Royal Enfield Super Meteor 650 (2023 - on) Review

The Royal Enfield Super Meteor 650 is the first spin-off of the firm's 650 twin range. This cruiser motorcycle is available in standard or Touring trim.

Enfield started building their first twin-cylinder motorcycles to be made in India back in 2018 with the Interceptor roadster and Continental GT café racer before the Super Meteor variants were unveiled at the Eicma trade show in 2022.

Powered by the same air/oil-cooled eight-valve 648cc parallel-twin engine with a 270º crankshaft and central chain-driven SOHC equipping the previous 650s and named after Royal Enfield’s first 100mph model which debuted back in 1955, you also get a three-year unlimited mileage warranty.

We reckon it's the best value of all the cruisers in this class.

Riding both new variants in Rajasthan, India’s largest, emptiest province pushed right up against the Pakistani border with miles of open desert roads – think Arizona, with a curry for supper - confirmed their appeal.

The Royal Enfield Meteor 650's twin-cylinder motor is the star of the show in terms of riding satisfaction, for this is a middleweight motorcycle that thinks big. It’s been intelligently developed to be all things to all riders, so that the less experienced can ride around town all day in fourth gear, and the hyper-flexible engine will let them do so without any hiccups or transmission snatch.

But at the other end of the performance scale, it was a willing companion for a high-speed blast through the wide-open roads of Rajasthan, clocking sustained high speeds on a 280-mile blast from west to east across the Great Thar Desert.

The Super Meteor doesn’t have the torque or power of a 900cc twin or even a 750 – but that’s OK, because the Royal Enfield motor invites you to work hard at making it go fast, as it will.

Just make maximum use of the light action slip-assist clutch and smooth, precise gearshift to keep it revving, and you’ll be rewarded with quite impressive levels of performance. It’s a willing partner in making both new Super Meteors a ton of fun to ride.

Additional reporting by Dan Sutherland

The Super Meteor’s well-proven engine is carried as a fully-stressed component in an all-new steel spine frame jointly developed by Royal Enfield’s UK Technology Centre at Bruntingthorpe and RE subsidiary Harris Performance, and incorporates a new cylinder head mount for additional stiffness.

Showa is now the suspension supplier for Royal Enfield’s twins, and the Super Meteor comes with an upside-down fork for the first time on any RE model, a non-adjustable 43mm Big Piston item carried at a 27.6° rake with 118.50mm of trail, offering 120mm of wheel travel.

At the rear, the extruded steel swingarm delivering a rangy 1500mm wheelbase carries twin Showa shocks, with 5-step preload adjustment and 101mm of travel. There’s a 19-inch forged aluminium front wheel and 16-inch rear, shod with Indian supplier CEAT’s new Zoom Cruz tubeless tyres specially developed for the Super Meteor duo.

Braking is supplied by the same single 320mm front disc as on the earlier 650 models, but a much larger 300mm rear brake disc (up from 240mm), both gripped by twin-piston calipers from Brembo’s Indian subsidiary ByBre, with twin-channel Bosch ABS. On the road the front brakes just aren't powerful enough - you need to use the rear in order to pull up in a decent amount of space.

The Standard model weighs a claimed 241kg with oil and a 90% full 15.7-litre fuel tank, equating to circa 230kg with oil/no fuel. That’s quite a bit heavier than the 202kg similarly quoted for the Interceptor twin with the same motor.

A 740mm seat height ensures almost any rider can put both feet flat on the ground at rest, with forward footrests and a tall, wide touring-style handlebar featuring easy-adjust clutch and brake levers.

The Standard bike’s riding position has the pulled-back handlebar combining with the forward-mounted footrests to deliver a reasonably relaxed albeit pretty upright stance.

With the quite wide stepover and flatter-feeling seat compared to the Tourer it seems you’re perched more atop the bike than sitting in it, and pillion space is less spacious, too. The Tourer’s seat is quite different, with a notably narrower stepover which lets you tuck your knees in tighter to the tank, and a shape which has you sitting more within the bike.

The bumpy Indian highways really tested the Super Meteor’s Showa suspension, with the settings for the raked-out non-adjustable forks ensuring that even with the bike’s extra weight they didn’t bottom out under heavy downhill braking, but kept on damping out road shock from the uneven surface. On poorer UK roads we found it bottomed out a bit, lacking the high-speed refinement of other suspensions.

The rear suspension was even better, with the super compliant Showa twin shocks’ well-chosen damping delivering a good ride over broken everyday road surfaces.

If I could split the star ratings for ride quality and brakes out into two, I would award the Super Meteor four stars for ride quality but just three for the brakes.

The operation of the single front twin-piston brake caliper and 320mm disc is just about adequate, with good feedback through the lever that’ll help you stop the ABS kicking in too often on India’s dusty road surfaces.

But both Super Meteors would definitely benefit from extra bite from the front brake, making you glad you’ve got the hefty 300mm rear brake that stops the bike better than its larger front partner. Thanks to the Super Meteor’s extra weight you must use both brakes hard to stop from any speed.

The Bosch ECU-equipped fuel-injected engine produces a claimed 46.33 bhp of crank power at 7,250 rpm, meaning it's A2 compliant, while peak torque of 38.57lb.ft is delivered at 5,650 rpm – 400 revs higher than on the older 650 twins.

But RE’s Chief Engineer Paolo Brovedani told MCN there are no mechanical changes to the engine in the new models, only that the Super Meteor’s airbox and exhausts are all-new, which coupled with revised mapping for the ECU delivers a Cruiser-friendly wider spread of torque, with 80% of that peak grunt already available at just 2,500 rpm.

The unchanged six-speed transmission with overdrive top gear features a slip/assist clutch, but now with a heel-and-toe shifter as standard on both Super Meteor variants.

The engine’s key asset is the great mapping of the Bosch ECU, especially the response from a closed throttle, which is ultra-smooth with no snatch or jerk. This made the Super Meteor an ideal ride in India, where stop/start riding in heavy traffic is a fact of everyday life.

On the new RE twins you just twist and go, with that clean pickup and a totally linear build of both power and torque. The single gear-driven counterbalancer removes any trace of vibration all the way to the hard-action 7,500 rpm limiter.

The power delivery is impressive for a middleweight motor, coupled with the abundant torque which is ideally spread throughout the rev range, providing a surge of acceleration as soon as you twist your wrist to exit a turn.

We found the Meteor 650 sounds the most authentic of its class.

Top gear roll-on is impressive, too – running at three-quarter throttle at 75 mph on a deserted Indian Toll Road in sixth gear still left sufficient grunt for the Super Meteor to surge forward noticeably if I cracked the throttle wide open. For a 650cc bike, this is a very motorway-friendly ride.

Our Royal Enfield Super Meteor 650 owners' reviews don't indicate anything particularly concerning from a reliability perspective.

Overall build quality is good and owners' reviews for the other Royal Enfield 650s reveal nothing to worry about either.

The satin-chrome aluminium switch cubes look stylish and substantial, despite being devoid of RBW technology’s buttons and switches owing to the absence of any electronics other than EFI and ABS on a bike with a cable throttle.

The LED headlamp on both models is another first for Royal Enfield, matched to an LED rear light. Build quality is excellent with a premium feel to many components and self-evident attention to design detail, like how the oil cooler and hoses match up with the frame downtubes.

Thanks to their quite different riding positions these two new variants of the Meteor are sufficiently different from one another that despite sharing the same mechanical platform, they’re essentially two distinct variants - mid-capacity Cruisers that are enjoyable to ride thanks to a great engine, and super handling.

One is a standard Cruiser model with prices starting at £6,799 OTR, the other a Tourer variant costing £7,299 OTR fitted with a wind tunnel-developed windscreen, LED indicators front and rear, and a larger seat with extra pillion space, plus a vestigial backrest.

Enfield’s existing 650s have sold like hotcakes and - when you take the Super Meteor’s low price point into consideration - Royal Enfield CEO Siddhartha Lal will most likely have yet another global hit on his hands.

And there’s more to follow, with RE upper management openly stating they have a whole series of new twin-cylinder models nearing production to join this range-topping new Super Meteor duo.

Rivals in the entry-level cruiser market will come in the form of Honda’s £6299 Rebel 500, Harley-Davidson’s £12,995 Nightster and Kawasaki’s £7449 Vulcan S.

The MCN test: Royal Enfield Super Meteor 650 vs Honda Rebel 500 vs Kawasaki Vulcan S

First published in MCN 26 April 2023

McDonalds, Coca-Cola, Hershey’s bars – we do love a US import over here but by the time it reaches our shores, sometimes a small reduction in size is required to fit our less indulgent tastes. Seriously, have you seen the size of a  large Coke in American fast food outlets?

You could swim in it! This size reduction can apply to cruisers, too. Over the pond, big is most certainly viewed as better but in the UK our more nadgery road network sees middleweight cruisers proving remarkably popular. And not just to those on restricted licences, but to all kinds of ages and both male and female riders are happy to take the plunge.

With this in mind, we charged MCN’s News Editor, Dan Sutherland, with the task of testing three A2-legal (or restrictable) middleweight cruisers.

"As a shorter rider (of five-feet six-inches), I can certainly see the appeal of these bikes," says Dan, "and at ten stone I’m also quite light so I can sympathise with those who find big-capacity cruisers a bit of a heavy handful. I’m intrigued to live with these three mini-cruisers as my commute, which is basically flat and mainly straight-line riding in open roads from Coningsby to  Peterborough, is ideal cruiser country. And I even pass New York on the route – New York,  Lincolnshire, that is."

Using his 50-mile ride into the office as a test route, would Dan fall for the charms of these mini American dreams?

The MCN Verdict

"Having spent a few weeks cruising around Lincolnshire on these three machines, I can certainly now see the appeal of a middleweight cruiser. They are really good fun to ride and I have enjoyed the change in pace they offer compared to something like a middleweight naked.

"They make no sporty demands on you and it is nice to actually take a chill pill and slow down on a ride, I’ve seen things on my route I’ve not noticed before – mainly potholes as I desperately try to avoid them.

"Out of the three mini cruisers I tested the Enfield is the clear winner. Not only is it the best value, it also delivers the full cruiser experience without feeling like ‘just’ an A2-bike. You could buy it and keep it forever, it does all that is requested of it and has character and soul. The Vulcan wasn’t quite my cup of tea, I appreciated the engine’s extra poke, but its  performance cruiser looks felt a bit too plastic-fantastic for me. And the Rebel, as good as it was in town, just didn’t have the substance for me to feel comfortable riding it on bigger roads.”

The single round instrument cluster combines an analogue speedo with an inset LCD panel showing gear selected, fuel level, time, odometer and twin trips, and there’s a USB socket onboard, too.

Royal Enfield’s free-to-use TBT/Turn-by-Turn Tripper navigation pod developed together with Google which links to the rider’s smartphone via Bluetooth, is included as standard for the first time on an RE twin-cylinder model.

Both a side stand that’s very easy to flip out while seated on the bike and an equally easy-access centre stand come fitted as stock, too.