Royal Enfield set to dominate the urban market with new Meteor
New Meteor 350 will build on incredible success of Interceptor and Himalayan
‘With the Meteor, we hope to double things once more’
Royal Enfield are set to grow even further in 2021 with the release of their new Meteor 350 – an attractive little urban cruiser for under £4k. We first brought you news of the new bike in November but now Royal Enfield have finally unveiled full details of the small-capacity machine. Built around a brandnew 349cc single and all-new twin-downtube spine frame, the Meteor 350 should help Enfield build on the huge success they have achieved with the Himalayan and their 650 twins. “We’ve grown to become the biggest brand in the 250-750 segment,” says Arun Gopal,
Enfield’s head of Europe. “With the Himalayan we doubled our sales in Europe from 3400 units to 6300 units, then in 2019 we doubled it again with the twins to 11,000. With the Meteor, we hope to double things once more.” For Europe, there will be a trio of trims for the 20bhp machine by the time it arrives in dealers early next year, starting with the Fireball, which comes in funky colours to attract younger riders, for £3749, followed by the Stellar, which comes with a backrest and traditional colours, for £3839 and finally the Supernova, which has a backrest, screen and two-tone paint, for £3909. Early indications suggest that the Meteor has already far exceeded Enfield’s expectations.
“We originally planned on building 10,000 Meteors per month,” says Simon Warbuton, Head of Product Development. “It had a good early reception in India. We launched it at the start of November and we had 24,000 deposits by the end of the month.” A large part of the bike’s appeal is its combination of classic style, modern tech and solid reliability. The clocks use an old school floating needle for the speedo but combine it with an LCD that has three trips, a gear indicator and a service notice. The switches take inspiration from classic advance/retard levers, while the TFT sidepod brings Googlepowered mapping. Interestingly, Enfield also plan to make the satnav available for other models in the new year – a nice move that you wouldn’t expect from other manufacturers.
Lastly Enfield are keen to prove the quality of the new bike, so as a well as service intervals of 6000 miles, it comes with a three-year unlimited mileage warranty (as do all the accessories) plus three years’ free breakdown cover. Remind us again why most bikes cost north of £10,000…