Remember Honda’s V3 engine? This is apparently what it sounds like
Honda has released a new teaser video which gives us an insight into what its V3 Compressor project is going to sound like.
Honda’s V3 Compressor concept basically broke the internet when it was revealed at EICMA last year. Since then, though, the buzz has settled down a little.
Until yesterday, when Honda dropped a teaser video, which is allegedly giving us a listen to the wild configuration as it’s tested on the dyno. It’s a fairly noisy clip, with lots of thumping music in the background, all of which makes picking out the engine sound a bit of a task - it took me three listens of it to finally figure out which bit was the bike!
Have a watch/listen, and plug your lugholes back at around 26 seconds - it's better with headphones!
Hear that? That short one-second burst of engine noise, is what we think Honda is getting at. It’s extremely short, around a second, but it’s distinctive enough that we can tell it’s not an inline four, a V4, crossplane twin, or V-twin. All signs, then, point to the new V3, which in any case is the focus of the video, along with an Africa Twin in the desert, DCT, and E-Clutch for some reason!
There is another hint of what the V3 will sound like, and it comes right at the end of the video as the credits are about to roll. It’s that whooshing induction noise, a bit like an airliner’s engine spooling up as it sits on the runway. That, we are guessing, is the e-compressor doing its e-compressing. There’s no engine noise behind, and while that’s confusing, it’s also not.
The point of the e-compressor is that it is a standalone item. Yes, it feeds air into the engine at an increased pressure, but it’s not driven by the engine itself. Freed from the crankshaft (which is one common method of driving a supercharger), the Honda V3 compressor can be called into action at any engine speed and theoretically provide precisely the right amount of boost to attain a desired result. Be it smoothing out a flat spot at 4,000rpm, boosting low-end grunt or adding a bit more of a rush at the top of the rev range. In theory, this system is an all things to all engines solution.
With the teasers now beginning to build, we are hopeful that EICMA this November should give us a little more information on the bike that the new V3 will be landing in.
As ever, we’ll be there in person to bring you all the news as it happens.
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Simon (AKA Toad) has been working within the motorcycle industry for more than twelve years, and a member of the motorcyclist family since birth. Growing up around British-built single and twins, it was inevitable that a life on two wheels was on the cards, from a very early age!
