What Is Kawasaki Really Up To With Its Supercharged 'Project H2' UTV?

No matter how you slice it, there's something utterly intoxicating about the very idea of Kawasaki's supercharged H2R engine, isn't there?

I mean, whether it's in a motorcycle or an unmanned delivery drone, both the idea and the sound regularly turn heads. For those reasons and more, we were very excited when Kawasaki first posted a short, tantalizing video teaser about Project H2.

Since it's a teaser, it didn't show much. Just enough for our brains to register the tiniest hint of a UTV. Naming it "Project H2," of course, carries a certain amount of weight if your name is Kawasaki, so naturally our thoughts turned to questioning whether Team Green was about to stuff a supercharged H2 engine into a UTV. I mean, the math was right there, wasn't it?

But teasers and spy shots aren't the only ways to potentially find pre-release information, well before OEMs make any official public announcements. Patents and trademarks can sometimes also point the way, for those with the patience to dig. And while it's true that they don't always end up amounting to something you can ride (or drive), some of them can be very interesting, indeed.

Take, for example, a veritable pile of patent documents that Kawasaki Motors filed with the US Patent and Trademark Office back in October 2023, but which subsequently weren't published until earlier in 2025. If you're keeping track, that timing was, rather coincidentally, not very long before Kawasaki posted its Project H2 teaser on its official channels. 

To me, patent documents are often fascinating because their titles, quite frequently, are so benign as to completely belie the interesting tidbits they actually contain. All of these documents, for example, are very blandly titled "Off-Road Vehicle," with zero specificity about the subsystems they might be illuminating, nor indeed anything else. 

Dig in, and you'll see that we're talking about variations on "an off-road vehicle includes an internal combustion engine, a supercharger, an intercooler, an intake tank, a throttle body, first injectors, and at least one second injector. The engine includes cylinders." Elsewhere, you'll find that it contains "a plurality of cylinders," which indicates that Kawasaki doesn't want to give away all its secrets just yet; only wishing to confirm that it's definitely not a single-cylinder engine in any way, shape, or form. 

With me so far? We then learn that, "The supercharger supplies intake air to the engine. The intercooler is provided at an intake conduit provided between the supercharger and the engine. The intake tank is provided at the intake conduit and defines an intake chamber inside the intake tank. The throttle body is provided at the intake conduit, and includes intake conduits and throttle valves. The intake conduits are respectively connected to intake ports of the cylinders. The throttle valves are respectively provided in the intake conduits. The plurality of first injectors are provided at the throttle body and inject fuel to the respective intake conduits. The at least one second injector is provided at the intake tank and injects fuel to the intake chamber." 

Although the above text comes from the abstract of just one of the multiple patents, the others similarly describe elements of the supercharger, intercooler, intake tank, and exhaust system that all relate to the same vehicle. They use some of the same broad overview diagrams to show the vehicle, as well as a common flow chart showing how the subsystems all work together within the vehicle. Close-up drawings of the subsystem in question differ, so they correspond with the individual subsystem being described in the specific patent. 

While it doesn't give any specifications about the engine involved, we do see that there are both a supercharger and an intercooler involved. Separate patents that Kawasaki has filed recently also talk about a neat little air conditioning system for UTVs that would duct cool air at the legs of driver and passengers while the vehicle is in action, but it's not clear whether these specifically relate to the same UTV as the supercharged hijinks are for. Remember, Kawasaki does make a whole bunch of UTVs, and the air conditioning system could relate to something else entirely