Royal Enfield Shotgun 650 (2024) – Review

Royal Enfield is a company with a very long history. In 1893, which was a year before motorcycles were invented, a bicycle business based near Birmingham, won a contract to supply parts to the Royal Small Arms factory in Enfield, Middlesex. To commemorate the deal, the company was renamed the Enfield Manufacturing Company, and they named one of their bicycles the Royal Enfield – with the slogan, ‘made like a gun’. Which is a nice bit of foreshadowing.

So what is a Shotgun? It’s almost impossible to decode Royal Enfield’s marketing guff on their website – so I asked voice-over man to have a go, to see if it made more sense: “A century of pure motorcycling DNA collided with the anarchic spirit of custom culture”

No, still makes no sense. The Shotgun is a mash-up of a retro, cruiser and a bobber, and even a hint of muscle cruiser with upside down forks. It uses the Interceptor twin engine and a new frame shared with the Super Meteor – but according to Royal Enfield the Shotgun is a base for customising – and to prove it the bike comes with a detachable subframe and pillion pad, which we didn’t get with this bike, which is ok because no-one wants to ride pillion with me anyway!

Pros & Cons

Royal Enfield Shotgun 650 (2024) - Geek Test Review

Welcome to the Geek Test, where road test hero and long-time BikeSocial contributor, Simon Hargreaves, gets properly nerdy this time with the 2024 Royal Enfield Shotgun 650.

2024 Royal Enfield Shotgun 650 - Price & PCP Deals

While prices start at £6699 for the Sheet Metal Grey version, the list price increases depending on your colour preference. Add £100 for the Drill Green or Plasma Blue versions or £200 for Stencil White. Those prices include the OTR of first tax and registration.

Over a three-year PCP deal, that’s about £99 a month after a 10% deposit, with just over three grand to find at the end of it if you want to keep the bike. That’s about £100 less than the Super Meteor cruiser, £300 more than an Interceptor, and £100 more than my favourite, a Continental GT.

2024 Royal Enfield Shotgun 650 - Engine & Performance

The motive power of the Shotgun is the same 648cc air-cooled, fuel injected parallel twin found in the Interceptor, Continental GT, Super Meteor, the Classic 650 and Bear 650. Developed at Royal Enfield’s R&D base at Bruntingthorpe from scratch, they say it’s a ‘classic bike engine on the outside only’, and it’s thoroughly modern inside with a one-piece forged crank, six gears, fuel injection and a slipper clutch. The motor uses a modern 270° crank, with balancer shaft, for those pleasant, charismatic vibes.

During development the motor began life as a 600, but became a 650 when the factory decided the original Interceptor needed more power to… their words, “comfortably exceed 100mph”. – but also because they wanted the engine to be a natural progression from a 350 or a 500 for their existing customers in India. It also happened there was, at the time, a gap in the market at that capacity for a retro twin. But they didn’t want to go any bigger because more power means a higher chassis spec, which ultimately means higher price.

The motor is aircooled, with deep fins, and has a single overhead cam allowing space for that classic rounded-off cam cover look. Along with that massive clutch cover, it’s a very convincing ‘classic bike’-looking engine. At 78mm bore and 67.8mm stroke, the Shotgun motor is more oversquare than you’d imagine – for example Enfield’s 500 twin in the late 60s was almost square. I suppose the nearest modern equivalent I can think of is Kawasaki’s air-cooled 650, the W650, from the late 90s – which was well undersquare (although I say ‘modern’ – that’s like, 25 years ago... it’s sobering to think we’re almost as far from the W650 now as the W650 was from the last ‘British’ Royal Enfield in the early 1970s). Anyway, as I say, Royal Enfield claim 46bhp and 39 lb.ft – so we naturally took the Shotgun down to the dyno at BSD Race developments near Peterborough, to find out what it’s really doing.

Now, it’s always tricky testing bikes like the Shotgun because they’re what I call a subjective-style of motorbike – you can measure it, you can measure the power and acceleration and how high the seat is... but really, bikes like this aren’t about numbers, they’re about feelings. And my ‘feelings’ might not be the same as your ‘feelings’.

Anyway, the Shotgun isn’t designed, I think we can all agree, to be fast in a straight line, it’s not designed to be fast round corners, it’s not designed to stop like it’s hit a wall, and it’s not designed to tour Scotland with a huge fuel range.

It is designed to look good and make you feel good – and they don’t make a ruler for that.

So on the dyno, the Shotgun makes 43.7bhp at the back wheel, peaking at 7200rpm – and 36.6 lb.ft of torque, peaking at 5600rpm which it pretty close to what Royal Enfield claim, and says to me they’re taking their figures from somewhere in the powertrain closer to the crank than the back wheel.

And at first glance the dyno curves are unremarkable, no major dips or blips, nothing dramatic. But it’s actually a fairly peaky motor – it revs pretty hard and peak torque is fairly close to peak power – it’s doing its best work over two thirds of the way into its usable rev range. Now let’s take something more relevant to the Shotgun – here it is compared to the Kawasaki W650 I mentioned earlier – this one is from near the end of production in 2003.

Ah, ok, so that’s interesting. You have to say, it’s not a great look for the Shotgun – the Kawasaki motor is 676cc so it’s a bit larger, it’s also air cooled, it’s 360°, not a 270°, it’s also a single overhead cam but it’s driven by a bevel gear, not a cam chain. It’s also running on carbs, not fuel injection, and, as I mentioned, it’s undersquare compared to the Shotgun. But it makes more power and more torque, everywhere, and revs just as hard. Yes, I’m as surprised about that as you are. I’ve ridden W650, a long time ago, and I don’t remember it feeling, er, exactly lively. So why the difference? Well, for a start, the numbers aren’t as far apart as the scaling of the graph implies, there’s only a few bhp in it.

But it is a fitter motor – so I can only guess it’s either because a) beating a 25-year old Kawasaki engine wasn’t a design priority for Enfield – it’s that ‘feelings’ thing again – or b) the Kawasaki didn’t have to contend with Euro 5+ and exhaust catalysts. I suspect it wouldn’t look quite so healthy if you stuffed a bloody great cork up its exhaust.

Despite its air-cooled looks, the Shotgun is actually a fairly peaky engine on paper, for a bike that looks like it should be doffing about in a relaxed manner. Which isn’t to say you can’t doff about on the Shotgun, in fact doffing about is pretty much its thing. I tried riding it like I stole it but it’s completely not the point. As long as you stick to doffing about, the motor is lovely. It’s a very flat, even power delivery, nothing startling, but it’ll boogie away from the lights handily enough, you have to pump through the gears a bit to keep it flying and there’s no tacho so you’re changing gear by feel. But transmission is clean, there’s rarely any drivetrain lash, although you do have to cog it down a bit to get it going: top gear is very much an overdrive.

2024 Royal Enfield Shotgun 650 - Speed Testing

And speaking of performance, let’s have a look at the speed testing. Yes, I know it’s not especially relevant on a bike like the Shotgun but anyway the best 0-60 time was 6.76s – the best technique was to pretty much drop the clutch as soon as the bike was moving, then give big handfuls between gears.

What might be a bit more relevant to the Shotgun, in terms of performance, is how quickly it can shift in top gear – 40-60mph roll-on times. You’d hope this style of engine would give you some lazy, no gear-change-required top gear performance – but, as I said earlier, top gear feels a bit of an overdrive. And as a result, the Shotgun takes 6.7s seconds to go from 40 to 60mph in top gear, in 151 metres.

So how does all this feel on the road? Well, the Shotgun isn’t a spud-thudding old school torque monster making great gobbets of thrust in a rev range as wide as a fingernail – it’s a mild-mannered, flexible, deeply civil engine, entirely predictable, easy to use, no surprises good or bad. Power delivery is smooth and even, easy to meter accurately at the throttle, and you get what you ask for. Nothing more, probably a bit less, truth be told. If you crank it up it’ll beetle along at decent tilt but at those kind of revs – which you can’t actually see – it feels all a bit unnecessary on the poor thing. It’s easy to inflict yourself on a motor like this, sort of bully it along – and that’s not doing anyone any favours. If you must know, top speed is somewhere around 95mph – on a test strip, in leathers, flat on the tank, it’d top the ton, just.

At a practical level, the clutch is light although the lever action is a bit sort of springy – in practice it’s either in or it’s out, there’s not a lot of finesse at the lever. The gear-change is neat and tidy – obviously no quickshifter so you slam the long-throw throttle shut, reel the clutch in, hoof it into the next ratio, lob the clutch out again and haul the cable back open again. No fly by wire here, it’s all analogue. Nice sonic accompaniment too – the exhaust is pleasingly loud.

I suppose it’s partly about your riding environment, if you live in the arse end of nowhere and it’s a straight line to get there, then the Shotgun’s not really your bike because it hasn’t got the legs or the suspension or the riding position. If, instead, you spend your riding time scudding about on urban roads or short rural rides, or you don’t think every ride is an opportunity to explore the outer limits of your machine’s performance, which is weird, doesn’t everyone ride like that? Then the Shotgun’s twin does a good job with what it's got.

Like I said, it’s really hard to judge the motor on performance because it’s about feel and it you want me to swerve away from Geek Test empiricism and get into sensations, I have ridden engines that are similarly about feel and they’ve left a bigger impression on me than the Shotgun motor. Personally, I think a 270° parallel twin can be a bit of a cop-out, it’s the vanilla option, the one that has a whole load of sound engineering, cost, packaging, component, assembly advantages but being a truly memorable, essential, stimulating riding experience isn’t necessarily one of them.

I’d say a proper V-twin, or maybe, a transverse V such as a Guzzi (or inline V, however you describe it) – or a flat twin – or a 360 or 180° or even a 285° parallel twin – they all have balancing or design or packaging or cost downsides but I would argue they’re all more involving and engaging engine designs. But then, maybe a lot of modern riders don’t value that vibe – literally – and prefer a path of less resistance.

2024 Royal Enfield Shotgun 650 - Handling & Suspension (inc. Weight)

The Shotgun frame was debuted on the Super Meteor and also features on the Classic 650. It’s a central steel tube spine running under the tank with the flying seat supported at the end on a steel plate. A thick strut from the headstock bolts to the top of the barrels and another pair of struts grip the front of crankcases. At the back, a pair of steel tube loops hold the rear shocks, the silencers and footrest assemblies, while a hidden pair of pressed steel plates grip the rear of the crankcases and hold the swingarm. A pressed steel subframe carries the rear hugger skin and, when it’s fitted, a pillion pad sits on a bolted-on rack which is a pretty cool luggage rack if you just remove the seat.

Suspension is by Showa – at least, the 43mm forks are because it says so on the top. They’re unadjustable but they’re upside down, for that authentic modern retro modern retro modern look. The shocks are also made by Showa, with five-stage preload adjustment – genuinely retro retro because it’s that stepped collar design.

I set the rear suspension on maximum preload, partly for ahem anatomical reasons, but partly to get as much ground clearance as possible. Turns out there’s a pretty full toolkit under the Shotgun’s side panel – plenty of roadside repair capacity in there... and a USB port for charging your, er, toolkit. And also for adjusting preload. Mind yer knuckles mate!

Leaning a bike like the Shotgun far enough over to get the pegs down is not big or clever but it is fun, especially if you have a GoPro hanging off the back. The sparks are very pretty, it reminds of the days when we’d lap roundabouts with titanium knee sliders and the only way we could get to watch the sparks was to twist the inside mirror down so you could see the reflection. Anyway, back to the Shotgun chassis, to round off, we have an 18in front and 17in rear on cast rims. So how does it all work? Well, again, what’s the context? For the quality of the ride, if you stamp-on over bumpy roads, and I did, and the 90mm of rear suspension travel has a lot of damping to cram in a very small space – it’s not great, and the bigger the potholes get, the less great it is. Big bumps go straight through the suspension, into the frame, and into the rider. And ask the Shotgun to go round a corner at the same time, and that suspension travel effectively gets even less so it’s pretty harsh, or direct, and only gets less direct by either slowing down a bit or riding over better roads. But thanks to the Shotgun’s wheelbase (it’s shorter than the Super Meteor) but still 2 and a half inches longer than the Interceptor – stability is never an issue. You just have to grip the thing and hold on, wincing occasionally.

At more conventional speeds, the Shotgun handles, I dunno, it’s okay. It steers lightly and accurately, it’s easy to point in the right direction. I rode it in all kinds of slime and slipperiness and never got a wheel out of line. With only 44bhp and limited ground clearance, the suspension control isn’t going to be seriously challenged in terms of handling by the motor and all it really has to do is be comfy and compliant. A kind of – ‘you had one job’ situation.

Along country backs roads, the suspension gets a bit bouncy and underdamped over ripples and changes of camber. It’ll bongo around, never out of control, actually the forks are pretty good – most of the low frequency movement comes from the back of the bike, and those twin shocks – they’re more Biro than Showa. If I owned a Shotgun, they’d be the first items I’d upgrade. K-Tech makes the Razor Lite for £748 for the pair, which have adjustable preload, rebound and shock length, or there’s the Razor Piggyback which adds compression adjustment for £1144 if you’re serious about your back end. Or you can also get shocks from YSS or Nitron – who don’t list a specific unit but I’m sure they’ll make something.

Brakes are by ByBre, the budget Brembo brand, try saying that 5 times. I should say ‘brake, singular,’ really, because the Shotgun has just the one 320mm front disc gripped by a two-pot sliding axial caliper which certainly looks vintage, but not in a good way. And at the back is a hefty 300mm disc also using a two-pot caliper – and before you ask, yes, they’re different part numbers.

In our braking test, 60mph to standstill, the Shotgun actually proved pretty tricky to stop because of the size of the grips and the shape of the lever. The grips are fat and the lever is wide and flat, so actually wrapping your fingers round it and with enough strength to squeeze it, and yet keep a grip on the bars, is a bit tricky, my wrist kept rolling under and twisting the throttle open.

Maybe I should grow longer fingers. I don’t think the feel at the lever helped either, there’s not much feel or finesse. It sort of reminds me of when custom bike builders in the 1990s used to fit aftermarket six-pot calipers and braided hoses, which didn’t match the standard master cylinder bore ratio so you ended up with brakes that looked great on the spec panel but were like squeezing a lump of wood compared to the OE brakes. Anyway, the best I managed, with smoke coming off the caliper, was 2.88 seconds or, more importantly, 38 metres, pulling 0.9G. I think we can say an extra disc up front and stickier tyres might get some of that back, but again, the bike can only work with what it’s given. Braking effectiveness is about a lot more than just calipers and discs – it’s also about steering geometry, centre of gravity – and about weight balance. And speaking of weight, we plopped the Shotgun on the Geek Test Scales and against a claimed kerb weight of 240kg (at 90% fuel and oil) we measured 230kg with a full tank.

It’s rare to weigh a bike and find it’s less than the manufacturer claims, especially by this much. So I’m wondering if Royal Enfield are quoting their weight figure with the fairly substantial pillion subframe and seat fitted? It looks like it could account for an extra few kilos. Anyway, the Shotgun is a pretty chunky fella, a fully-fuelled F900 GS Adventure with 10 litres more fuel is only 250kg. That said, the Shotgun is predominantly made of metal. I can’t remember the last time I rode a bike with so little plastic on it. Side panels, tank, aluminium headlamp shroud, mudguards. And it’s a good thing which I’ll get on to in a moment but from a purely practical point of view the Shotgun only feels heavy when you push it around – and all bikes of this style tend to feel heavier than they are because you can’t get any bodyweight behind them, so you’re always pushing down and the footpegs always bash your shins. But on the move, it all goes away – the Shotgun is easy to hustle along between cars, shimmy around, nipping around town and dodging traffic at low speed.

2024 Royal Enfield Shotgun 650 - Comfort & Economy

The Shotgun’s riding position is very natural. It’s not so low as to be cramped for a six-footer, but its 795mm seat height makes it manageable for all shapes and sizes. Your feet are in a good position, I’m glad Royal Enfield resisted the urge to move the pegs too far forward, where you can’t use them to brace yourself against acceleration, but they’re not so far back it makes your knees ache. It’s just a really nice sitting position. Good seat too. Plenty of width for the, er, wider posterior. So I spent the Geek Test riding day happily bombing about and didn’t even think about me bum or any aches or pains. Clearly, the faster you go and the longer you do it, it starts to get a bit tiresome, I spent about half an hour on the motorway and dual carriageways and that was plenty.

Now, I’ve stopped running Geek Test bikes out of fuel completely because it turns out it can damage the cats and seeing as I’m a cat person, that’s not a good thing. So instead we’re now measuring fuel consumption the usual way: brim the tank, reset the trip, run it as low as we dare, then refill and work out how many miles we did on that amount of fuel. And, by doing that, I got 95 miles from the claimed 13.8 litre tank – that was over 17 miles into the reserve range, with the fuel light on and the fuel gauge flashing one bar. But the tank only took 10.3 litres to fill back up, so that means there was, according to my Casio calculator, 3 and a half litres left. That’s 41.8mpg that means there was still 32 miles left in the tank so that makes the Shotgun’s reserve range a total of nearly 50 miles – or about a third the total range of the tank. Just because you’re fuel paranoid, doesn’t mean they’re out to run you out.

2024 Royal Enfield Shotgun 650 - Equipment

Not a huge amount of equipment to talk about; the Shotgun’s got ABS, of course, but there’s no traction control, or rider modes. I mean, there’s not even a tacho. You get two trips, a fuel gauge, reserve fuel indicator, gear position, and there’s an ECO indicator to show when you’re not hammering it. Which, to be fair, you sort of know if you are anyway. Our bike had the optional Tripper, a turn-by-turn navigator that works via Bluetooth with a Royal Enfield app, if you like that kind of thing. I’m a bit too old to figure it out.

2024 Royal Enfield Shotgun 650 - Rivals

You could say Kawasaki’s Eliminator 500, which is a very traditional Japanese manufacturer’s take on the theme. It’s not the prettiest bike, bit of a mess in terms of styling, smaller engine, and it won’t surprise you I haven’t ridden one, but I refuse to have anything to do with anything called Eliminator, apart from the obvious.

What else? Honda’s CMX500 Rebel. That’s £5699, but it’s a bit too custom/cruiser, really. To be honest, for me, the Shotgun sits at the bottom, price-wise, of the Bobber-style bikes – Triumph’s Bonneville Bobber, which is £13 grand, or Indian’s Scout Bobber, which is also about £13 grand, so basically twice the price.

Which sort of put the Shotgun in a class of one, at its price point and performance – which is the same trick Royal Enfield pulled when they launched the Interceptor. And which means, really, the Shotgun’s nearest rival probably is either the Interceptor, or the Super Meteor.

Kawasaki Eliminator 500 | Price: £5999

Read more

Power/Torque

44.8bhp / 31.4lb-ft

Weight

176kg

Honda CMX500 Rebel | Price: £5799

Read more

Power/Torque

45.6bhp / 32lb-ft

Weight

191kg

Royal Enfield Super Meteor 650 | Price: £6799

Read more

Power/Torque

47bhp / 38.6lb-ft

Weight

241kg

2024 Royal Enfield Shotgun 650 - Verdict

So in the absence of a long list of electronics to talk about, we can talk about the old-fashioned stuff like, switchgear! And it’s nice to see Royal Enfield have kept it looking appropriate for the bike. Squint, and the switches are made of Bakelite. But what they aren’t is cheap looking. The whole of the cockpit area has a kind of solid, pre-war industrial look to it. And let’s get into the finish and styling of the bike because really it’s what the Shotgun is very much about. And although I’m the last person you’d go to for style advice, I have to say I think the Shotgun is a proper job, it looks great and, when you’re spudding about in town, you feel like other people think it looks great too.

And this is where that thing about the bike being predominantly made of metal really comes into its own. There’s not a hint of plasticky about it. It’s got a functional, almost industrial aesthetic; a kind of bare-bones, back to basics but with a flourish of days gone by. I like the Bobber nod with the ‘flying’ seat, the faintly military colour of the Green Drill colour scheme. Fit and finish is good too – the filler cap is nice and solid, I appreciate Royal Enfield adding a clever bit of double-skinning to the exhaust headers to stop them looking weedy (I think Triumph do that as well), and I like the chunky feel of it all.

I wish it had better brakes, I wish it had better suspension, and I wish it had thinner grips but aside from that, there’s not a lot I’d actually want to change about the bike which is ironic given that it’s predominantly about customising.

If you’d like to chat about this article or anything else biking related, join us and thousands of other riders at the Bennetts BikeSocial Facebook page.

2024 Royal Enfield Shotgun 650 - Technical Specification

What is MCIA Secured?

MCIA Secured gives bike buyers the chance to see just how much work a manufacturer has put into making their new investment as resistant to theft as possible.

As we all know, the more security you use, the less chance there is of your bike being stolen. In fact, based on research by Bennetts, using a disc lock makes your machine three times less likely to be stolen, while heavy duty kit can make it less likely to be stolen than a car. For reviews of the best security products, click here.

MCIA Secured gives motorcycles a rating out of five stars (three stars for bikes of 125cc or less), based on the following being fitted to a new bike as standard:

• A steering lock that meets the UNECE 62 standard

• An ignition immobiliser system

• A vehicle marking system

• An alarm system

• A vehicle tracking system with subscription

The higher the star rating, the better the security, so always ask your dealer what rating your bike has and compare it to other machines on your shortlist.

Getting a motorcycle insurance quote with Bennetts is easy.

We compare prices from our panel of top-tier insurers, to find riders our best price for the cover they need. With common modifications covered as standard, our policies are rated Excellent on Trustpilot and 5 stars by Defaqto. We are an award-winning UK broker, with a UK-based contact centre and 24/7 claims support. 

 

Buy direct or renew at bennetts.co.uk, or via our contact centre, to gain access to a free BikeSocial Membership - unlocking discounts on kit, tyres, training, and exclusive customer-only VIP experiences.