2018 Royal Enfield Continental GT 650

The Continental GT 650 makes minor changes to the Interceptor and creates a gorgeous cafe racer and a sharper motorcycle

- Shubhabrata Marmar 

The Royal Enfield Continental GT 650, we know now, will be the more expensive of the two 650 Twins that Royal Enfield is in the process of launching right now. The United States market is the first, and only market to have received pricing so far. And two things are clear. First, the chrome tank models on the Continental as well as the Interceptor 650 are the most expensive trim models. And second, the Interceptor is less expensive by about USD 200, about 15,000. That is on a base price of about 4.5 lakh there, so the difference is not significant. Let’s look under the skin, shall we?

Powertrain and chassis

Royal Enfield clearly set out to make just the one bike, cast in the mould of a roadster and a cafe racer, explained Siddartha Lal, CEO, Eicher Motors. He believes that given how new the all-new bike project was for Royal Enfield, not thinking of the 650 as a platform helped focus, effort and time. We do believe that, for example, a Himalayan 650 and a Scrambler 650 (our placeholder name, not Enfield’s) will follow. But what Lal was underlining is the reason for how similar the two motorcycles are.

So the air/oil-cooled fuel-injected 648cc parallel twin is a simple eight-valve SOHC unit that is shared across both, the Royal Enfield Continental GT and the Interceptor 650. There isn’t any difference between the two, and the six-speed gearbox, gearing and the slip-assist clutch are common too.

I was surprised to realise that the frame is the same as well but Royal Enfield’s chassis development team explained that while even the suspension is the same, the Continental GT runs slightly higher preload than the Interceptor which sharpens up the motorcycle by a tiny, but crucial bit.