American cruiser maker Indian Motorcycle is going back to its roots in 2026. It’s 125 years since the iconic brand made its first motorcycle, and the modern day version of the company is celebrating with a year of celebrations and a new model paying tribute to its halcyon days.
The 2026 Indian Chief Vintage is a custom bike inspired by the 1940s Chief, arguably the ultimate iteration of the early company’s most famous bike, and fuses traditional design with Indian’s latest Thunderstroke V-twin engine.
The styling, as you might expect, is heavily inspired by those post-war machines with the heavily sculpted front and rear mudguards, a tiny single seat, fat-tyred 16” wheels and an engine which has been styled and engineered to look period. The 1890cc Thunderstroke 116 engine isn’t new, but it remains a unique piece of modern engineering, which is incorporates old school design with modern day technology.
Like the originals, this latest Indian’s engine is an air-cooled design, meaning no radiators or unsightly pipework. It’s long-stroke, with just two valves per cylinder and even uses pushrods rather than an overhead camshaft design. The result is an aesthetically appealing design as much as anything else, which fits the Chief’s design perfectly. No peak power figure is even quoted (it’s most likely in the region of 90bhp) but really it’s all about the torque, with a tree-stump pulling 156Nm on tap at just 3,300rpm being the headline.
Bikes like these are real love/hate kind of things. If you look at it in distaste, then you’ll almost certainly never get it, but if you enjoy laid back cruising and like the style, we reckon this will have a lot going for it. It’s not cheap, at £18,955 in black or £19,455 in Indian’s traditional red, at the time of writing. It feels really authentic though, and Indian has always offered a credible alternative to Harley-Davidson.
On paper, the technology isn’t cutting edge but, to be fair, that would probably clash with the riding experience Indian are trying to create. You can’t underestimate the engineering task involved in making a traditional air-cooled design like this Euro5+ compliant, though, and what tech is there is discrete and neatly integrated. For example, there’s a modern TFT dashboard which connects to the rider’s phone and facilitates on screen navigation, but it is packaged in a 4” round display that creates the look of a traditional analogue speedo at first glance.
First introduced in 1922, the original Chief was famous for its quality and performance – with V-twins of between 1000cc and 1300cc making them the biggest and most powerful machines of the day. Production was paused during the war years but resumed in 1946 and continued until 1953, when Indian ceased production of motorcycles. The company would lie dormant for over 45 years, until 1999, when the name was revived by a short-lived conglomerate. The ‘new’ Indian has been under the ownership of the giant Polaris company since 2011, who brought out its own Chief in 2014. The latest version extends the number of modern day Chief variants to six, with the entry level Chief Dark Horse costing £16,355, and the ‘Super Chief’ models topping the range at £22,855 – although the manufacturer is currently running a promotion with £2,000 off the price off its Chiefs until the end of March.
