There are two motorcycle brands that changed India’s adventure bike scenes for good – Hero Xpulse and the Royal Enfield Himalayan. While the latter has received a big upgrade, the Xpulse is yet to get bigger and faster. In fact, the question has gone from ‘When is the Xpulse 400 launching?’ to ‘Will we ever see a bigger Xpulse?’ Well, the answer here is a big YES!
But it is going to take a while.
Well, it has been a little over five years since the Hero Xpulse 200 made its India debut. This motorcycle with a 21-inch front wheel, large ground clearance and great comfort allowed a lot of Indians to enter the world of off-roading or enduro riding. In fact, its pricing made it quite a value-for-money proposition then. For the outside world, the Xpulse 200 was a big success and we could see plenty of such bikes in urban as well as in rural markets. But internally, Hero MotoCorp didn’t see it as a big success as the sales projection was much higher. Nevertheless, the company kept spending heavily on marketing this bike, and over the last few years, it launched a few facelifted models, and also launched the rally variant for more serious buyers. I bought the fuel-injected version in September 2020, and I sold it earlier this year because I got super bored with it.
That 200cc single-cylinder air-cooled engine has decent performance but it isn’t the kind that will keep you happy for years. While I know that the ride setup and the bike’s off-road capabilities are perfect for the Indian market, over a period of time, you will get bored with that dull acceleration and also poor highway performance. Which is what happened with me and that is why I went for a more powerful ADV.
But the good news is - the bigger Xpulse is under development and will hit the Indian market within the next two years. Hero MotoCorp knows that it has spent crore of rupees building this brand and it will keep it alive in the form of a bigger bike. The current Xpulse buyers will eventually want to upgrade and the company doesn’t want these customers to switch to brands like Royal Enfield and KTM. But where’s the bike? According to my sources, the R&D of the bigger Xpulse faced some major issues with the design of the engine, due to which the project got delayed by a few years. This engine was rumoured to be a 400cc single-cylinder liquid-cooled motor that could churn out around 35bhp-40bhp. The torque was expected to be around 35Nm. But this engine could never get a go-ahead as it didn’t fully perform as expected. In fact, some spy shots of this bike were published a few years ago.
Interestingly, a few months ago, an Xpulse test mule was spotted with a bigger air-cooled motor. This could be the 440cc single-cylinder air-cooled engine that is seen on the Mavrick 440 and also the Harley-Davidson X440. For the record, this engine is fantastic, and possibly the best engine Hero has ever developed. Vikrant has been riding the Mavrick 440 long termer every single day and he simply loves it. So now, it makes us think, is Hero planning to use this 440cc engine on the bigger Xpulse? We won’t know for sure, but this engine will make a lot of sense. It is known for its strong low and mid-range. It is super refined, and with the engine already doing duties on two bikes, it has been well tested and the company is already sitting on a lot of data.
The bigger Xpulse will be launched by late 2025 or early 2026 but there’s a high chance to see a concept of it later this year. Hero MotoCorp will only show concepts if that bike has plans to go into production. At this EICMA, we could see that happening.
