The man with overall responsibility for creating Royal Enfield’s first twin-cylinder modern-era cruiser is New Jersey native Adrian Sellers, 42, who after a four-year stint with Honda R&D in Italy and, before that, nine years at Yamaha’s Design Laboratory in Los Angeles, was appointed the Indian company’s Head of Custom and Motorsport in 2016, based at its UK Technology Centre at Bruntingthorpe. Let’s leave it to him to tell us how the ground-breaking Super Meteor 650 came about.
2023 Royal Enfield Super Meteor 650 Review
“In my previous roles I ended up doing a lot of research into the Custom scene, as part of keeping abreast of styling trends and so on. Custom has always been a very forward thinking arena for motorcycles – such bikes are pieces of artwork that you can do one-off crazy stuff with that wasn’t done before, which can then be brought into the mainstream. I became very interested in it as a function of research, and when I came to Royal Enfield, there was an opportunity to have a more direct participation in the segment. We began working on the Super Meteor pretty much as soon as I joined – it’s an all new platform for us, so yes, I guess you could say it’s the bike I was hired to produce.”
“When we created the 650 motor, we knew this was going to be a good basis for a lot of bikes, as with our Meteor 350 Single. And so even before I joined they had started to put together this multi-year, multi-model plan for the future, and that’s what we’re executing now – every one of these new twin-cylinder Royal Enfield models that are coming out now are part of that plan that was thought up over seven years ago. However, things happen during development, and so your plans may need to change in terms of the order in which each new variant is launched. Each model has its own unique set of challenges, and sometimes, one or more of them causes a delay. On this bike, we delayed it a bit just to get the finishes right, to make sure that our premium model really was going to be properly that. But there’s another motorcycle we’ll be announcing in due course that the Super Meteor overtook for that same reason – we’re very focused on getting each model just right before releasing it to the customer.”









