Anyone who kept a close eye on the goings on at last year’s EICMA motorcycle expo in Milan, Italy, will know Honda quietly ran a renaming broom through its roadbike line-up, presumably to streamline the current model platforms and to make way for new ones.
It started with last year’s CB500 line-up; the CB500 nakedbike got shuffled under the Hornet umbrella for 2024 after the CB750 Hornet was added to the stable, while the soft-roader CB500X became the NX500, presumably to form the start of a road-biased adventure touring range – à la NX650 Dominator – while the CB1000R, CB650R and CB300R assumed the sophisticated neo-retro role.
So even though an all-new authentically retro-styled 350cc nakedbike would be the perfect platform to tug at the heartstrings of those old enough to fondly recall the huge sales hit Honda had in the late 1960s and early 1970s with the original CB350, it simply no longer fits into the new naming regime for 2024.
