantly of scooters and some mopeds!

Two months ago, after the bossman had returned to base from Kanpur waxing eloquent about the Daelim-based LML motorcycles, we knew that they had to be distinctive if not special. But as we saw it, they couldn't be anything less than that for a scooter maker which was finally trying to break into an even more cut-throat world - a world inhabited by the Japanese Big Four and their Indian partners. However, with flagging scooter sales (sign of the times, ask Bajaj Auto will you?), moving onto properly conceived motorcycles was the only logical alternative left to LML. As you will deduce, for a first attempt the Kanpur company has done very well!

In early December I got a call from Adil saying that the LML bikes had arrived and I should start testing the motorcycles. Nothing new for me in my job as vehicle tester for OVERDRIVE but there was a certain menace in his voice when he emphasised that not only had I to test these bikes but also write the road test report! "You have had it too easy," said my other colleagues and maybe that was why I was now being pressed into action, of a different, and as I can recount with the benefit of hindsight, a tougher kind! Give me a bike or a car and tell me to hit a stretch of road and you won't find me complaining. But ask me to buckle down and sit at a computer terminal or with pen and paper and you know I am not gonna take kindly to it. I do better - I think!!! - when I have to humanise the whole thing, in a face to face, mano-a-mano exercise. Sadly, the bossman in just such an exercise had got his message subtly across (though I tend to think he pulled rank on me) in just this very man-to-man way and that is why you, dear readers, will have to bear me for a while!

And I begin my new trade as a pen pusher thus.....

It is surely a sign of times to come that not having a four-stroker in your product range is one foolish thing. Thanks to the tough emission legislations - foolish I think in the sense that the fuel is still of the old substandard variety, moving to four-stroke engines offers the best benefits to cost ratio in almost every respect (but you two-stroke freaks, don't fret, I am on your side as are the bossman, Aprilia and some other staunch makers who are trying to give it a new lease of life!).

Being late entrants into motorcycles, oops, mobikes (better to be on the better side of DKS!), LML has wisely gone in for an engine which has definite potential to meet more stringent emission laws of the future with further modifications.

I have no hesitation in stating that in certain respects, the Energy and Adreno feature most modern four-stroke engine technology among Indian motorcycles. Some of the car manufacturers in India are already rolling out state-of-the-art four-stroke technology, such as four valves per cylinder, computerised fuel injection, etc. The Honda City as a prime example with its highly efficient engine which not only produces a class leading 100bhp from a 1500cc engine but is also one of the most frugal in terms of fuel consumption. This thought must have weighed pretty strongly on LML minds because they had to get into an arena to play on some form of equal basis with big daddy Honda and savvy TVS-Suzuki besides scooter nemesis Bajaj Auto and the others. It has helped LML's prospects no end that technical collaborator Daelim of Korea earlier had a collaboration with Honda. If you are conversant with Honda engines one could figure out the basis of the CG series in the LML powerplants. But Daelim had done its own work on the strong Honda design and given it better breathing, more revvability and better torque via the adoption of a new combustion chamber serviced by two intake valves where earlier there nestled just one, in a bid to make the four-stroke engine meet emission norms without the need for air injection and the like which would have added its own complexity to the whole. So while other bike makers are yet saddled with a two-valve four-stroke engine, LML has to be lauded for being bold enough (some could read that differently as gimmicky also but that's not a view we share here) to go the three-valve way.