In another edition of “this heritage bikemaker was once European,” we have Speedy Working Motors (SWM), a name once plastered across Italian-built dirt bikes and now under the umbrella of Chinese industrial giant Shineray. SWM's story is a particularly interesting one: born in Milan in 1971, successful in the golden age of European off-road racing, dead and buried by the mid-'80s, and then dragged back into the sunlight three decades later with Chinese money behind it.
And out of nowhere, SWM has just launched an adventure touring bike. But it stares at one very damning possibility: nobody outside where it’s being launched will even know it exists.
Called the Versante 550, the adventure tourer sits right at the very end of what you’d call beginner motorcycles, and at the cusp of proper middleweights. All thanks to an engine capacity of 494cc. It’s a water-cooled parallel-twin motor producing 48 hp at 8,500 rpm and 33 lb-ft (45 Nm) of torque at 7,000 rpm.
That makes it fit comfortably into the European A2 license category. A 6-speed manual gearbox and a final chain drive help it reach a respectable top speed of "over 100 mph (160 km/h)" as well. In Italian, “versante” primarily means a slope or a mountainside. Not bad naming for a bike that’s meant to traverse mountains.
But for all that “adventure” ambition, it’s got fairly basic components to show for it. A steel tube trellis frame sits on adjustable KYB inverted telescopic forks at the front and an adjustable KYB shock at the rear.
Braking comes from Brembo’s subsidiary J. Juan, with dual front discs and switchable ABS. You get tubeless cross-spoke wheels with gold-colored aluminum rims that measure 19 inches at the front and 17 inches at the rear. The seat height comes in at 31.8 inches (810 mm), while the wheelbase measures 57 inches (1,450 mm).
Weighing under 463 lb (210 kg) dry, the Versante 550 packs a rather big 5-gallon (19-liter) fuel tank. That’s just a tad bit heavier than most 500-600cc touring motorcycles but not so much that you’d struggle.
On the electronics side, you get traction control and a very handy collision warning system that alerts you of an oncoming collision just in case you’re feeling drowsy on the bike. There’s a front-facing dashcam, tire pressure monitoring system, a USB port, a TFT screen with phone connectivity and navigation, while a tinted windscreen, hand guards, and crash bars complete the safety package.
At €5,490 (US$6,401 per direct conversion), it does offer excellent value. The Honda NX500 is the most direct rival, which comes in at $6,899. Then, there are others like the Benelli TRK 502 and the recently launched Norton Atlas, but the latter does come with a substantially more powerful 585cc twin motor.
There’s currently no word on whether the Versante 550 will make its way stateside. I’d put my money on never.
But I can already picture the touring scenario: you leave home on Friday morning, point the front wheel vaguely toward the mountains, and keep going until the road runs out of interesting places to stop. That's where the Versante makes sense.
And perhaps that's the most honest way to look at this motorcycle. It’s not something that’s going to scare a Transalp or make a GS rider question their life choices. It's the one that quietly raises its hand and says, “Um, excuse me, can I come too?”
But the real question is, will it even get noticed?
Source: SWM
