Just as you though the Chinese were starting to design their own products, along comes a pair of Ducati rip-offs that are just insulting.

Yes, You Are Dreaming: These aren't real Ducatis

What is it with the Chinese philosophy of blatant copying of western motorcycle designs? Surely there are enough of them to foster original thought in designing new motorcycles? It's not as if the copies are any good, either: they are often really badly executed, with a passing resemblance in appearance hiding awful mechanicals underneath.

The two latest horrors come from the Moxiao factory: the MX650 and MX500 are, if you half-close your eyes, bad facsimiles of the Ducati Panigale V4 and Streetfighter V4. In appearance, they are close but not quite close enough. In a word, they are clumsy. Here's another word: ugly.

They get a lot worse under the skin. Rather than a fire-breathing V4, the MX650 (the Panigale V4 copy) gets a weedy 650cc parallel twin motor, which itself is a clone of the Kawasaki ER-6n motor. With just 60bhp on tap (a dripping tap, at that!) and weighing in at 50lb more than the Panigale (for a total of 489lb), this unfortunate beast will struggle to reach 75mph and, presumably, will take a couple of days to get there.

If you though that was bad, then the MX500, the Streetfighter V4 copy, gets a 471cc parallel twin engine, pushing out a limp 44bhp. Moxiao claims a top speed similar to the 650cc-engined bike, at 74mph but expect its acceleration to be even more glacial. It also weighs more than the real Streetfighter, while producing a fifth of the power!

Needless to say, it looks dreadful.

What I particularly like is the fact that both bikes are photographed with a stone and an old bike battery under the side stand to keep them more upright. Classy! If they can't get the side stand right, what have they got wrong (apart from everything!)

Look, no-one is forcing you to buy - or even look - at these bikes but they are hardly helping convince us that China is capable of doing anything other than badly copy other's designs. There are some Chinese companies that are trying hard to change this perception, but whilst companies such as Moxiao are churning out this sort of rubbish, those other companies are going to have a hard time convincing the rest of the world that they can be taken seriously.