So, its known that United Motorcycles are running late, but they have finally signed a Joint Venture with Lohia Motors of India. Earlier they had planned that they would begin attacking the lucrative Indian two-wheeler market with their existing line-up of Renegade Commandos and others.
However things now seem to have changed and they plan to launch an all-new motorcycle designed specifically for our market. In this article we will talk about the details we know about this India-specific motorcycle.
Key pointers about the project…
- The new motorcycle will be a cruiser.
- It will be made under the Renegade family umbrella
- This cruiser will have an engine displacement between 200 to 500cc
- This cruiser is being designed at UM’s design, research and development centre at Miami in Florida.
- It will be manufactured completely at United Motorcycle-Lohia’s (UML) manufacturing facility at Kashipur, Uttarakhand.
- Localisation of parts will be upto 70 per cent, which is fairly high for a first timer.
The ‘between 200 to 500cc‘ is a large range which UM has told us, but going by the speculative bit that we have talked about earlier, are we looking at a 350cc water cooled V-twin motor that the company is, allegedly, making for India? We aren’t sure at this point…
Pricing, according to the company, will be ‘lesser than 2 lakhs’ which further tells us that we are looking at something drastically interesting. Launch of this new cruiser will take place by the second quarter of 2015 and will be the debut point for UM in India. Before the launch, UM intends to have 50 dealerships ready in metro and tier-1 cities.
Talking about future products, UM does intend to expand to other segments including the sports category as well as within the cruiser segment.
