650cc Honda Africa Twin Coming Soon?

The company has filed patents for an inline-four adventure tourer

Honda tends to use a single engine platform to spawn a variety of different motorcycles spanning across genres. Its 500cc lineup, for example, has everything from the CBR500R sports bike and the Rebel 500 cruiser to the CB500F naked and even the CB500X adventure tourer. This lineup is on its way to India soon and you can read more about it here, but for now, we’re taking a look at Honda’s 650cc inline-four motor.

The brand has recently filed patent applications in Europe for an inline-four powered adventure tourer, and the motor in these drawings looks a lot like Honda’s existing 650cc unit. This makes a lot of sense: this engine powers the CBR650R sports bike and the CB650R neo-retro naked, but it doesn’t have an ADV application… yet. So, could we see an Africa Twin 650 anytime soon?

Well, not quite. You see, though the bike in these images is an adventure tourer, the latter half of that term dominates over the former. With alloy wheels measuring what appears to be 17-inches in diameter at both ends, this bike is more of a soft-roader than an all-out off-roader. Long-travel suspension and adequate ground clearance should ensure that you're not too bothered when the road surface becomes a little less than ideal. So it’s more likely that we’ll see a CB650X sometime soon, rather than a smaller Africa Twin.

This intended role and engine configuration fit well together, since more hardcore off-roaders need the bottom-end grunt of a twin-cylinder motor to handle the rough stuff, whereas an inline-four makes most of its power in the higher reaches of the rev band. If Honda is serious about putting this bike into production, we could see a concept version sometime early next year followed by a production bike soon thereafter.