The standard lineup of leak photographs is starting to reappear for the Royal Enfield Himalayan 650, or whatever it is, with multiple outlets showing the new bike in action.
Check out ADV Pulse here or Motorrad Online here for photos of a new adventure bike with an air-cooled parallel twin engine similar to the one used in the INT650, Meteor 650, 650 Bear and so on. This machine appears to be well on its way to production, with the usual tell-tale “black box” mounted to the tailsection for telemetry purposes, but everything else looking like a stock bike.
In fact, it looks a lot like someone at RE was looking closely at the Husqvarna 901-series bikes and decided they liked those lines, and adapted the look to the Himalayan. We’ve seen 650 Himalayan prototypes before—in fact, we expected to see the bike in production years ago—but those machines typically looked like a 410 Himalayan with a bigger engine stuffed into the chassis. This looks much more smooth, rounded and long-haul friendly, and it might explain why the bike has taken this long to hit the market. Maybe RE’s design team (based in the UK) decided to overhaul their machine’s look before putting it on the market.
Or maybe the engine will be overhauled as well, into a 750 as some moto-pundits speculate. Currently, the 650cc twin makes 47 hp, but an emissions regulations update might choke that output and force RE to punch the motor out to 750cc. This has been the pattern across the industry, broadly speaking, for the past decade.
Aside from that, it looks like the new Himalayan will get ByBre brakes (Brembo’s subsidiary) and full-adjustable suspension, with quick-detach luggage system and, for Indian customers at least, a sari guard… the spy pix show this on the bike, despite the fact that most international markets won’t want it.
