Baby Honda adventure bike revealed

LAST week we said that Honda was planning a new Chinese-made, downsized adventure bike based on the CB190R. Now it’s launched exactly that during the 25th anniversary celebrations of its Wuyang-Honda joint venture.

The bike, dubbed CB190X and bearing the terrible name ‘Tourism’ on the tank, is exactly what last week’s patent filings led us to believe. It’s based on sporty-looking Chinese market CB190R, which means it gets the same 184cc air-cooled, fuel-injected single and tubular steel frame. But it’s wrapped in predictable adventure bike styling – beak, high screen, aluminium grab rails, crash bars – and given longer-travel suspension.

According to Chinese site NewMotor, which took these pictures at the bike’s unveiling, the power is the same as the CB190R, with 15.8hp at 8000rpm.

Oddly, Honda already makes another adventure-style bike around the same engine and chassis, the CBF190X Fight Hawk, also sold in China. It, however, keeps the sportier USD forks of the CB190R as well as that bike’s underbelly exhaust, so probably has a little less off-road ability than the new CB190X.

As we said last week, there’s little chance that this bike will ever be sold in western markets, but it would be easy to imagine how a sleeved-down, learner-legal 125cc version could prove popular.