China might be starting to turn out some impressive bikes these days but the old stereotypes of cloning and copying will never go away as long as machines like these—the new Moxiao MX650 and MX500—continue to appear. As barefaced copies go, you can’t get much more blatant, and Moxiao seems to have no intention to stop ripping off Ducati’s designs. The company has previously made a convincing-looking copy of the Ducati Panigale 1199, and its latest creations mimic the styling of the Panigale V4 and Streetfighter V4.

Although there’s clearly no chance that a real customer could be conned into buying a parallel twin from Moxiao thinking they’re getting their hands on a V-4 Ducati, it’s surprising that Ducati’s lawyers haven’t put a halt to these copies already. Presumably the difficulty of enforcing intellectual property rights in China, combined with the fact that Ducati isn’t likely to lose any sales to such machines, is why they continue to be made.

The first of the new models is the MX650, which is a development of Moxiao’s previous Panigale-copying model, and as such uses a horizontally mounted rear shock like the old V-twin Panigale instead of accurately replicating the vertically mounted design of the current Panigale V4. Under the skin, it gets a new 650cc parallel-twin engine, made by Moxiao but almost certainly a clone of the Kawasaki ER-6n motor, as it shares the same 83mm bore and 60mm stroke of that unit. It replaces the previous model’s 471cc twin, which was a copy of the Honda CB500 motor. In terms of performance, the MX650 makes 60 hp, which doesn’t stack up well to the 211 hp of the real Ducati. At 489 pounds, the Moxiao is around 50 pounds heavier than the real Ducati too, and its top speed of just 74 mph is simply embarrassing. The styling is Ducati’s, of course, but Moxiao’s copy is close enough to fool someone at a distance, wearing the same oversized winglets on the fairing and sharing deeply hooded headlights and a single-sided swingarm.

The MX650 isn’t as embarrassing as the MX500 though. The 500 is based on the previous-generation Moxiao Panigale copy, including the old 471cc parallel twin making 44 hp. It’s rated for the same 74 mph top speed as the 650, but presumably gets there even more slowly and, at 436 pounds, manages to be heavier than the Ducati it copies, even with less than half the capacity and little more than a fifth of the power.

Unlike the MX650, it’s not even convincing in the styling department. While mimicking the Streetfighter V4′s shapes, it manages to get them just wrong enough to be jarring, and there’s far too much fairing in evidence to hide the wimpy parallel twin.

It’s sad that the Chinese bike industry isn’t yet rid of this sort of cloning. Some Chinese marques appear to be genuinely reaching for global standards these days, but as long as machines like the Moxiao MX650 and MX500 exist it will be impossible to throw off the wider impression of Chinese bikes being little more than low-rent copies riding the coattails of others’ successes.

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