Revealed: The New Triumph Trident

On 25 August 2020, the prototype of the new Triumph Trident was revealed at the London Design Museum. According to Triumph, the result of the four-year design project, a three-cylinder British designed motorcycle, will be priced competitively and will be available in dealerships by spring of 2021.

According to Triumph

With the announcement of the new Triumph Trident, they made this statement to summerise what this new motorcycle was designed for:

“The Trident design prototype marks the beginning of an exciting new chapter for Triumph, where the brief was all about fun, from the look to the ride. With its pure minimalist form, clean lines, Triumph design DNA and more than a hint of our Speed Triple’s muscular poise, this gives the first exciting glimpse at the full Trident story to come. Ultimately our aim was to bring a new take on character and style, alongside the accessible easy handling and quality Triumph is known for – at a price that’s really competitive”.

Steve Sargent – Triumph Chief Product Officer

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Along with this statement, Triumph noted that the middleweight roadster will be easy to handle, will have “torque-rich performance” and a “muscular pose”. They also noted that the Trident is aimed to be a new entry point to the Triple Roadster line-up.

https://youtu.be/4AIN_zfEmbU

Discussion

While I’m sure everyone is excited about the new Triumph Trident, there isn’t much information on its features, performance and price range. Unofficial sources say that the Triumph Trident will host a 675cc engine originally found in the Daytona and Street Triple lineup. So the best I can do is speculate what that means.

What I would like to point out from the start is that I wouldn’t categorise the Trident as a “streetfighter”. A streetfighter is more aggressive-looking, even though the general outline is basically identical to this bike. The Triumph Trident is what I would categorise as a “Roadster”, and Triumph also correctly referred to it as a roadster in their press headline.

I’ll briefly explain the difference between a roadster and a streetfighter.

Both roadsters and streetfighters are naked bikes. In fact, you could include cafe bikes, standard bikes and the so-called “scrambler” (which are not actual scramblers, btw) into this category of naked bikes.

The roadster and streetfighter categories both have a short muscular look to them but the difference being that streetfighters have much more straight-edged aggressive styling to them while roadsters have more traditional features like round headlights and a more bullet-shaped fuel tank.

The roadster and streetfighter sub-categories are very much alike. If Triumph wanted, they could easily produce a streetfighter just by making some minor changes to the Trident.

In my opinion, a Triumph streetfighter would be very irregular for a brand that has been known to uphold their heritage. A streetfighter would be too far off from what they have been making so far but a roadster fits in perfectly with their current lineup.

The reason why I needed to make this clear is so that we can correctly identify the competitors for the Trident. This confusion in categorising is all thanks to BMW for messing it up all the time in various categories. But Triumph has also named the competitor models which doesn’t line up with what I have to say.

These are the motorcycles that the Triumph Trident will be competing with:

• Honda CB650R
• Yamaha XSR900
• Harley-Davidson Bronx (supposedly aborted)

These motorcycles are in some sense competitors of the Triumph Trident:

• Ducati Monster 797
• Suzuki GSX-S750
• Kawasaki Z650
• KTM 790 Duke
• Yamaha MT 07

So now that we’ve categorised the Trident, I’m willing to say that this bike is aimed at the North American and UK market rather than Europe. Don’t take my words as actual fact on this. It’s just the feeling I get from it. In my opinion, Europeans are more into streetfighters like the Z series from Kawasaki, the KTM Dukes and Ducati’s own Streetfighter.

In the UK and North America, people might appreciate the more traditional look from a roadster. But again, this is just my opinion.

The closest competitors to the Triumph Trident also don’t seem that similar to me. Let’s take the CB650R and XSR900. In comparison, they just look a lot slimmer than the Trident. They just don’t have enough muscle to really be compared to it. By this, I mean that they don’t look broad enough and doesn’t have anything to do with power or torque.

I think the only real competitor, by looks, would be the Harley-Davidson Bronx but nobody knows where that train is going since it just disappeared from their website a short while ago. I would have loved to see these two bikes go head-to-head.

Some other notes

Since the Trident will be hosting the 675cc triple-cylinder engine, we should expect it to produce around 100 HP, but the actual figures will only be available later on.

The price range is still unknown but I’m guessing that it should be under $10,000 since Triumph has repeatedly mentioned that this bike will be competitively priced.

Update: Specs for the Triumph Trident 660

As with most bike reveals, there’s not much you can say just by looking at some photos and reading marketing fluff that basically tells you nothing. I like the way it looks though. I’ll be following their progress to see what happens.