Old-School Meets the Future with Honda’s CB4 Interceptor

At first glance, it looks like the designers at Honda sat down to watch Mission Impossible – Rogue Nation before putting pen to paper for the CB4 Interceptor concept. There is a hint of the BMW 7 Series profile to this new Honda motorbike; but that is certainly no criticism, for the CB4 is a fine looking old-school, yet very modern machine.

Finished in satin black with some sharp lines offsetting the curves, Honda has built a bit of a subtle head turner. The company revealed the concept at the recent EICMA conference in Milan along with a couple of other bikes – the CB1000R and Africa Twin Adventure Sports respectively.

Arguably, the CB4 Interceptor has been based around the CB1000R with a café racer feel added in for good measure. The bike is the work of Honda’s R and D department based in Rome, which has been concentrating on (I quote) a ‘Neo Sports Café’ theme. You may recall way back in 2015 that Honda debuted the first incarnation of this – the CB4 Concept – at the same show.

Honda clearly did not get the memo and has not gone with the design flavour of the month, but created a bike that runs on good old fossil fuels rather than electricity. Yet the technology is certainly not lagging behind, the CB4 utilises a fan that converts the motorcycle’s kinetic energy into power to run the fuel tank mounted touch-screen, providing constant connectivity. This allows the rider to make use of maps and also to make calls in an emergency. How this would work in real terms (bulky padded gloves?) remains to be seen of course. Note also the circular striking LED headlight.

So can we expect this beast to go into production then? No word from Honda on this yet, but there are some rumours that the original, maybe visually less refined, CB4 Concept is slowly making its way towards becoming a Honda production bike…

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