The first surprise was the price. The second was that within an hour of riding it, the price had stopped being the interesting thing about the bike.
CFMOTO spent years being dismissed as the cheap option and then quietly got good, which is the same arc as every technology that ends up eating an industry from the bottom. The MT650 is a middleweight all rounder: enough engine to hold a motorway without straining, not so much that it argues with you in traffic.
What stayed with me was how ordinary it felt, in the best sense of that word. Nothing rattled. Nothing felt like a corner had been cut to hit a number in a brochure. The switchgear had weight to it. The engine pulled cleanly from low revs and kept pulling, and it did exactly the same thing the next morning, and the morning after that.
Most of riding is not the dramatic part. It is the commute, the errand, the hour of dull straight road between two good ones. A bike that stays pleasant through all of that is doing something harder than being fast.
The badge on the tank was worth nothing. Everything underneath it was worth a great deal more than I paid.
