I recently had the opportunity to throw a leg over a 1996 Yamaha TW200. Or was It a 2008? Or a 1988? Who cares, they’re all the same bike. For 35 years the Yamaha TW200 has soldiered on as the funky big-tired carousel horse of the Yamaha lineup, basically unchanged.
No other current bike has the, dare we say, panache of the balloon-tired TW200. And, in a motorcycle world where retro bikes are all the rage, why not just buy a bike that hasn’t changed since 1987?
Yamaha has a history of keeping bikes around past their sell-by dates. The V-Max and the YZF-R6 remained in the catalogue for decades (with some upgrades). We think the 2023 TW200 is the oldest new motorcycle you can buy in the U.S.,…