After the community made their thoughts clear, by building custom versions of the Royal Enfield Himalayan 440 based on the Royal Enfield Scram 440, RE itself decided to give its customers what they wanted from the factory. This is the Himalayan 440, and it is a triumphant return to form for Royal Enfield, who recently has been rather busy shoving their 650cc engine into every possible motorcycle format they could think of.
The Himalayan 440 instead solves a genuine problem, which was nevertheless created by Royal Enfield itself when they discontinued the Himalayan 411 — that of a simple, rugged, deliberately unsophisticated adventure tourer with gobs of torque and a cradle frame. This is the niche that is being filled by the Himalayan 440, as it has all of those features. Heck, Royal Enfield is banking on nostalgia so much, they even made the new Himalayan 440’s dashboard look like the older ones, in terms of the placement of the circles, though they have dropped the tachometer. Thankfully they didn’t put the Himalayan 450’ console there, and this new dashboard has character.
The chassis is the same single downtube split dual cradle, but the rear subframe is different from the Scram 440, though visually looks identical to the Himalayan 411. The air/oil-cooled 442cc single pumps out 25.4PS and 34NMm, figures that are identical to the Scram 440. The Himalayan gets a 21-inch front wheel though, unlike the Scram’s 19. The kerb weight is 199kg, which is identical to the BS6 Himalayan 411s, and just 3kg more than the Scram’s.
When the old Himalayan was replaced by the new Himalayan, Royal Enfield made it a point of not calling the new one Himalayan 450, as it wanted to replace the Himalayan 411 with the Himalayan 450. However, at launch, there was a minimum price difference of nearly ₹50,000, as back in December 2023, the price of the Himalayan 411 ranged between ₹2.15 lakh and ₹2.22 lakh, while the 450 was launched at ₹2.69 lakh. So with the new Himalayan 440 being priced at ₹2.29 lakh ex-showroom, Royal Enfield has placed it in a niche where it has only one rival, and not a very effective one in terms of sales.
