Find the right adventure bike
With more choice than ever before, RIDE helps you navigate the increasingly complicated adventure bike landscape
AT THE TURN of the millennium, the term ‘adventure bike’ was never overheard in mainstream motorcycling circles. Drowned out by discussions about kneeslider compounds, Dynojet kits and some kid called Rossi who was threatening to make 500GP racing exciting again, any bike that didn’t have clip-ons, a full fairing and at least two Rs in its name was seen as a bit weird. Naked bikes and tourers were treated with suspicion but at least had a recognisable purpose. Why on Earth would anybody want an overgrown off-roader?
Today, Britain’s new-bike landscape is almost unrecognisably different. We buy five times as many adventure bikes as we did in 2000 and they now comfortably out-sell sportsbikes. The two biggest selling motorcycles of any style above 125cc are BMW’S R1200GS and R1200GS Adventure – and yet these titans of tall touring count for just one in six of all the adventure bikes sold in the UK. Even if you don’t count the R1200GS models, the adventure market still eclipses the supersports sector. Adventure bikes are no longer a one-bike class.
This explosion in popularity has fed (and been fed by) a boom in overlanding options, with offerings from almost every manufacturer. But this baffling choice also means things aren’t as simple as asking which bike is ‘best’ – instead, the variety is so enormous that the trick is working out which one best suits you.
Do you want to hit green lanes or autobahns? Use it for the daily grind or annual holiday? Crossing continents or chasing sportsbikes? Travelling light or carrying kitchen sinks? Do you like one, two, three or four cylinders? Want a traffic buster or back-lane blaster? Technical tour de force or stripped down simplicity? Light and agile, or solid and stable? Getting down and dirty, or sitting high and mighty? And which bikes have genuinely been developed to head off-road and which are merely styling exercises that are likely to baulk at the sight of a muddy puddle?
To offer a starting point, RIDE’S Adventure Decoder tries to make sense by laying out the mind-boggling market. Based on the test-riding team’s thousands of miles in these saddles (though some are so new we’ve ridden them for the first time this month), we’ve plotted the relationships between these bikes. We’ve started with BMW’S R1200GS at the centre of our axes. It’s a well known quantity and good at pretty much everything, so it provides our reference point – and it’s the bike to which the others are inevitably compared.
Bikes with a stronger on-road focus – with elements like cast wheels, short seat heights and lower handlebars – sit above the GS on our graph; below it are those with more ability on dirt (larger spoked wheels, longer-travel suspension and a slimmer, lighter chassis). Machines with a friskier, sportier feel (quick steering, eager throttle response) go to the right; those that excel at long-distance work thanks to plushly padded seats, larger fuel tanks, taller screens and greater carrying capacity go to the left. We’ve included a few machines – BMW’S R1200RT, Honda’s Fireblade and KTM’S 450 Dakar Rally Replica – as boundaries, for context. One of the many adventure bikes on the market will be right for you –and hopefully this will help you find it.
“The explosion in their popularity has fed a boom in overlanding options”