While Bajaj Auto and Triumph Motorcycles are yet to sign a formal pact, the British marque’s chief product officer Steve Sargent and chief commercial officer Paul Stroud has confirmed to Economic Times that the company has already conducted early testing of prototype models.
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Triumph Motorcycles sees the partnership with Bajaj Auto as a long-term collaboration, and both companies want to get the details right, stated Triumph executives. Speaking to the website on the sidelines of the EICMA motorcycle show in Milan, Italy, Paul Stroud said:
It’s a very complicated thing when two well-established brands try to join together. We’re seeing this as a long-term collaboration between ourselves and Bajaj. So, we both want to get it right.
Regular readers would know that the new models from the partnership will be developed by Triumph Motorcycles and be manufactured by Bajaj Auto. The partnership aims to collaborate the technical expertise of Triumph Motorcycles with the production capabilities of Bajaj Auto. The new motorcycle will be manufactured by Bajaj Auto in India.
Speaking about the developments, Steve Sargent added:
I’m not expecting the development costs to be significantly different if we had done this ourselves. I think really the advantage in the collaboration is the economies of scale that Bajaj has.
Sargent added that Triumph Motorcycles had attempted to enter the lower-displacement segment with a 250-cc engine-powered motorcycle but it was not able to get the economics of it right. The partnership will target its products in the 400-800 cc segment, thus putting them against the likes of Royal Enfield motorcycles (500 range and the 650 Twins) and Harley-Davidson Street series. We could also see a lower displacement model (250-300 cc) from the partnership between Triumph Motorcycles and Bajaj Auto.
The Made-in-India models from Bajaj-Triumph, as confirmed by Rajiv Bajaj, Managing Director of Bajaj Auto, will be exported to US, Europe and Japan.
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While the motorcycles from the Anglo-Indian partnership are yet to be revealed, the latest product from the Indo-Austrian partnership, the KTM 390 Adventure, is heading to our market very soon. The single-cylinder adventure model from KTM, which was unveiled at the 2019 EICMA motorcycle show, will reportedly arrive in India in December this year. KTM is expected to unveil the motorcycle at the 2019 edition of the India Bike Week in Goa.
[Source: economictimes.indiatimes.com]
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