Six-Cylinder Streetfighter Shootout of the Future: Honda EVO6 vs BMW Concept 6

Six-Cylinder Streetfighter Shootout of the Future: Honda EVO6 vs BMW Concept 6

There are currently two motorcycles that have six-cylinder engines, and both of them power big and bulky touring machines: the BMW K1600 and Honda Gold Wing.

Both engines are large-displacement, high-torque powerplants that create sweet-sounding exhaust music, and we’ve wondered what other uses could be made from these unique engines.

We’re not the only ones, as designers from Honda and BMW have both shown concept motorcycles built around these motors, making us wonder if we might one day see a version of either enter production.

Honda was first to the game when it unveiled the EVO6 at the 2011 Tokyo Motor Show. A “Pride Fighter,” according to Honda, it was a bold concept streetfighter based around the company’s flat-Six engine from the Gold Wing.

Might we one day in the future be doing a shootout with a pair of brutish six-cylinder streetfighters from Honda and BMW?

Two years later, at the EICMA show in Italy, BMW teased visitors with the Concept 6 streetfighter model based on a previously unseen inline six-cylinder engine that later debuted in the K1600 GT and GTL.

Unveiled at the 2007 Tokyo Motor Show, the Honda EVO6 is the most mouth-watering use of Honda's horizontally opposed six-cylinder since the Rune.

This year’s launch of BMW’s K1600 series strengthens the possibility of a production version of the Concept 6 becoming reality in the not-too-distant future. The EICMA show might’ve been BMW’s way of doing market research on the Concept 6’s viability.

With four years having passed since a public appearance of Honda’s EVO6, the promise of that model coming to fruition dims, but like the limited-production, high-concept 2005 Rune that utilized the Gold Wing mill, we could be pleasantly surprised. It could be that Honda is just sitting on its hands waiting for the global economy to recover.

With neither bike a sure thing, we decided — in the spirit of a good, old, black and white Godzilla movie — to create some science fiction of our own; to pit one concept model against another by extrapolating information from the current models they’re derived from and combining that knowledge with the limited facts presented by the respective manufacturer.