What you see here in the lead image is a teaser pic that is a part of a media invite sent to us by the boffins at Honda Motorcycles and Scooters India. Looking at this teaser, it would be safe to guess that Honda has something promising in store and safely expect us to report live from this event, which would be held tomorrow.
Our guess is that Honda would be unveiling its upcoming 100cc commuter motorcycle tomorrow. This is the same motorcycle that would go head on against the high selling Hero Splendor. The upcoming commuter bike would help the Indian subsidiary of the Japanese auto giant to displace Hero MotoCorp from the top of the Indian bike sales chart and become the new king pin of our rapidly growing two wheelers market.
It may be noted that all the speculations regarding the upcoming 100cc motorcycle are backed by Honda Motorcycles and Scooters India’s official announcement that they plan to challenge Hero MotoCorp Splendor with a 100cc entry level commuter motorcycle. The new Honda commuter motorcycle will become the cheapest motorcycle in the bike maker’s product portfolio and would be considerably cheaper than the Dream Yuga 110. While HMSI’s Dream Yuga, along with most other HMSI bikes, is doing good numbers on the sales charts and the bike maker is already reigning over the automatic scooter segment, it realizes that it is the very basic 100cc entry level commuter bike segment wherein the real sales volume lies.
While the upcoming 100cc bike from Honda would be a direct rival to the Splendor, it won’t be half as dated and would instead be a modern bike in all aspects. Powering the bike will be a 100cc single cylinder motor that would be loosely based on the Dream Yuga’s 110cc mill. Our sources say that the single pot engine would have a max power figure in the vicinity of 7.5 PS and would have a decent torque figure of 8 Nm. The motor will be mated to a 4 speed transmission and would be sufficiently fuel efficient to make the good folks at Hero MotoCorp pretty worried.
In all probability, the price of the new bike would undercut that of the Hero Splendor by a negligible margin.