Honda CB500 launch in India is definitely cooking up since its ADV sibling is already here. Here we have some more dough on this…
Honda is planning to make it big in the mid-capacity motorcycle space in India. It created a special division for motorcycles between 300-500cc, just to have more focus on this segment.
Apart from the locally made CB350 series and CB300F, Honda also sells the premium CB300R and the very recently launched NX500 in India. And to expand this very segment, the company appears to have patented its next product – the CB500 for our market.
The CB500 street naked was earlier called as CB500F, however, under the new nomenclature it is denoted as CB500 Hornet. It will be interesting to see if Honda carries over the ‘Hornet’ branding here in India or not since ‘Hornet’ in India is associated with a much smaller 180cc motorcycle.
As you may know, the CB500 is the naked sibling of the NX500 ADV and hence, is based on the similar platform. Which means power comes from the same 471cc, liquid cooled, parallel twin engine that belts out around 35 kw of power and 43 Nm of torque.
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The CB500 is promoted as a friendly motorcycle and comes with a very manageable seat height of 785 mm. It has a new 5 inch color TFT screen with smartphone pairability. In the new 2024 version, Honda has also added the HSTC or Honda Selectable Torque Control to the feature list.
Apart from this new patent update, Honda had also kept on display the CB500 at its Bangalore showroom in 2022 probably to gauge interest in the streetfighter. We can expect Honda to launch the CB500 in India anytime this year and it will be placed under the NX500 – around that Rs 5-5.5 Lac price bracket.
