Few weeks ago, two un-camouflaged V-Twin cruisers were spied testing on the roads of Faridabad in Haryana. The news of low cost motorcycle from Harley Davidson, few design cues from its other line of products and it having a CKD plant in Haryana has made us believe that test vehicles are the new low cost models from Harley Davidson. A report from Motorbeam now confirms that the test motorcycles are indeed a low cost motorcycle from the American manufacturer that are being tested.
The upcoming motorcycle is likely to get a new 500cc V-Twin engine that is rumoured to churn out 45bhp and 50Nm. This low cost Harley Davidson is being developed under a new platform called –G platform that will become the base design for future low cost models which are targeted to emerging markets like India.
It is likely the company will rely on local manufacturing to keep the price very competitive which might be possible as there is still time for this motorcycle to hit Indian roads as its currently in early stage of development. We expect the motorcycle to hit the market in next 2 years.
One of the reason we feel Harley Davidson will take their time to develop this motorcycle is because for the first time, they are developing a low cost and low displacement (883cc being the smallest one) motorcycle. They are known for developing some really nice big displacement cruisers, so ‘not very developed’ low cost motorcycle might give them bad PR which obviously no manufacturer would like to have.
Currently the company sells most of its motorcycles in India through completely-knocked-down (CKD) route. The cheapest Harley-Davidson you can buy in India is the Superlow for Rs 5.71 lakh. We can expect the upcoming low cost Harley to be sold in India somewhere between Rs 4.5 and Rs 5 lakh and might be called as ‘ReallyLow’ (Pun intended!)
