Top Secret Report From Japan: Honda CL500, CL300 Scramblers Incoming!
Those rumors of a new Honda CL series won’t go away. Decades after the last of the great CL scramblers went off the market, they’re expected to return in the near future. Now, the perennial pot-stirrers over at Young Machine (a Japanese moto mag) are calling for these bikes to be unveiled on this fall’s show circuit, as a 2023 release. And, they’ve put together a very convincing render.
Visit the story here, or see a screengrab of the site below, including some very garbled Google Translate text:
There isn’t a whole lot of useful info in this screengrab, thanks to Google Translate’s garbled work. And, Young Machine hasn’t gotten their hands on official Honda confirmation of these details, far as we know. Image: Young Machine
So, yeah. As you can see from that screen cap, Google Translate’s work on this story is worse than the translation for a mid-’80s video game. But there’s still a very solid base behind this rumor, as we’ve seen everything from patent drawings to trademark applications nailing down a design for a scrambler based on Honda’s Rebel 500 and Rebel 300 cruisers. For its part, Young Machine has been consistent in its prophecies of these machines, and it’s very rarely wrong—sometimes, just a few months early. But it’s easy to see why they think this bike is coming—our first glance at a redesigned Rebel frame, with the rear end kicked-up for offroad travel, debuted a long time ago, and Honda’s been at this project long enough to release a machine.
An idea whose time has come
If Honda actually builds a CL scrambler series, it’s an idea whose time has come. In fact, Honda’s not too late to the game—but it is wayyyyy behind many other OEMs. While Honda went big into neo-retro styling over the past decade, it simultaneously ignored its own history of scramblerized street bikes, just as several other OEMs made major bank off this idea. Honda could have sold a lot of these bikes if they’d come to market around 2015-2016, after the initial 500 platform launch. For whatever reason, that didn’t happen.
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