On 16 September, on a stage in Paris, Royal Enfield put its first electric motorcycle on sale in Europe and the UK. The Flying Flea C6 is €5,990 there, £5,300 across the Channel, which is about Rs 6 lakh in our money. The same bike has been on sale in Bengaluru since April at Rs 2,79,000. Read those two numbers again.
Roughly twice the price, for the same machine, once it crosses a border. And here’s the thing: I don’t think that’s the outrage it reads like.
Let me explain. The Flying Flea C6 is a small, retro-styled city electric – 3.91kWh of battery, a 15.4kW motor, 115kmph flat out. In Europe that buys you a 104km range on the WMTC cycle. At home the same bike is quoted at 154km, because it is measured on a friendlier ruler. Same battery, two different rulers, and it’s worth knowing which one you’re reading before you get excited.
So who is it for? A commuter. Twenty kilometres of Bengaluru stop-start on a Tuesday, not a weekend blast up to Nandi Hills. On that job it makes sense at home, where you can own it outright for Rs 2,79,000 or ride away for Rs 1,99,000 if you rent the battery on a subscription. In London or Paris, Rs 6 lakh worth of city EV lines up against a very, very different field, and chances are it looks dear against it.
Now, the fairness bit. A motorcycle almost always costs more once it leaves the country it’s built in. Homologation to a new standard, shipping, a dealer network that has to be paid for and fed – none of that is free, and none of it is Royal Enfield being greedy. In my book a European price double the Indian one is steep but not sinister. I’d just like RE to say why, in plain words, rather than let the number sit there.
We at SBW have been reading what would-be buyers are posting, and the question they keep asking is the honest one: is an electric Royal Enfield worth nearly twice what a cheaper electric commuter costs? The people leaning towards it aren’t doing it for the spec sheet. They’re doing it because it’s built properly and because RE is promising a service net behind it, which for a first-generation EV matters much, much more than a headline range figure. Mind you, even the battery-rental plan is fuzzy – people who’ve rung showrooms can’t get a straight monthly number yet. Sort that out, RE.
To be fair to the company, this isn’t a bike nobody wants. Managing director B Govindarajan says early India riders have logged “over 100,000 customer-ridden kilometres in just three months”. That’s people actually riding, not just booking, no? Meanwhile, the morning the Europe price landed, the only news at home was a new Parachute White paint option. A colour, not a cut.
In my head it’s a light, spookily good thing in traffic and irrelevant on a highway, but that’s a guess until someone hands me the keys. What I can tell you is what the two tags mean: an Indian buyer is getting this bike cheaper than almost anyone else in the world.
So before you grumble that Europe got robbed, look again. For once, we’re the ones getting the deal.
