A few months ago, at the international unveiling of the new 650 twin motorcycles, Royal Enfield Chief Executive Siddhartha Lal disclosed that the company wouldn’t shy away from electric bikes when the time was right. Well now it seems like the company believes that the time may not be so far away after all. The company’s president, Rudratej Singh was recently quoted as saying, “Royal Enfield has several projects in the pipeline and the electric platform is one of them. We are in an investment phase in the project where we have a team that is working on different ideas and concepts with a long-term focus. We will disclose our plans at an appropriate time.”
Royal Enfield has always been associated with Retro styles motorcycles, and it will surely continue this trend as long as the rules of the land allow it. Still, this move might come as a surprise, but going by the market trend, RE wants to take the first mover advantage. After all, the company isn’t exactly switching over to a new form of driving force properly, but it’s already begun to prepare for an Indispensable future.
Harley-Davidson has also been actively working on an electric platform for the past few years and had showcased the LiveWire concept a few years ago.
We don’t expect a production version of the bike from RE before 2020. But what will an electric Royal Enfield be like? Well atleast from RE we can expect that the motorcycle will be all about enormous torque delivery. This will contain the Royal Enfield DNA in it. The bike will going to be brisk, but quiet!
Along with the electric bike, RE is also working on two platforms that will replace existing ones to meet the upcoming BS-VI emission norms– confirmed by Rudratej Singh. We expect that the Classic, Thunderbird and Himalayan series are the ones that will be updated.
RE’s most selling bikes is The Classic 350. It’s possible that RE will try to maintain the retro styling of the Classic 350 and 500 too while updating them with modern features like LED lighting, ABS, and better cycle parts, apart from a BS-VI-compliant engine. We’d love to see what RE will do till then stay tuned to theunbiasedreview.com for more updates!
