There’s something crazy going on with motorcycles in China, and it’s honestly fascinating to watch. The region’s manufacturers are trying out crazy ideas, seemingly just because they can, and motorcyclists get to experience the madness. Benda just came swinging with a flurry of new motorcycles, including the P51. Named after America’s iconic World War II fighter, this motorcycle has a BMW-like boxer twin. That’s interesting enough, but Benda didn’t stop there: this thing is scaled down to 250cc and then paired with an electric motor. This is a small bike that makes 62 HP, because why not?
China’s motorcycle brands have come so far in such a short time. The country’s motorcycles were seen as jokes only fifteen years ago, an era when Chinese builders punched out cheap motorcycles that, in my experience, sometimes broke down immediately. Today, China’s motorcycle manufacturers are doing some wild stuff. What I love about this new era is that these brands aren’t really printing out obvious clones anymore, but coming up with their own ideas – and frequently bizarre ones at that.
The Benda brand shows up often in stories of weird Chinese motorcycles, and that’s because the company is seemingly just throwing everything at the wall. When I last wrote about Benda in 2023, the company was working on a chunky bike, the LFC 700, with an inline-four engine and a headlight that doubles as a ram air intake. Amazingly, that bike actually went into production, and it’s expected to come to America soon. Since then, Benda has only doubled down on the crazy. It has a new line of weird engines and is putting them into equally strange motorcycles.
One of them is the P51, the bike with the previously mentioned tiny engine that packs a huge punch thanks to what Benda calls its hybrid system.
Benda Briefing
It’s been a couple of years, so here’s a quick reminder about Benda’s history from my previous story:
Hangzhou Saturn Power Technology Co., Ltd. was founded in 2016 and is situated in Hangzhou city, Zhejiang, China. As of October, the company says it has 466 employees, about 40 percent of which work in the firm’s engineering department. These engineers developed Benda’s 125cc to 2000cc engine platforms, which go into distinctive motorcycles, ATVs, and side-by-sides.
In 2020, Benda released its first motorcycle, the Chinchilla 300, above. This first motorcycle resembled a Harley-Davidson Sportster or an Indian Scout, but scaled down to a small bike. The Chinchilla 300 is powered by a 298cc V-twin good for 30 HP. In 2021, the Chinchilla 300 was joined by the Rock 300, which had the same engine and similar American cruiser style, but was a tad larger.
Hangzhou Saturn Power Technology employs about 1,200 people, of whom more than 20 percent are engineers. The company claims that its engineers have the freedom to cook up whatever wild ideas they want.
It took Benda a couple of years to figure out America’s certification process, but as of the spring of this year, Americans can buy Benda’s Chinchilla 300, Chinchilla 500, and Napoleonbob 500 small cruisers. The company is still slinging these bikes here despite tariffs, and plans to keep expanding in America, anyway. If you’re curious, the biggest of the bunch, the Chinchilla 500 V-twin, costs $5,999.
At least in my eyes, Benda’s schtick is taking ideas that other brands have pioneered and then remixing them into something else. Its names are something else, and “Benda” itself is sure to get some Futurama Bender jokes here in America. [Ed note: I was this close to putting him in the topshot – Pete]
A few years ago, Benda’s big breakthrough was its BD V4 platform. That mill was good for up to 1198cc, 152 HP, and 89 lb-ft of torque. V4s have been around forever, but here Benda was, playing around with one.
Earlier this year, Benda came out with a large 1700cc inline-six cylinder engine that has some similarities to the BMW K 1600 inline-six of 2011.
Benda has paired this big powerplant with a DCT of its own design. The company has yet to reveal which production motorcycle will use this engine, but it’s just delightful that this engine was made in the first place. Inline sixes are so rare in the motorcycle world.
Earlier this year, Benda also unveiled the P51 Concept engine, and then just took the wraps off of the production version at EICMA, the Milan motorcycle show.
A Hybrid Boxer
The P51, which I will again note was named after the iconic North American P-51 Mustang fighter (more on that later), also seems to go down a path that BMW paved first. But then it gets weird really quickly. The P51 platform starts off as a 250cc boxer twin. Alright, that’s sort of weird because of how small it is, but boxer twins aren’t anything new. Benda’s boxer features dual overhead cams and liquid-cooling. At the rear of the engine is something really different, and it’s an electric motor. This motor, which pulls juice from a battery charged by the engine, pumps total system output to 62 horsepower and 74 lb-ft of torque. Benda says it’ll hit 62 mph in just 3.7 seconds.
That’s a pretty bonkers output for a bike relying on a 250cc engine. Some of the hottest street-legal production 250s in history, the 19,000 RPM four-cylinder 250s from Japan in the 1990s, made around 45 HP. The Honda CBR300R of today makes about 30.4 HP. So, in pairing the tiny boxer with an electric motor, Benda has made a 250 that punches well above what its displacement would normally suggest.
Benda also claims that the P51 weighs about 392 pounds, or only slightly porkier than a typical 300cc motorcycle. Apparently, the bike can run on electric power alone for a limited distance, or run in a hybrid mode with both the gas engine and electric motor working together, just as you’d expect in a hybrid car.
This all comes wrapped in a package featuring an aluminum main frame, a steel tube subframe, a telescopic fork disguised to look like a girder fork, and a single-sided swingarm with a monoshock. The bike’s capped off with a headlight that looks like a turbine, which appears to be one of Benda’s ideas for giving all of its bikes an identifiable look.
Of course, Benda is a totally unproven manufacturer here in America and in much of the rest of the world outside of China, so who knows if these bikes will last. At the very least, I didn’t find any obvious red flags about the company itself.
A big question here is, why? Why did Benda make a hybrid boxer? Why did Benda name it after an American plane? Benda says it did this because Chinese motorcycle riders adore electric technology, so it wouldn’t have been enough to just make a big and powerful boxer that would otherwise be boring. Now, at least in Benda’s eyes, it’s weird and exciting.
As for the P51 name: Apparently, the P51 Mustang is a bit famous in China thanks to the Chinese-American Composite Wing, which flew P51s in 1944 and 1945.
Benda says that the P51 shown in EICMA is production-ready, and it will go on sale soon. Sadly, the company has not given any hard launch date yet or indicated which markets it’ll be sold in first. Historically, Benda launches in China first before sending its bikes worldwide. Since Benda is still trying to make the American market work, there’s a chance we could see this bike in a year or two.
I hope it does come here, because it’s definitely something different. Benda made a little hot rod just because it could. I love it when the motorcycle industry does things like this. Motorcycles should be fun, and this sounds like it could hit that mark and then some.
Top graphic images: Benda
Great “HP” for a 250 with an electric kicker, but man is that thing hidious or what? Ugg!
Just a reminder, Honda makes an 1800 cc 6-cylinder boxer.
Liquid-cooled, so clearly a waterBenda. Maybe they could make an airBenda for slower riders like me? I wouldn’t even need to pair a companian appa.
Hurray for weird and interesting tech in transportation!
Unfortunately, China requires by law to scrap any motercycle of more than 13 year old. So I don’t think these things are engineered to go the distance.
Way back when Velocette made 250cc boxers, the water cooled side valve LE and the air cooled OHV Valiant. I think the smallest boxer in between was the BMW R45 circa 1980
Ford should use this as engine as a range extender in the Mach-e.
Liquid cooled, but has air-cooling cylinder fins? Also the P51 was notably liquid cooled, so wouldn’t have had fins like that on its engine…
Looks like it was designed by H. R. Giger.
Not my cup of tea though.
For better or worse, Richard Nixon’s trip to China during the 70’s to open up ties, and their getting Most Favored Nation status were the catalysts to the transformation of that country, which was terribly backward up until that point. Even Amazon.com and Walmart would not be the behemoths that they are now if ol’ Tricky Dick had stayed home instead.
To quote Rodney Dangerfield on The Simpsons: Dad and I, we started out great, but now it’s falling apart like a Chinese motorcycle.
An important question to ask when it comes to these foreign-market whiz-bang products is “what is it actually like to live with?”
Like sure this bike has some neat styling, but I’d have to suspend a fair bit of disbelief to think that some random Chinese motorcycle manufacturer could come out with a compelling hybrid motorcycle when Kawasaki brought their decades of experience as a top tier motorcycle manufacturer to the table and spent years developing the Ninja 7 Hybrid only to deliver something that didn’t exactly light the world on fire. Like am I expected to believe that some transcendent engineers at Benda opened their third eye and pierced the veil of reality to bring to market some mind blowing technology and packaging that Kawasaki was too blinded by their own hubris to produce?
I’m old enough to remember the pre-iPhone days when everyone was losing their minds about how advanced the Japanese-market cellphones were. Then just a few years post-iPhone everyone forgot they even existed because they were never actually all that great, just maybe a little bit nicer than what was available globally at the time (and mostly due to carrier shenanigans crippling the experience of those rest-of-world phones).
Very cool.
What I don’t like about the BMW boxers is how unrefined they feel for what they are. I have to think a 250cc (much smaller) version would be far smoother.
Too bad the Napoleonbob wasn’t made by Trumpchi.
Personally I’m holding hold out for the Louisrobert to come out.
That is one steampunk looking power plant. I love it! Keep the unusual stuff coming.
“obvious red flags” – um, except, of course, for the flag of the PRC, which is pretty darn obvious and pretty darn red.
Avanti popolo, and all that.
P-51 using a BMW engine? When I hear BMW, I think Focke Wulf 190.
I would like to know more about reliability, longevity, and parts availability. You can walk into a Honda dealership and order parts for a 50 year old motorcycle. Will you be able to get parts for a 5 year old Napoleonbob?
I could not find anything about that, which is why I say that this company is entirely unproven in the Western world.
Also, I wish more carmakers were more like Honda when it comes to long-term parts availability. 🙂
Likely not. You also are unlikely to find parts for a 50 year old Kawasaki or Yamaha at your local dealer. Walked out of both empty handed looking for parts for bikes that were only 20 years old.
If you want dealers and parts availability from a Chinese brand CF Moto is the ticket. They have been in the USA since 2002 and have about 700 dealers. Originally only ATVs and SxS but they have done a big motorcycle push lately. They also make engines and complete motorcycles for KTM.
China requires motorcycles of more than 13 year old to be scrapped. I sincerely hope that does not answer your question.
Now I want a plug in EREV motorcycle.
Chinchilla 500 is an amazing name, do not change this! (And no, I’ve never ridden anything more powerful than a Vespa.)
My other bike is a Napoleon Bob
So is it true that only the left grip is heated?