Behold, Great Wall’s Eight-Cylinder Motorcycle Engine
Great Wall Motor saw Honda stick a flat-six in its Gold Wing and said “hold my two cylinders”. Finally, its eight-cylinder engine has broken cover
In 2024, the mad is not the realm of the manufacturers. For corporations, experiments are risks, and are therefore to be avoided. Not for Great Wall Motor, though.
No, GWM has built an eight-cylinder engine for its motorcycle project, making the 1,833cc flat-six in the Honda Gold Wing look positively ordinary.
Not small, though. GWM’s eight-cylinder is expected to displace about 1,600cc, although the official specifications haven’t yet been released by the Chinese company. So, we still don’t know performance figures like power and torque outputs, either. We do know what it looks like, though, since it’s shown in the video above.
The engine is expected to be used in a grand tourer, akin to the aforementioned Gold Wing, that was sort of half-revealed in a video posted to Chinese social media by GWM’s billionaire owner.
RideApart reports that the bike will launch under “Souo” branding. It translates to “Soul”, which is... inspiring. This is somewhat in-line with GWM’s branding for its cars, some of which launch under the “Haval” brand.
Assuming GWM’s engine reaches production, it will be the first production eight-cylinder motor to be used by its manufacturer for a motorcycle since Morbidelli’s unit of the 1980s. Although Morbidelli is now relaunched under the Chinese stewardship of the Keeway Group, there are currently no signs that an eight-cylinder engine is being developed to revive the Italian brand’s history in that respect. So, the GWM, or Souo, will have to do for now.
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Image credit: YouTube/Chris Wee.
Alex has been working in the motorcycle industry for as long as he has been at Visordown, which has been since March 2022 so we'll let you work it out from there. He's the new guy. He'd be fetching us all coffee 'round the clock if he wasn't based in the arse end of nowhere.
