Royal Enfield’s Electric Future

The redemption of Royal Enfield in recent years has been remarkable to watch. For years, Enfield was seen as an anachronism—the Indian-owned remnant of a once-proud British marque that was forever trapped in the past—but its turnaround in fortunes has been spectacular, becoming one of the world’s fastest-growing bike companies.

As recently as the early 2000s, Enfield’s mainstay models still had four-speed gearboxes with the shifter on the right-hand side. Even today, many of the company’s machines have only five ratios in their transmissions, decades after six-speed boxes became the norm elsewhere. But with the launch of models like the Himalayan, INT650, Continental GT, and most recently the Scram 411, the brand has latched onto a whole new market. In 2006, the company made 33,000 bikes, but by 2019 when the twin-cylinder models joined the range, that had risen to more than 800,000 per year. The brand has a stranglehold on the mid-capacity market in its Indian homeland, accounting for around 95 percent of bikes sold in the country between 250cc and 750cc, and a market share of more than 25 percent for all bikes over 125cc sold in India.

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By setting up a dedicated R&D facility in the UK, just a stone’s throw from Triumph’s headquarters and in the middle of the country’s engineering heartland, Royal Enfield has been able to attract talent including plenty of ex-Triumph personnel, and it’s now using that R&D center as well as its Indian operation to develop an electric bike project. Back in 2020, Siddhartha Lal, managing director of Royal Enfield’s parent firm, Eicher Motors, told the media that there was a team of engineers working on an electric bike project, but he’s been adamant both then and in subsequent interviews that the project isn’t being rushed to market. In 2020, he expected a wait of “three years or so at least,” and now it looks like it will be 2025 before we see an electric RE hit showrooms.

Royal Enfield’s new CEO, B Govindarajan, told The Hindu BusinessLine: “Over the past six to eight months, we have made investments in the EV space in terms of creating physical infrastructure for testing of vehicles and associated preparedness. We have also been hiring good talent for our technology centers in India and the U.K. Overall, we have been intensely focusing on the EV space.” But, like Lal, he suggests there’s no hurry to hit the market with such a bike, saying “…we would like to understand the buyer requirements in this segment completely before rolling out new products.”

As with many motorcycle brands entering the EV field, Enfield’s research is backed by government incentives. In India, Eicher Motors is taking part in the “Production Linked Incentive” (PLI) scheme to encourage electric vehicle development, while in the UK Royal Enfield was part of a consortium—along with ZF Automotive UK, Romax Technology, and the University of Sheffield—that received 248,798 pounds sterling ($286,800 at current exchange rates) of funding towards a 498,830 pounds ($575,000) electric motorcycle project in 2020. The UK partnership’s stated aim was to “develop a demonstration e-motorbike concept based around a vision of a future supply chain.”

So clearly, Royal Enfield is in the early stages exploring its future as an EV maker, but we’ll have to stay tuned to see further developments and when it plans to commit to building a new electric-powered model.