Benda’s New Boxer Twin

Rarely has a particular engine format been as closely tied to a brand as the boxer twin and BMW. However, that doesn’t mean the Bavarian company has an exclusive right to the layout, and now China’s Benda is planning a boxer of its own.

BMW hasn’t always had a monopoly on the idea of boxer twins. It’s one of the earliest engine layouts to be popularized in motorcycling, appearing in the likes of the WW1-era British ABC and earlier still in Douglas models, albeit spun 90 degrees to the orientation we now consider normal, with one cylinder pointing forward and the other to the rear. BMW adopted the boxer twin for its first bike, the 1932 R32, having already used the same layout for its aero engines. Later the BMW R71 spawned clones like the Ural and Dnepr from the former Soviet Union and the Chang Jiang CJ750 in China, and even Harley-Davidson got in on the action with the WW2 XA model.

However, to most of us the boxer is inseparably tied to the BMW brand, which makes the new design appearing from Benda all the more intriguing.

The bike seen here is far from a simple copycat of an existing BMW. For a start it’s far smaller than any boxer twin in recent history, with a capacity of just 250cc presuming its “BD250-3B” code name is an accurate representation of the engine size. At a glance it looks larger than that, but that’s something of a Benda trait—the company’s current V-twin BD250 NapoleonBob 250 and 500 models look like machines with much larger engines, thanks in part to the big, DOHC cylinder heads atop small cylinders. Benda also has no fear of exploring different engine layouts, already featuring V-twin, inline-four, and V-4 engines in its lineup.

The motor itself is a DOHC four-valve-per-cylinder design with air- and liquid-cooling, as revealed by the combination of heavily finned cylinders and a substantial water radiator. Unlike more traditional boxer twins, which tend to have the transmission mounted directly behind the engine, the Benda follows the lead of BMW’s latest R 1300 motor by flipping the engine around so the clutch is at the front, with the transmission mounted underneath to make for a more compact package.

While most bikes with longitudinal engines opt for a shaft final drive, the Benda design has a chain-driven rear wheel. That means there’s a bevel gear after the transmission to turn the drive by 90 degrees, something that the company illustrated in a recently filed technical patent. The BD250-3B’s design illustrations also show an unusual setup for the drive chain, appearing to have a two-stage system. Although hidden by a cover, it looks like there’s a first chain or belt on the left of the bike, running from the output of the transmission and diagonally upward and rearward, to a front sprocket mounted concentrically on the swingarm pivot.

Benda already has a reputation for finding unusual solutions, notably the NapoleonBob 250’s weird girder fork setup, so it’s not surprising to see that the new boxer twin also adopts several unorthodox elements in its design. The rear suspension, for example, includes that unusually high swingarm pivot point as well as an underslung rear shock, offset to the right-hand side. It’s hard to make out from the illustrations how the shock linkage operates, but there appears to be a hydraulic or pneumatic system on the right of the bike, with three hoses emerging from it and disappearing toward the rear shock. Since Benda already uses pneumatic electronic suspension on its V-4 Dark Flag cruisers, it’s quite possible that this new machine has a similar setup.

While Benda has also launched a semi-automatic transmission recently in China on a 350cc V-twin cruiser, this new design seems to use a standard manual box. We can see the clutch cable running from the lever to the clutch arm at the front of the engine, and there’s a conventional foot shifter on the right-hand side.

The frame is another unconventional design, appearing to use the engine as a fully structural member, slung beneath a pair of tubular rails that run horizontally from the steering head back to the rear of the seat. At the front, the fork gives the impression of being a girder setup, but unlike the complex system used on the NapoleonBob 250, these actually appear to be more like the design used on the NapoleonBob 500, which has faux girders in the form of cowls that hide a conventional telescopic fork.

While it would be easy to dismiss the new Benda designs as a flight of fancy that will never reach production, the evidence so far is that the company isn’t afraid to break with convention and there are plenty of production-style elements on the design including bar-end mirrors and components like fork-mounted side reflectors, a license plate bracket, and all the lighting required by law.

Benda’s bikes have already been introduced to the US market in the form of the Chinchilla 300, Chinchilla 500, and NapoleonBob 500, which all recently went on sale priced between $4899 and $6399. How long those MSRPs can be maintained in the face of the recent introduction of steep tariffs on Chinese-made goods isn’t yet clear.