Scout Sexy & Chieftain Dark Horse

The Indian Chieftain gets the Dark Horse treatment, making it meaner but not necessarily leaner. We swing a leg over this mammoth machine to see if you can actually live with it everyday.

- Ravi Ved

The Dark Knight Rises – it’s funny how I just couldn’t get this title out of my mind on the night that we were shooting the Indian Chieftain Darkhorse. So, naturally, this had to go on to become the headline of this article. And, funny as it may sound, I was thinking about it so much that I even managed to draw some parallels between the Chieftain Dark Horse and Batman. The most obvious one? Well, both come draped in matte black. And, of course, both are loaded with gadgets… but that’s where I hit a roadblock. Fortunately, then, this isn’t some weird article listing the similarities between the Chieftain Dark Horse and Batman – this is a review, so let’s get down to business.

First things first, the Indian Chieftain Dark Horse is not an all-new model – it’s a variant of the standard Chieftain. With that in mind, there isn’t much to set the Chieftain Dark Horse apart from its namesake. It follows the ‘you can have it in any colour you want as long as it’s black’ philosophy. That said, the matte black does add to its retro appeal. The downside is that it does tend to attract dust quite easily. And, just like the Chief Dark Horse, this one too is a single-seat version of the Chieftain. But, as you may have noticed in these pictures, this particular bike has the optional pillion seat fitted to it – one of the many customisable options. In fact, of the 300-piece Indian accessory brochure, nearly half of them fit the Chieftain Dark Horse. And this one has gone to town with accessories worth more than ₹2 lakh fitted to the bike that you see here.