Himalayan 750 to launch by the end of the year says Royal Enfield design boss

Royal Enfield is on the brink of unveiling its long-awaited twin-cylinder Himalayan, with the firm’s Chief of Design revealing further details of the project while also confirming the new 750 platform is due ‘shortly’. 

Speaking exclusively to ADV247 at this summer’s ABR Festival, Mark Wells confirmed the new platform will underpin both an adventure bike and a café racer, while revealing the heavily revised engine will deliver a significant, if not groundbreaking, performance increase over the firm's existing 648cc parallel twin. 

“We've got the 750 [platform] coming out shortly," Wells said. “It’s pretty much an all-new engine. It's obviously based largely on the original 650, but there are a lot of new parts. Power figures I can't talk about yet, but they're up a noticeable amount. 

"Character is still very much the same. It's still that beautiful, smooth torque curve where, at 2000rpm, you're getting about 80% of your torque. You get that initial pickup on the torque and a nice flat torque curve, which is what our twins are so well known for. That lovely slick gearbox and really good fuelling are exactly the same, but there's just more of it.” 

Although Wells stopped short of confirming a public debut at this November's EICMA show in Milan, he admitted it remains a possibility – many fans expected to see the model at the trade event last November, though it now transpires that the model wasn’t quite ready for launch at the time. 

If November comes and goes again with no big-cc Himmy, then we’ll extremely surprised. What is a dead cert, however, is that the bike will be here next summer at the very latest, meaning visitors to next year's ABR Festival will be able to get a hands-on look at the incoming production machine. 

More focus on touring comfort 

Naturally, the incoming model won't replace the existing single-cylinder Himalayan 450 either. Instead, Royal Enfield sees the larger-capacity machine as sitting in an entirely different lane, with more emphasis on grand touring while softening the off-road appeal of the bike’s smaller-capacity sibling. 

"When we started the Himalayan 450, the whole goal was to create a globetrotter," Wells explained. "We wanted to create a bike that, if you genuinely wanted to go exploring around the world, was the best choice irrespective of price, cost or size. 

"The whole thing with the 450 was to create something that was super-capable, that you'd actually look for bad roads on. The new 750 is slightly less off-road-focused. Not a lot, but it is." 

Aside from sporting a larger-capacity, twin-cylinder motor, Wells also confirmed that the chassis is a whole different affair than what’s found on the 450. Among those disparities is a smaller front wheel setup, with Enfield ditching the four-fiddy's 21-inch front hoop in favour of a more road-biased 19-inch rim. Braking hardware is also beefier, and previously seen spy shots show the bike in development with a twin-disc front brake arrangement. 

Pressed on weight, Wells wouldn't reveal final figures but suggested the bike will land around (and potentially under) the 210kg mark. 

Interestingly, the project almost never happened, despite it being easily the firm’s “most asked for product,” according to Wells. 

"The backstory to it is that I didn't want to do it initially," the designer admitted. "I didn't think it was the right thing to do because I thought the engine was going to be too wide and too heavy. 

"There was a lot of debate about it all the time. "The team was keen, and Ed Cobb, one of my concept engineers, said, 'Let me build a proof of concept. We'll stick an engine in a frame and build a bike.' 

"We did that, took it to Wales and it turned out great. That very first prototype was using the old 650 engine, and we said, 'Yeah, we should do this.'" 

Why make a 750? 

The obvious question hanging over the whole project is why bother with the new engine in the first place – especially as doing so should surely mean increased development costs? Enfield doesn’t exactly struggle to shift its 650 models, and in fact, before it was confirmed that the bike would arrive with a larger-cc powerplant last year, the bike people were asking for was simply a 650-powered Himmy. 

"A bigger hole doesn't necessarily cost you more money," Wells said when asked about the above. "We wanted to make that step up and we wanted to put some space between the 450 and the 750 so there was an obvious differentiation. 

"When you think the 450 is already making 40bhp, the numbers are getting quite close, the current generation of 650s make 47bhp, even though the character is completely different. We just wanted to open that gap a little." 

Nonetheless, the aim of the game was not one of numbers alone, or so the Indian marque would suggest. 

"I always talk about Royal Enfield having three core characteristics," Wells said. "One, it has to have a story. We don't just do me-too products. 

"Two, it's got to be a beautiful thing to look at. You've got to walk into a showroom and go, 'I love that. That's cool.' 

“Those two things are easy to achieve when you don't have a budget to work to, but the third point is that it has to be approachable and affordable - that ties everything together. 

"When I say approachable, I don't just mean in terms of money. I mean how the bike encourages you to get on it, how the community behaves and how we as a brand behave. 

"There's so much machismo in motorcycling, and the idea is to say, 'Look, if you've ever had a go, come have a go. See what you think.' All of our bikes always do that, and the new 750s will be no different. 

“Every new-generation product we do is showing step-change improvements. We're making huge leaps forward." 

"Anyway, I think people are really going to like them [the new bikes]," Wells concluded. "I'm super proud of how they're coming out.”