Everybody loves a scrambler, always have, always will. It’s no new thing, just an old trend coming back round. Street scramblers were invented in southern California in the 60s; Mojave desert racers – cool as you like. Slap on some wide bars and trail tyres, lower the gearing and you’re street scrambling for real. On Any Sunday.
Project XScrambleR 700

Triumph’s new Scrambler 400X caught my eye at the Birmingham bike show. And I wasn’t the only one. Every few seconds another individual closely resembling my mature demographic swung a leg over the Scrambler to bounce up and down and twiddle the controls.
Like me, they may have been fondly recalling their teenage Triumph days in the 1970s. Along with its modern triples, the reborn brand has successfully capitalised on that proud heritage with a line of modern classic big twins. Matching that visual ‘DNA’ very closely, the smaller 400s are said to be pitched at attracting image-conscious young blood into biking, but judging by the leg-swingers above, most customers may prove to be more bike-in-a-shed oldies looking for a lighter ride than well-groomed Bike Shed hipsters.

Along with a road-oriented Speed 400 with 17-inch wheels and a 45mm lower seat height, the 400X Scrambler gets a 19 inch front with a bigger rotor, 150mm of travel, switchable rear ABS and largely cosmetic protection. The stock alloy sump plate is a necessity to disguise and protect the low-slung coolant reservoir.

All that somehow manages to cost an extra £600 (£5600) over a Speed 400 – as with Honda’s 300L/Rally price chasm, the off-road aspirational look always costs more.
Claimed wet weight varies even within the brand’s source material: the show board left claims 170kg, the Triumph website says 179kg and Indian reviews (see below) come in at 185 kilos, though it’s said Indian spec tyres and wheels will be heavier to cope with the sub-continental pounding. Both bikes get switchable traction control – for 39hp? – and lengthy 10,000-mile service intervals.

The 400s are being assembled in India by Bajaj who among other things, also produce KTM’s 390s while probably selling more of their own branded bikes in a year than all European manufacturers combined.
I read 400s will also be made in Thailand (where bigger Triumphs are assembled) and Brazil. Wherever UK units come from, if the 400s’ durability proves to be anything like the also-Indian-made BMW 310GS we use in Morocco – some now on 80,000 rental kms – there’ll be little to worry about.

For me scramblers have always been Goldilocks travel bikes – fine on the road, at home on gravel and OK on the dirt. And they look like a proper motorbike. So along with its cool retro look, the 400X ticked a lot of boxes for me at the NEC: tubeless wheels, adequate suspension travel, basic metal bash plate (an uprated £130 accessory is fitted on the green show bike) and a ‘portrait’ aspect radiator tucked out of the way on the front down tubes, like an RE Interceptor. The seat looks promisingly wide, though CTXP (below) found the forward slope annoying. You do wonder if the pillion perch is detachable. If yes, it could be removed to sit a tail pack lower, another win. At a potential 90mpg (32kpl; 75US), the 13-litre tank will return over 400km. Most of these stock features were mods I had to make to my current 300L to make it a functional travel bike, not least a £300 tank and some £200 crash bars to protect the vulnerable radiator. I’ve not managed to improve the seat.
Interestingly, UK-based Rally Raid, who a decade ago found a wide audience with their popular CB500X upgrade kits (which I used myself in prototype form in Morocco), are planning to develop kits for the 400X too: tubeless spoked wheels, suspension, sump guards, risers. They already run a range of such accessories for the similar G310GS.

Some reviewers grumble about the lack of spoked wheels to complete the retro look. Spoked or alloy, I’m not bothered as long as they’re tubeless for easy repairs. These days just about all alloy wheels are tubeless, but to make spoked TL wheels requires expensive assembly and tensioning of outboard spokes, being optionally offered on the new Himalayan 450 (left). I’ll take the Scrambler’s 10-spoke alloys; with a good set of tyres and location-appropriate riding they ought to resist leak-inducing dings. Got a bad leak? Bung in a tube.

There are a couple of actual riding reviews from BHP India and Autocar India matched with equally wordy video reviews. A couple of months back US-based Common Tread XP took a pre-production Speed and Scrambler on a 2000-mile round trip from Delhi via Zanskar Valley to the ‘highest motorable [asphalted] road in the world’ which these days is the 19,024’/5798m Umling La in southeastern Ladakh (left) close to the Chinese border.
This was not another of CTXP’s goofy, Top Gear-like stunts, but a proper travel adventure that snatched some of the wind out of Enfield’s 450 Himalayan sails – and maybe sales too. RE also chose Umling La as the destination of their Final Test, and their drone heavy YT vid (see below) trounced CPXP by a couple of weeks. Currently both vids are neck-a-neck at about half a million views.
Watch the Triumph Himalayan vid here or listen to Zack C’s honest, post-trip appraisal of the Scrambler below. It’s not all rosey – no small bike every is once you’ve ridden big – but the aroma’s promising enough. Both are on about half a million views right now.

Other things I saw at the NEC
I’d have liked to have had a closer look at the new Chinese-engined, water-cooled 350 Beta AlpX which had been presented at the EICMA show in Milan. They claim about 155kg juiced up, but Beta didn’t attend the NEC and tbh, it’s probably on the tall side for me and dynamically no better than my sported 300L.

A few years back I got on well with my old 400 Himalayan in Morocco so I cast a look at RE’s much revised water-cooled 450 Himalayan which will doubtless soon be pitted against Triumph’s 400X. Same price, same claimed 40hp at 8k, but with 10% more torque at 1000rpm lower down. Front and rear remain 21/17 (greater rear do-it-all tyre choices) and with tubeless spoke wheels an option. It’s at least 15 kilos heavier than the 400X, though that includes a centre stand, 50mm more travel (200mm all round) and those nifty tank racks alongside the 17-litre tank. The small 4″ console/dial pairs with a phone to show Google Maps or similar; though it’s on the small side let’s hope that proves to be as seamless and reliable as it could be.

My old Him 400’s gimmicky digital compass rarely pointed north. But as one tester observes in the vid below, he’s lost loads of smartphones clamped to the bars as nav devices; for me that’s always been a sketchy idea. I feel they’ve lost out on the great look of the old 400 (right); Triumph’s understated style works better for me, but the drastically improved 450 Him will be a travel contender for sure. Read impressions from a two-day Himalayan test ride from AdvPulse or my chin-rubbing preview here. It’s great to see the ‘400cc’ class opening up at last.

For nearly three times the price of either I could have a beautifully made, 150-kilo CCM Tracker or any of their other scrambly iterations around the pokey, ex-Husky 600-cc motor. There are loads of low milers on sale now for around half the new price which, not matter how good they are, suggests they’re weekend playthings.

What a shame Honda’s CT500 scrambler spin on its 500 platform looks a bit too much like their Rebel cruiser or just not as good as it could have been. There’s no doubt it would be a better all-rounder than the Triumph, with effortless cross-country speed, near-as-good economy and low, flat-seat comfort. But it would need the usual grand or more of extras to be a traveller. And that gigantic pipe!?

Austin Vince was on duty on the Honda stand and showed me round his Adventure Spec Magadan 3 panniers now with Molle strapping and non-black fabric, but no longer featuring the novel slash-proof aramid lining. Right now they’re on sale at 20% off at ASpec. That’s about 260 quid.

Being a fan of DCT but not its 10-kilo added mass, I also had a look at Honda’s new E-clutch. It’s an ingenious system of ECU-controlled servos to enable clutchless foot changing and even pulling away (while retaining a clutch lever), but as others have noted, it stills look a bit clamped-on and bulky. It’s only on the CB650 for now, but you can be sure it will spread to other models if it goes down as a smooth operator. I bet I’d be a convert.