On November 6, 2020, Royal Enfield launched the highly-anticipated Meteor 350 to its lineup. The new bike not only introduced a new engine to the 350 family, but it also introduced the latest technological innovation from Enfield.
The Meteor became the first bike to offer the all-new Tripper navigation system, a leap forward on the technology front for the Indian maker.
As Enfield’s Head of Digital and Analytics Pawan Kakwani explains in the introduction video, there are two parts to Tripper—the bike pod and the app. The pod is the face and the app is the brain if you will. What we mean by that is that the rider enters coordinates in the app and that the turn-by-turn instructions show up on the display. The two work in symbiosis.
The app uses data from Google Locations and Places and allows the rider to enter up to 20 waypoints along the way. Using the app also means that navigation is uninterrupted even when entering low or no-signal areas.
Meet The Meteor:
The display pod, separate from the instrument gauge, not only shows standard navigation instructions with arrows and distances but it also visually indicates how close the riders are to the next turn by gradually “filling” the arrows in, as though they’re loading. Once they’re there, the arrows start flashing to indicate that it’s time to turn.
Product Manager Matthew Cardenas explains in the video that the idea with the way the system is set up is to display the instructions in the rider’s peripheral vision so that they know they have an action to take or a turn to make without being distracted from the road.
At the moment, Tripper is only available on the new Meteor 350—all three versions of it. Royal Enfield has yet to confirm whether we can expect the system to make its way to other models. We doubt Enfield developed an entirely new technology for a single bike. It would be a great upgrade particularly for the Himalayan and the 650 Twins. After all, they’re Enfield’s best sellers outside of India, on markets that relish tech toys and features.