3000 MILES ON KTM 790…
Basing an adventure bike on the stupendous 790 Duke looked like a great idea, in principle. However, in practise doubts began to surface. 3000 British miles get to the truth of the matter…
… Adventure. Based on the incredible 790 Duke. But can it cope with big miles?
LAST YEAR EVERY one of Bike’s road testers fell head-over-heels in love with the 790 Duke, and duly crowned it Bike of the Year – ahead of the mind-frazzling Ducati V4S. The KTM’S 100bhp engine is a riot of midrange thrust, instant throttle response and top-end wallop, while its non-adjustable suspension is a near-perfect compromise between ride quality and demon handling. It’s a weapon.
Which brings us to the 790 Adventure – essentially a Duke on stilts with a bigger screen and funny fuel tanks. Going by that heritage, it should be brilliant. But after the launch, there were niggling doubts. The screen seemed noisy, the seat felt hard and it was £2300 more expensive than the genius Duke. Obviously the Adventure’s engine – which has been tweaked for even more torque – is still superb, and the suspension is similarly capable. But is the Adventure plush enough to cope with rivals such as the excellent Triumph Tiger 800 and BMW’S R850GS? And does it justify that stout £11,099 price? We thrash, commute and tour for 3000 British miles to find out…
Engine and transmission
Running in a 790 Adventure takes some getting used to. These days, brand new bike engines are so precisely built and the components so accurately machined they usually feel utterly normal. You’d be hard pressed to tell if they’d done 60 miles or 6000. But the KTM goes further – with the odometer on three miles, it feels positively loose. Start it up and there’s a clattery racket as it settles into a not-quite-even idle, it’s V-twin-esque firing order seemingly jiggling the revs about. Then you blip the throttle and it barks instantaneously as if pistons and liners have spent 20,000 miles bedding it. It sounds more like my mate’s 60,000-mile 990SMT than a brand spanking parallel twin. The obvious question is, if it feels and sounds like this at three miles, what the hell will it be like at 3000?
The answer is: exactly the same – clattery, fit and slightly uncouth. There’s an edge to this engine that will make riders used to the silky pastures of transverse fours feel uneasy – until you get used to it the
KTM sounds worryingly unbalanced and lairy. See also, pre-dvt Ducatis.
The parallel twin engine is subtly different to the 790 Duke’s, with milder cam profiles giving more torque at lower rpm and slightly less peak power – 95bhp happens at 8000rpm (Duke: 100bhp at 9500rpm), with peak torque of 66 lb.ft at 6600rpm (Duke: 62 lb.ft @ 7500rpm). And you can tell the difference – the Adventure definitely feels more gutsy at 6000rpm. The Adventure’s engine encourages overtaking using the thumping midrange rather than going down a gear to blast past in a carnival of revs as you would on the Duke. The top-end rush is slightly curtailed, but not by much. It just happens earlier. Despite loving the Duke, I prefer the Adventure engine’s delivery because the power is even more accessible.
Of course, 95bhp doesn’t thrill in quite the same way as a 140bhp R1250GS, but on the road it doesn’t feel that far off because you use full throttle a lot. Trying to apply 140bhp takes considerably more concentration and talent. The only time the KTM’S relatively modest power output is obvious is when you need to show a motorway lane-hogger how cross you are by blasting past and can’t muster much more than a speedy waft.
But power isn’t a niggle with the Adventure – thrashing a 95bhp bike is more fun than being wary of a 140bhp one. The issues are low speed fuelling and high speed vibes. Below 3500rpm the engine sometimes jerks and clatters to such an extent you end up using the clutch to smooth things out. It’s worse under heavy load – ie, if you crack the throttle open in a high gear and low revs – but it also happens on moderate throttle in low gears. This gets irritating in town – a shame when the low speed handling is so brilliant. Editor Hugo agrees: ‘The engine is responsive and eager, the power delivery is a great blend of revs and midrange, but it feels coarse. It’s brilliant on a B-road, but it’s tiring over distance. The low speed fuelling is irritating – I started knocking it into neutral and coasting to traffic lights. The fuelling issue also manifests itself in fluctuating engine speed at a constant throttle.’
The second, and more minor, niggle is vibration. Sitting at 80-85mph on motorways, the vibes through the bars are just enough to send my fingers to sleep after an hour or so if I’m wearing summer gloves (thick winter gloves dampen the vibes enough to keep blood flowing). Art chief Steve Herbert picked up on this too, though he was more bothered by vibes from below: ‘Despite the twin balancer shafts’ best efforts I found the buzzing in my feet annoying.’
But let’s not end this section with a gripe, because overall, this is a superb road engine – tractable, exciting and reliable. And it’s made even better by the exceptional, optional, £350 quickshifter. Without it, the gearbox is fine – short throw, light action, all very normal these days. But the quickshifter (both up and down) is so good it actively makes your rides more enjoyable. If you’re riding hard, it bangs in upshifts with a pleasing pop like a WSB Ducati, and blips the throttle perfectly on dizzy downshifts. The really clever bit is everywhere else – the cruising, pottering and town riding that takes up a huge amount of our riding life. So if you’re
dawdling through a village and want to go up a gear, the quickshifter smoothly changes up (most will clonk because they haven’t been mapped for this). If you’re cruising behind a car and change down to prepare for an overtake it just shifts down a gear with a barely audible blip (a lot of quickshifters will refuse to work for the same reason). It’s brilliant, and frees up your brain for more important matters. Get on almost any other bike after riding the Adventure and you’ll miss that gearbox and quickshifter.
Handling and ride
The Adventure’s chassis is identical to the 790 Duke’s – same frame, same rake and trail, same swingarm – but with longer forks and a 21in front wheel and 18in rear instead of the 790’s 17s. This means the 790 has a 34mm longer wheelbase than the Duke, and a higher centre of gravity (despite those pendulous fuel tanks flopped each side of the engine). You’d think that lot would take the edge off the Adventure’s handling compared with the Duke’s, which is hilariously brilliant, but very little is lost in translation. The Adventure’s narrower Avon Trailrider tyres give it a light, exuberant feel turning in, and the longer travel suspension settles smoothly midcorner. If you hammer the excellent radial brakes on entry and uncork the throttle on exits you’ll obviously get more movement and weight transfer than the Duke, but it never feels anything other than entertaining. It’s a cleverly set-up bike – good job too, because the only adjustment option is rear preload.
‘It’s a fine advert for narrow tyres (and for Avons),’ agrees Hugo. ‘It’s reassuring on corner turn in and it feels neutral. And unlike some long travel adventure bikes it doesn’t flop forward, dipping the front end, unless you are savage on the brakes.’ The ride quality is equally impressive. There’s a horribly rattly section on my commute that I use to compare test bikes, seeing how fast I can go before my lower back starts moaning. Sportsbikes don’t get much above 65mph. The Adventure barked through at 83, only a few mph below the all-time record holder, Yamaha’s semi-actively suspended Super Ténéré 1200. The only downside is pillions and luggage. With it loaded to the gunnels I want to adjust more than rear preload to calm fore-aft movement.
Electronics
These are fundamentally sound, but with several annoyances. First, the good stuff: the traction and wheelie control feel sophisticated, cutting in smoothly without the jolt some bikes deliver; the menus are intuitive and easy to navigate; the colour TFT screen is easy to read and logically laid out; the fuel gauge (which only shows the bottom half of the tank, KTM assuming it makes no odds if the tank is full or ¾ full) is accurate. Nice.
The first annoyance is the My Ride smart phone connection. This allows you to get KTM’S £7.99 navigation app, which displays sat nav instructions on the TFT screen where normally you’d see trip info. Good idea, if irksome having already shelled out £11,099. The trouble is, the sat nav is poor. It refuses to call roads by their real name (eg, it says ‘turn left onto Hauxton Rd’ when it means ‘turn left onto the M11’), it chooses odd routes that Googlemaps and I both agree are slower, and it keeps losing Bluetooth connection with the phone and then stops working altogether. I gave up after two days. Next gripe (and we’re getting picky here) is that despite having a range to empty facility, you have to go into the menus to see it. Then there’s the TFT screen itself, which is surrounded by a big black border that houses the warning lights. These aren’t lit most of the time, so the dash normally resembles a cheap Chinese miniature ipad, with a small screen and a massive frame. For 11
grand you’d expect a better solution. And finally, the indicator switch became erratic in heavy rain. Then it all got better in the dry and has been fine since. Odd.
Controls and comfort
The main barrier to comfort is the screen, which is awful for those over 5ft 10in. There are two positions and neither work – the higher one angles the screen back, so the effect is the same as the lower position. Madness. And the noise is appalling. Not only is it far louder than a bike with no fairing, but the bobbly, vibratory turbulence at 75mph made me feel ill. Going above 80mph was impossible without crouching down a few inches. Putting the seat into its lower position means six-footers like me have to crouch less, but you still have to, and then your knees are more cramped. I fitted an MRA wind deflector which smooths out the flow, which means you can cruise at 85mph without feeling like you drank a gallon of absinthe the night before and are now having your skull beaten by a rubber mallet.
The riding position is standard adventure bike (ie, comfy) and though I found the firm saddle good for 150 miles before fidgeting, Steve struggled with it: ‘After 80 miles I was having issues. The seat is rock hard and while there’s plenty of space to shift about, I soon exploited all of it. Also, though it’s far from cramped, the low seat made my knees grumble.’ The latter point is a tricky one for shorter riders – raise the saddle and you struggle to touch the ground, lower it and dodgy knees might suffer. With the saddle on its higher setting Hugo and I found it comfy for knees and arse.
Practicality
Those low fuel tanks and their 20 litre capacity help give the Adventure a rival-bashing (and attainable) 275 mile range, but the star is the engine. It is extraordinarily economical. Thrumming along at 70-80mph on busy motorways will see over 70mpg, if the traffic clears and you edge up to 90 you’ll get mid-50s mpg, fast B-road japes will net you close to 60 and only the most merciless of thrashing will take it under 50. Amazing.
The tanks themselves look vulnerable to crash damage, but Hugo reckons they’ll be fine. The plastics have a robust feel. We reckon even the most hamfisted DIYER will struggle to break any lugs off and though a low speed crash will scratch them, it’s unlikely they’ll crack.
Quality and finish
Overall it’s good, though we ran the Adventure through spring and summer so it never saw salt. All the Torx bolts remain unblemished, the tank paint shrugged off having a tankbag permanently strapped on, and the plastic panels can be refitted precision. The picture is only blighted by some tatty wires poking out of the heated grip controller.
‘Get on almost any other bike after riding the Adventure and you’ll miss that gearbox and quickshifter’