Field Notes on the Honda EZ90: A Motorcycle Designed to Scare Nobody
Pemulis Water & Power • Outer Sunset, San Francisco
The Honda EZ90 Cub was produced from 1991 to 1996. It has a 90cc two-stroke engine, automatic transmission, enclosed chain, electric start, and full plastic bodywork that gives it the silhouette of something a concept artist designed for a 1987 world's fair. It weighs about 150 pounds. It will not scare you. This was Honda's explicit design goal, and it remains the most interesting thing about the machine.
Most motorcycles — even the small ones, even the beginner ones — make some concession to intimidation. There is a clutch lever because that is what motorcycles have. There is exposed chrome or bare metal because that is what motorcycles look like. The Honda EZ90 made none of these concessions. The chain is fully enclosed so your pants don't get eaten. The transmission is automatic so you cannot stall it. The choke operates by itself. Under the seat, on many examples, there are small lockable storage compartments — the kind of detail you add to a scooter that commuters will park on city streets, not to a dirt bike. Someone at Honda engineering in the early nineties looked at a trail bike and asked: what if we took out every part that requires learning something? Then they did that.
The result is genuinely strange to spend time with. It rides like a trail bike — the geometry is right, the suspension travel is real, the skid plate and hand guards are there because the machine expects to be ridden into things. But nothing about the experience requires you to have ridden a motorcycle before. A person who has never thrown a leg over anything can get on an EZ90 and go. This was the entire pitch. Honda called it, with complete sincerity, the easiest motorcycle in the world.
The collector paradox this created is a good one: because the EZ90 was so reliable and so simple, most owners rode them without thinking about maintenance. They weren't collectors' objects when they were current. They were toys, used like toys, treated like toys. The result is that finding one now with uncracked, unfaded, intact bodywork is significantly harder than finding one that runs. The plastic is the rare part. The engine mostly just works.
There is also the EZ-Snow, which is either a Honda factory option or an aftermarket conversion kit or a barn-find myth, depending on which forum you're reading. The configuration is real: the front wheel becomes a ski, the rear wheel becomes a track. Whether Honda sold these as complete bikes or as conversion kits is, according to multiple sources who have gone looking, genuinely unresolved. RideApart describes "precious little info" and conflicting reports. This uncertainty is appropriate. The EZ-Snow is the EZ90's most logical form — a machine already designed for people who want to play in terrain they shouldn't — taken one step further into terrain that's arguably ridiculous. It has exactly the energy of a Honda engineer saying: we already built the dirt-scooter, what if we made it into a snowmobile? And then maybe doing it.
What the EZ90 is, stripped of nostalgia, is a design object that solved a real problem — the barrier between "person who wants to ride something fun off-road" and "person who has actually done that" — in a way that was very Japanese and very 1991. Full plastic enclosure. Hidden complexity. Friendly surface over engineered interior. It is a motorcycle that looks like it was designed by the team that made the original Game Boy: a thing that does a specific job with maximum approachability and minimum friction, wrapped in a body that a child would describe as "futuristic" and an adult in 2025 would describe as "kind of perfect."
We have one in the shop. Vintage motocross gear lives alongside it in our collection — jerseys and pants from the same era, the same early nineties moment, aimed at a completely different type of rider. The EZ90 and a 1992 Fox Racing jersey represent two answers to the same decade: one says go as hard as possible, the other says it's fine, just twist the throttle. Both answers are correct. That's why both objects are worth keeping.
Browse our Vintage Moto Collection — jerseys, pants, and gear from the era this bike was built in.
Header image: Photo: Rainmaker47, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons