Upcoming Honda Middleweight Bikes Aim To End Royal Enfield's Reign

It seems that there are three more upcoming Honda middleweight bikes that will aim squarely at Royal Enfield, in order to steal some of the segment leader’s market share, that will enter the Indian market.

By unveiling the H’ness CB 350, the Japanese bikemaker made its intentions pretty clear that it is here to stay and will even commit itself to developing market-specific high-capacity products to get good market share.

Indeed, the CB 350 has a very high localisation figure of 90 percent and is produced at the manufacturer’s Manesar facility. Honda stated that it listened to what Indian customers demanded and developed the bike for our market.

President and CEO of Honda Motorcycle and Scooter India (HMSI), Atsushi Ogata claimed that the firm’s focus will be on catering to domestic demand and building volumes here.

The image which was shown during the H’ness unveil event tells us that one more bike like the CB 350, a CB 1000R-esque modern naked (which could be the BS6 CB 300R) and an adventure tourer are all set to be launched in India in the future.

Honda knows all this effort has to be made if it wants to take the fight to Royal Enfield. If we take the 250-500cc motorcycle class, in FY20, Royal Enfield had 97 percent market share, selling over 6.36 lakh units, while overall segment sales were nearly 6.59 lakh units.

Since one new motorcycle would not be enough to take on Enfield’s range of popular bikes, the manufacturer is going to bring three new bikes to the market.

Thus, more news about upcoming Honda middleweight bikes can be expected in the near future for sure.