On the sixth of September, Royal Enfield parked the Himalayan 750 on a stand at its own Himalayan Basecamp in Leh and let riders walk around it. No price. No date. No release either, mind you – eight days on, there is still nothing about the motorcycle on Royal Enfield’s own newsroom. A company never once shy about a launch showed its biggest engine yet to a field of riders and then went quiet. Which, if you know them at all, is not an accident.
What was on that stand is worth wanting. A new 750cc twin built on the 650’s architecture, six speeds, a Showa upside-down fork you can actually adjust, twin ByBre discs up front, nineteen inches at the front and seventeen at the back. Cruise control and traction control, both firsts for the company. The power figure everyone is quoting, somewhere around 55PS, is an estimate and nothing more, so hold it loosely. EICMA opens on the eighth of November. That is when we know.
And here’s the thing. I don’t think the 750 is where Royal Enfield’s problem lives.
Hear me out before you scream back. I have ridden the Interceptor 650 and the Continental GT 650, and I did the Himalayan 450 at its launch. Three rungs of the same ladder, and the GT is spookily good at the thing it was built for. Now put me in a showroom with a stranger who has a licence and a budget. Could I tell him which one is his? No. I could tell him what each one does. That is not the same job, and it is the job that matters, no?
None of which is the motorcycles’ fault. They are good. Some are far, far better than the badge on the tank suggests. It is the map that has come apart.
Royal Enfield sells seventeen models now across 350, 450 and 650, seven of them 650 twins, and the ceiling is the Super Meteor 650 at about Rs 4.06 lakh ex-showroom, with 47.4hp in the Bear 650 the strongest tune anyone has pulled from that engine. A 750 lands on top of that stack, not above it. You see the difference, right? Which means the man in the showroom does not get a clearer decision. He gets a longer one.
Read what people actually ask before they buy one. They are not asking for displacement. They are asking which Royal Enfield to buy. Somebody posted last week listing eight of them by name, asking in earnest how a beginner is meant to choose. Not one reply said wait for the 750. Not one. A chap who had spent weeks sampling off-roaders came away wanting the Bear 650 and not the Himalayan. The rungs are not even in the order the badges imply.
That said, be fair to them. A 750 twin is years of work, and you cannot explain a rung before you have built it. And Royal Enfield’s talent was never the spec sheet. It is the club, the ride, the fact that their people ride more than anybody else’s. Showing the bike to riders in Leh before showing it to the press at EICMA is the most Royal Enfield thing they could have done, and I liked it.
So here’s my ask, and fifty-odd days to do it in. Spend as much on the eight as on the ninth. Tell me what the Bear is for and what the Shotgun is for, one sentence each, in words a man with one budget can act on.
Sell me the ladder, not the top rung.
