Enter The Harley-Davidson Nightster 440?

[advrider]

Earlier in July, Harley-Davidson launched its new X440 roadster in India, built with help from mega-manufacturer Hero. That is to say, Hero is building the bike as the MoCo’s partner, and Harley-Davidson’s name goes on it. Now, only a few days after its debut, it appears the X440 family is already slated to start growing, with a new Nightster model apparently coming soon.

The news comes as Hero has apparently filed for regulatory paperwork that protects the Nightster 440 name—you can see the filing above, or search the paperwork for yourself here (search “Nightster” as the wordmark, under class 12). Actually, this paperwork was filed back in February, and was just discovered recently, so this project could be fairly far along.

So what might this new made-in-India bike be?

The current Nightster model sold in North America is a re-skin of the Sportster S. It uses a down-sized version of the Revolution Max engine (as seen in the Pan America adventure bike—see our review of the Nightster here). That means the North American Nightster has the same power as the Sportster S, with a claimed 90 hp at 7,500 rpm from the 60-degree, 975 cc V-twin.

The X440 is way, way behind that, as it’s designed for a much different market, with much different spending habits. According to Harley-Davidson’s Indian website, the X440’s fuel-injected air/oil-cooled single-cylinder engine puts out 28 lb-ft of torque at 4,000 rpm and 27 hp at the crank at 6,000 rpm. Expect that engine to be unchanged in the new bike, but with a different set of bodywork. While the X440 is a retro roadster, we’d expect the Nightster 440 to have more contemporary cruiser/muscle bike styling… but without as much muscle to back up those looks.

But that doesn’t really matter to most readers, as at this point, the X440 series is not supposed to be coming to North America anyway, and probably not Europe. That might change, but for now, inmates will have to travel to Asia to ride these bikes—and given how many inmates do fly-and-rent tours, we do expect to hear stories about these machines from our forum members in the months to come.

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