Did Honda Just Give A Sneak Preview Of An Upcoming Electric Motorcycle?

Art imitates life, and sometimes, life imitates art. Will that be the case with Honda’s latest parade float, which it’s designed to participate in the 134th annual Rose Parade in 2023? There’s plenty of reason to think that it could—and of course, our main point of interest is the one and only motorcycle that’s been sketched out in the official render. 

The overall float design, which Honda has titled Forever Determined, is meant to be a three-dimensional representation of Honda’s current (no pun intended, but we’ll allow it) emissions-lowering initiative, across all of its many and various vehicular segments. As a reminder, Team Red aims to achieve total carbon neutrality across the company by 2050, as well as get 100 percent of its new vehicle sales in North America to be all electric by 2040.

The vehicles on the float are, in Honda’s own words: 

• The Prologue, Honda's first all-electric SUV, arriving in 2024 
• The electrified Acura ARX-06 race machine that will soon compete in the 2023 IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar
• Championship 
• A Honda electric motorcycle 

In the skies above on the float, Honda’s design also includes a HondaJet Elite II aircraft, as well as the Honda eVTOL concept vehicle. Holding it down and moving the float through the parade will be “a specially configured 3.5L V6 engine from Honda,” because we aren’t quite living in that electric future just yet. 

Honda’s description of the bike doesn’t really give us a whole lot to work with, but the design depicted in the render clearly continues the language of the CB family. (That’s not really a surprise, as Honda CB machines will probably outlive all of us, in some form or another.) 

While Honda has been introducing a number of electric scooters and trikes in other markets, so far, it has yet to introduce its first electric motorcycle in any market. No road bikes, no dirt bikes, no electric bike concepts—nothing yet, as of December, 2022.  

Is this CB-derived design just a placeholder, or is Honda deep in the throes of bringing such a bike to market in the not-too-distant future? At the very least, Honda’s float render has accomplished one thing that Team Red was probably going for, and that’s getting people thinking and talking about it.