2025 Honda NT1100 Review

Honda is no stranger to sport touring machines.

The company has been making them for decades, and for the most part they’ve been revered by riders smart enough to try them. Until a few years ago, Honda’s VFR series of bikes featured a properly sporty appearance and an exciting V4 powertrain that traced its roots back to race engines. And Honda would sell them with matched hard-case luggage, reinforcing the point that these things were made to tour in a sporting fashion. Then Honda killed the VFR, and nothing replaced it — until now. 

Now the brand has a new sport touring bike: the 2025 Honda NT1100. New name, new style, but very familiar underpinnings. You see, instead of making a race bike for mature riders with the time and money to go on road trips, Honda took its Africa Twin adventure bike and tweaked it for road use.

Before you groan, know that the engineers at Honda are pretty clever folks, and the Africa Twin was already one of the livelier bikes of its kind. Add it up, and it looks like they might be on to something here. 

Familiar Engine

The heart of the NT1100 is a 1,084-cc parallel twin engine shared with the Africa Twin. For 2025, a series of changes were made to give the mill more usable low- and mid-range grunt, and indeed this engine pulls with one strong, linear wave throughout much of the powerband from less than 3,000 rpm to near redline at 8,000 rpm. Power is said to be just a hair over 100 hp, while torque, at 86 lb-ft, is strong enough to give it effortless thrust.

Typically, parallel twin engines are my least favourite configuration, mostly because they lack some of the character found in other formats. Multi-cylinder mills rev so freely towards the stratosphere, helping to keep a rider engaged, while V-twins have that lumpy idle that fans of big cruisers love so much. The NT1100’s parallel twin doesn’t sing melodically, nor rev to the heavens — it just goes about its business of motivating the NT in an effective — if gruff and unexciting — way. 

Clever Transmission

The engine’s effectiveness at propelling the NT1100 along swiftly is highlighted by its dual-clutch automated transmission (DCT) that leaves the left hand and foot wondering where the clutch lever and toe shifter are. They’re absent because the bike sorts its own gears, snicking up or down through the cogs with only the slightest of audible cues and virtually no shimmy in the driveline. It’s incredibly smooth, and when tooling around town, the combination of the instant and effortless shifting and the torquey power delivery make this Honda very swift from stoplight to stoplight. 

When passing, simply snap the throttle open and the bike will downshift a gear or two and go. But, if riding around in drive, the NT1100 is programmed to climb the gears so quickly, that it’s often in such a tall gear that anything less than a big ask of the throttle is met with some chugging of the engine before the revs catch up and the bike really accelerates. 

To overcome this, a rider can select sport, whereby revs are held a bit longer between gears, or tap another button to demand manual control of the shifting. This latter option is facilitated by an index-finger trigger on the left handlebar, with a thumb trigger for downshifts. When hustling the NT1100 on some of Ontario’s best-riding roads southwest of Ottawa, it helped keep me more engaged as a rider, if not fully replacing a traditionalist’s love of doing all the work him- or herself. Regardless of whether in full manual mode, sport, or drive, the trigger buttons will call upon the cog the rider wants on-demand.

Effortless, Not Flawless

When cruising around, whether in town, on the highway, or on backroads, the DCT makes great sense, and can make life just that little bit easier. Honda’s been offering various models with DCTs for more than a dozen years, so it’s had time to really dial it in. Still, where it really seems to suit the character of the Goldwing, there were times I still thought I’d prefer a traditional clutch lever and shifter setup here. Fortunately, the option is still offered by Honda Canada to spec one’s NT1100 as such, while fellow riders south of the border are stuck with DCT-only NT1100s. 

At low speeds, like manoeuvring around in a parking lot or on the sloped, gravel driveway of the cabin I was staying at, feathering a clutch would allow the bike to be walked around slowly. The DCT is less able to do that, and while throttle calibration is very precise once under way, there’s a bit of a toggle-switch on-or-off effect that can make it very tricky in those low-speed scenarios. Alarmingly, the NT1100 automatically shifts into neutral every time it shuts off, which means when parked on anything other than level ground, it can roll away, which is why the optional emergency brake lever should be standard equipment.

Ride vs. Handling

During my 1,000-km ride with the NT1100, I had plenty of time to dwell on the DCT, mostly because everything else about the bike is so well sorted that there was little else to complain about.  The brakes are strong and smooth with just enough initial bite, and the handling will make a rider very quickly forget that this bike’s roots come from an ADV machine. Of course, the Africa Twin is already known to be a decent on-road machine, but by changing the wheels and tires and tuning the suspension for on-road duty, the NT1100 has become a very adept corner carver. 

Its tall stature and nearly 250-kg (551-lb) curb weight mean it won’t encourage a rider to try to drag a knee, but it’s eager to lean into a corner, and its long wheelbase helps it to track well. Plus, its suspension is able to soak up mid-corner bumps that would upset a stiffer machine. In factory spec, its suspension was quite soft, which was made more noticeable once I had the panniers and top box loaded up. Still, there was no pogoing in the handling, and the front 43-mm (1.7-in) Showa inverted fork can be tweaked for preload, as can the rear end.

The upside to the softness is a delightful ride that, when coupled with a seriously plush saddle, meant long-days covering secondary roads were a breeze — even bounding over chewed up pavement in relentless construction zones.

Sport Touring Position

Adding to the all-day comfort is a posture that has a rider seated upright with an easy reach to the wide bars. Standard heated grips and cruise control get a big thumbs up, although during the first three ride days, the humidex soared to near 40°C, which led to my taking advantage of the five-position adjustable windscreen to get as much air passing over me as possible. Once the heatwave broke and we were faced with a very chilly morning ride, the way the fairings and elevated windshield direct air around the rider is amazing. 

The 6.5-inch screen can be configured to show all sorts of rider information, and weirdly, it sits right above a small, redundant LCD display that displays some of the same. The screen can be paired to Apple CarPlay or Android Auto, although only if you can get your helmet communication system to cooperate (mine wouldn’t). The menu system to navigate through the various displays, trip computer functions, and ride modes is pretty convoluted, and while the screen has touch functionality, it only works when the bike is motionless, leaving the rider to fumble through a complex series of buttons and toggles on the left grip. 

There’s so much going on with that left hand control setup that I found myself mistakenly downshifting a couple of times instead of cancelling the turn signal, or trying to tap the horn. 

Strong Value

As has usually been the case, Honda’s sport touring offering is a rolling engineering flex for the company. The 2025 Honda NT1100 is chock-full of modern technology, highlighted especially by the latest iteration of the company’s DCT transmission. It becomes a defining aspect of the ride experience, for better or worse. Otherwise, the bike is a pleasant long-haul cruiser when needed, or a fun, corner-slicing sports machine when wanted, delivering exactly what buyers in the sport touring segment want. Best of all, for riders who still want a traditional six-speed transmission, it’s still offered and will end up saving a buyer $1,000 for a sticker price of $17,599 before accessories, freight, and taxes. That compares favourably against the Kawasaki Versys 1100, and the Suzuki Vstrom 1050, which will both cost a rider at least $1,000 more, while picking one of the European competitors will ring the till considerably higher still.

Final Thoughts

Honda’s absence from the top-tier sport touring segment has been conspicuous, and it’s great to see the company’s return. That the NT1100 is a comfortable and capable machine with a reputation for bullet-proof durability makes it a compelling offering and a strong value.