North American Honda Confirms The Updated CBR600RR Is Not Coming To The US
North American Honda has slammed the brakes on every enthusiasts dreams of getting their hands on the updated 2024 CBR600RR this morning as they silently updated their website by highlighting the “3” on both the CBR600RR and CBR1000RR 2023 pages, hitting backspace, and typing “4”. We can only assume they let out an evil laugh as they undertook the rigorous task of updating their site with a new digit, knowing they are putting the stiff one to all of their street bike customers that have been chomping at the bit to get in the saddle of an updated sportbike from Big Red.
The signs that this was going to be the eventual outcome were hard to miss. Just look at any of the digital marketing that North American Honda puts out and you’d be hard pressed to find any photos, videos, or graphics of their sportbike lineup being featured. What you will see however, is a LOT of off-road content. It’s become clear that NA Honda has shifted focus and doesn’t find it fruitful enough to pursue offering updated sportbike models to the US customer base. If that sounds like an opinion to you, it’s because it is - and that’s because NA Honda won’t officially give a reason as to why they won’t bring us the new models. You can speculate that it has to do with some sort of regulatory issue, but the fact remains that Honda has stated before that the reason they kept the current CBR1000RR in their lineup instead of bringing the base CBR1000RR-R to the US was because they didn’t believe there was a market for that bike here, giving us reason to believe that they have lost faith in their street bike customers.
There’s a much bigger discussion to be had about who lost faith first though - did we, as customers, lose faith in Honda’s sportbikes because they have gone largely unchanged in over a decade and decide to go with a different brand, OR did Honda lose faith in their customer base and decide to not bring updated models. It’s a chicken vs. the egg argument, but seeing the success of the updated ZX-6R and enthusiasm around that model makes me side with the customer market. If you fail to update your product while every manufacture around you does, of course your sales will fall. You can’t blame that on a made up trope of “the sportbike market is dead in America” and cement your campaign to never update your models - all you’re doing is falling further behind. So when Global Honda announced a new model, instead of NA Honda realizing their mistake and adjusting course, they have decided to fall even further behind and declined to bring the new model to our shores, which is something many riders, both new and old, are very sour about.
