Honda makes electric mountain bike debut with all-new RN0

Honda unveiled the RN0, its first high-end electric mountain bike, on 3rd November 2026 at EICMA, the motorcycle show in Milan. It stood next to the new Africa Twin and Fireblade motorcycles, and Honda developed it together with Rotwild, a German company that makes premium electric mountain bikes.

The RN0 will go first to selected Honda motorcycle dealers in Europe from 2027, and possibly to its car and boat dealers later if demand is there. Honda hasn’t given a price, and its release also leaves out the range, the countries and a sale date.

It’s Honda’s return to mountain bikes after about two decades. In 2005, its RN01 won the overall title in the UCI Mountain Bike Downhill World Cup, and the new bike’s name follows on from it. The RN01 was built only for racing, and Honda didn’t bring a mountain bike to market after it.

An electric mountain bike, or e-MTB, has a motor that adds power while you pedal. You still ride it like a bicycle, but a steep, rocky climb that would have you pushing an ordinary bike becomes one you can ride up. With its motor and battery, the RN0 weighs about 24 kg.

The motor is Shimano’s new EP810, and it sits between the pedals. Shimano rates it at up to 100 Nm of torque, the twisting force that gets you moving uphill from a crawl. That’s up from 85 Nm on the EP801 it replaces, and it weighs 400 g less. A 720 Wh battery sits inside the frame. Wh, or watt-hours, measures how much energy it holds.

The RN0 is one of the first bikes with the EP810, and it uses the motor’s automatic modes. AUTO SHIFT reads how hard and how fast you pedal, your speed and the slope, then changes gear for you. AUTO ASSIST raises or lowers the motor’s help with the slope and how hard you’re pedalling. So on a climb, you keep pedalling and the bike picks both the gear and the power.

That motor got mixed reviews from the journalists who rode the RN0 before the launch. Nick Clark said it felt “a couple of generations behind” the newest motors from Bosch and DJI’s Avinox brand. He had enough power; his complaint was how finely the motor fed it in on technical climbs, and Shimano told him his unit was pre-production. Another journalist who rode it found it had plenty of power for trail riding. Clark also called the RN0 “one of the noisiest electric mountain bikes I’ve ridden”, blaming the hollow frame and the gear mechanism for the rattle.

The hollow frame is the part Honda designed, and it says the idea comes from how it builds motorcycles. It’s a carbon-fibre monocoque, moulded as one shell instead of tubes joined together. The rear wheel hangs off a large carbon gull-arm swingarm, the arm that pivots up and down with the suspension. When Honda showed an e-MTB Concept at the 2023 Japan Mobility Show, that frame was cast in aluminium. Rotwild’s parent company, ADP Engineering, adapted Honda’s design for carbon, set the geometry and suspension linkage, and will assemble the bikes in Germany.

So most of what makes the RN0 go comes from Shimano, and Rotwild’s parent builds it. We think Honda’s strongest card here is its dealers. The RN0 is pitched at people who already buy Honda motorcycles, and the price, once Honda shares it, will decide how many of them buy one.

Honda has had its own motorcycle subsidiary in Kenya since 2013, but it hasn’t named Kenya or any other market outside Europe for the RN0. The e-bikes we’ve covered here so far are delivery bikes, like the eBee bikes in Glovo Kenya’s She Delivers programme, which start at KES 104,999.