Royal Enfield has finally taken the wraps off the highly-anticipated Super Meteor 650 at the EICMA 2022. It is the third motorcycle to be powered by Royal Enfield’s 648cc parallel-twin engine. It gets a completely new chassis and will be offered in two variants.
The Super Meteor has a low stance and a long rake, as is typical of cruisers. It has a well-proportioned appearance thanks to 19-inch front and 17-inch rear wheels. It appears to be exactly what Royal Enfield intended it to be: an older sibling to the Meteor 350. As a result, it features a round headlight, a 15.7 litre teardrop-shaped fuel tank, a split-seat, and a single round tail light flanked by round indicators. The Super Meteor is the first RE to sport USD forks at the front, which also look quite butch.
Royal Enfield is offering the Super Meteor 650 in two variants — The Super Meteor 650 and the Super Meteor 650 Tourer. The latter is available in five colour options, namely Astral Black, Astral Blue, Astral Green, Interstellar Grey and Interstellar Green while you can have the former in two colour schemes — Celestial Red and Celestial Blue.
The Super Meteor gets a familiar dual-pod dash with the bigger left pod being the main console displaying your speed, trip metre, gear position and also the fuel indicator. The smaller right pod functions as the turn-by-turn navigation display, this is an option on other RE’s but comes standard with the Super Meteor 650.
The Super Meteor twins also get a whole host of accessories as a part of the Genuine Accessories Pack including bar-end mirrors, LED indicators, machined alloys and to make your highway cruise even comfier there are things like touring footpegs, a touring dual-seat, touring handlebar, windscreen, a passenger backrest and also panniers to store luggage.
Powering the Super Meteor 650 is the same 648cc oil-cooled parallel-twin engine that we first saw in the Interceptor 650 and the Continental 650. It even produces the same amount of power. 46bhp at 7250rpm and 52.3Nm at 5650rpm. This engine feeds power to the rear wheels via a 6-speed gearbox.
The Super Meteor is underpinned by a tubular spine frame steel chassis that is developed in collaboration with Harris Performance. This setup promises more comfort and a better ride than the other 650 twins. Suspension duties of the Super Meteor are handled by a pair of 43mm USD forks up front, the first time ever on a Royal Enfield, with 120mm of wheel travel, The rear gets a twin shock setup with preload adjustability. At 241kg the Super Meteor is the heaviest Royal Enfield ever, but it also gets a fairly low 740mm seat height that should make it easy to manoeuvre. But also low is the 135mm ground clearance, which means that you’ll have to be careful riding it on Indian roads once it’s launched.
While we don’t have an official India launch date yet, you can expect the Super Meteor to be launched here at the 2022 Rider Mania which is scheduled for November 18-22. And when it is launched here, expect it to rival the Kawasaki Vulcan S and the Benelli 502C, both of which are more modern looking alternatives. The Super Meteor 650 will be Royal Enfield’s new flagship and we suspect it will carry a slight premium over its other 650cc twins, because of its new features. Expect it to be priced around the Rs 3.5 lakh to 4 lakh mark.