2025 Honda Transalp Arrives With Changes, But Not The One We Really Wanted

For those wanting one of the best adventure motorcycles without having to remortgage, the Honda XL750 Transalp has been hard to beat. Despite being such a strong package and having not been on sale all that long, though, Honda has sought to give it a nip’n’tuck for the 2025 model year.

It gets a revised front end with a new dual LED projector headlight inspired by the Africa Twin. It’s a marked improvement over the outgoing model, which was a bit anonymous when viewed from the front. A little further up, there’s a reprofiled screen with a central duct, intended to “improve airflow around the helmet area”.

Sticking to the cockpit area, there’s also a new five-inch colour TFT, a part we’ve already seen on several other 2025MY Honda models including the Forza 750 and X-ADV we reviewed recently. To go with that, there’s new switchgear, incorporating a backlit, four-way toggle switch for the left-hand handlebar.

The updated switchgear and TFT can be used to navigate the same riding modes as before - Sport, Standard, Rain or Gravel. Each of these determines which of the four levels of engine power, three levels of engine braking, two levels of ABS and five levels of Honda Selectable Torque Control are used, or you can tailor each in the customisablle User mode. It’s also possible to switch off ABS to the rear.

The suspension hardware is the same, with a non-adjustable, 43mm Showa SFF-CA fork (Separate Function Fork-Cartridge) paired with a preload-adjustable monoshock from the same company. You still get 200mm of travel at the front and 190mm at the rear, but the damping rates are a little different, giving softer rebound and compression at the front and firmer at the back.

The brakes are carried over, featuring 310mm wave discs and two-piston callipers at the front, and a 256mm disc at the back with a single-pot calliper. The spoked wheels come wrapped in either Metzeler Karoo Street or Dunlop Mixtour and use inner tubes.

Honda has decided to leave the engine as is, which seems a smart move considering it’s one of the strongest elements of the package. The 755cc parallel twin uses a 270-degree crankshaft for an offset firing order and is oversquare, making it a brilliantly revvy thing that kicks out one of the best noises in the middleweight sector. It produces 90bhp and 55lb ft, and as also seen on the refreshed 2025 CB750 Hornet, there’s no longer an ugly breather pipe draped across the front.

There are also some new accessories available including a waterproof side/top bag set, a chunkier comfort seat, a revised tall screen, redesigned windscreen deflectors and new fog lights. You can buy all of them individually or as part of the Urban Pack, Touring Pack, Adventure Pack, Rally Pack or Comfort Pack.

What you still can’t do, though, is spec cruise control, which based on riding nearly 5,000 miles on ‘our’ XL750 longtermer in 2024 is the one change we really wanted Honda to make. Boo, and indeed, hiss.

This is forgivable, though, since the XL750 Transalp is likely to be priced very competitively, just as its £9,699 predecessor was. We don’t know how much the 25MY version will cost, but the price isn’t likely to rise by much.