I spent the last two weeks in a very strange world riding a Royal Enfield Himalayan 450. This is a new motorcycle to the U.S. but certainly not a new company. Royal Enfield is legitimately the oldest continuously run motorcycle maker in the world. The British company started in 1901 and hasn’t missed a year of production since then. A factory was opened in India in 1955, and now that’s where all the models are made. They served the domestic market well, but for years Enfield has been thought of exclusively as a retro brand in the west. With the Himalayan 450, that will change. This is a modern motorcycle designed in the U.K. to serve the adventure market. The real attraction is the price. The base model sells for $5799; basically half the price of a KTM dual-sport.
DJ Osborne on the Royal Enfield Himalayan 450 in Nepal.
To be fair, the Himalayan wasn’t developed from racing stock like KTM, Husky and Honda dual-sport bikes. It was conceived from the start as an adventure bike. It comes standard with a rear luggage rack, crash-bars, 4.5 gallons of fuel capacity and a frame-mount windscreen. All that stuff ups the weight to over 400 pounds.
As I mentioned, I rode the bike for a good two weeks in a different world–I was literally in the Himalayan mountains. I couldn’t attend the U.S. press launch of the bike in Park City, Utah last month and the people at Royal Enfield then asked if I would like to attend one of the company’s adventure tours. It was called the Moto Himalaya Mustang ride, which started in Kathmandu, Nepal and trekked to the ancient kingdom of Mustang, right on the border of Nepal, Tibet and China. I said yes. I’m not crazy.
The standard Himalayan 450 sells for $5799. This version is $5999.
For now, I’ll save the stories of that ride for later and focus on the bike. To be honest, I wasn’t expecting much. The Himalayan 411 that came before this model was basically a throwback to another time. It was cheap, air-cooled transportation but had little else going for it. The 450 has nothing in common with that bike. It has what they call the Sherpa motor, which is a DOHC six-speed with fuel-injection. It’s a little bulky compared to a premium-level 450, but otherwise is perfectly modern. It’s mated to a steel frame and Showa suspension. The brakes are Bybre, which is owned by Brembo. It has antilock brakes which have four user-defined modes. There’s a handlebar switch that allows you to select the amount of intervention at start-up.
The new Sherpa motor is the most modern engine Royal Enfield has yet produced.
In terms of outright performance, the Sherpa motor is right in line with any other EPA-approved 450 in the U.S. It perhaps doesn’t have the low-end snap of a Honda CRF450RL, but is otherwise right in the hunt. Its fuel-injection system is downright amazing. Our ride went as low as 2600 feet and as high as 15,500 feet above sea level. It kept going and going. At those extreme altitudes, you lose power, but the bike always ran clean, was easy to start and never stalled or misbehaved in any way. Once we got down a little lower, we found it would crack 160 kph in the dirt. At least, that’s what the electronic multi function instrument up front said. That translates to over 100 mph.
The windscreen is frame-mounted.
The suspension is another big win. It’s soft, but then it should be soft. After spending hours, days and weeks in the saddle it turns out that the Himalayan is a super comfortable bike. I especially appreciated the fact that you could raise the seat height. The bike’s weight is, of course, its biggest drawback. There’s no getting around the fact that it’s heavy. Think of a Kawasaki KLR650 and you get the idea. The Royal Enfield motor has more peak power than the Kawasaki, but less torque.
The big question that anyone has with bikes that are not manufactured in Europe or Japan revolves around reliability. Normally, we can’t say much about that. A magazine press bike rarely gets very much time. In this case, the Moto Himalaya Mustang ride had a sample of 17 Royal Enfield 450s, all ridden day after day. There were no mechanical issues. The bikes were crashed, certainly, but even so, there was never anything more serious than a bent lever or two.
I’ll have more on the Himalayan in the December issue of Dirt Bike. And stay tuned for a report on the ride itself. Man, do I have stories to tell!
See you next week!
–Ron Lawson
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