Souo

Souo Flat Eight Tourer Makes its Western Debut

By Ben Purvis

When Chinese car-making giant Great Wall Motors launched its first two-wheeled machine last year it instantly became the biggest and most high-tech bike yet to emerge from the country and it sprang another surprise by giving the Souo S2000 its western hemisphere debut CES in Las Vegas in January.

In case you missed it, Souo is Great Wall's newly-minted motorcycle brand, and while China's other bike makers have worked their way up from small single-cylinder machines to bigger, multi-cylinder bikes, Souo has leapfrogged them all - as well as every other bike maker on the planet - by starting out with an eight-cylinder machine. 

The S2000 is clearly inspired by the Honda Gold Wing, something the company readily admits: its philosophy is to start with the most capable tourer on the market and then to take everything up a notch or two. As a result, it clocks in at 1,999 cc and 152 hp compared to the Gold Wing's 1,833 cc and 125 hp, with a flat-eight engine rather than the Honda's flat six, double overhead cams instead of a single cam per bank, and an eight-speed-plus-reverse dual-clutch semi-auto transmission where Honda uses seven speeds. 

All that is bolted to a cast alloy chassis with a Hossack-style girder front end, again similar to the Honda's, and garnished with tech including a huge 12.3-inch touchscreen display using the latest Snapdragon 8155 automotive CPU (it's first appearance in a bike), rear-facing radar sensors for blind-spot monitoring, electronic suspension and just about every other luxury that can be imagined on a bike.

Its appearance at CES in January came immediately after Souo passed the major milestone of delivering the first examples of the bike to customers. Initially the brand sold a batch of 288 bikes in China, with Great Wall CEO Wei Jianjun personally presenting the keys to some of the customers that opted to pick their machines up from the new brand's dedicated handover showroom. 

Although Souo hasn't made an official announcement about how it will go about offering the S2000 and future models, which will include a cruiser based on the same flat-eight engine, outside China, the company has stated that its ambitions are global. Its presence at CES in the States, where the Souo machines were displayed alongside an array of Great Wall cars and trucks that are already being offered internationally, was a clear indication that Souo - which means 'Soul' - is not planning to remain a China-only brand for long.