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adventure-tourer

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Start the countdown for MV Agusta’s adventure bike reveal, as the Italian brand has signaled that it will it be debuting, not one but two ADV bikes at EICMA this year.

Starting with its “Lucky Explorer Project” name, and imagery from the Dakar Rally, it is clear that MV Agusta is trying to draw a line to the company’s rally-raid history through the Cagiva brand (something another Italian motorcycle brand does as well).

We are just days away from this year’s EICMA show, which means new bike leaks are coming in hot and heavy. The latest comes to us  from the folks at MV Agusta, which has been hard at work on its new 950cc three-cylinder platform.

The first bike that we seem to be getting from this new displacement is an adventure-tourer, as photos of the machine have been spotted on the road with an MV Agusta test rider onboard.

When I first met the Aprilia Tuareg 660, it didn’t make much of an impression. It was the 2019 EICMA show, and the bike was quietly on display in a glass box, covered with plants and vines.

The display was so nondescript, that thousands of attendees and hundreds of journalists passed by the Tuareg 660 without even noticing that it was there.

Nothing is subtle about the Tuareg 660 now though, as the middleweight adventure bike is riding the wave of success that has come with Aprilia’s previous two models from its 660cc platform.

Add into that notion how popular the middleweight ADV space has become recently, and we can begin to see why the Aprilia Tuareg 660 is one of the most anticipated motorcycles for the 2022 model year.

So to test its mettle, Aprilia brought us to the Italian island of Sardinia, where the winding mountain roads make for challenging and technical riding on the street.

And to get our feet dirty too, we tackled some rough gravel roads/trails, as well as an off-road circuit that Aprilia created with a good mix of sandy, rocky, wet, and bumpy conditions.

Is the Aprilia Tuareg 660 any good? Ask 31 riders and you will get a Baskin Robins of answers back in this highly personal two-wheeled space.

But, the Aprilia Tuareg 660 does seem to inhabit the Goldilocks zone of the middleweight ADV space that should impress many, and leave quite a few riders reaching for their wallets. Let me explain.

I’m sitting in the airline lounge at JFK right now, waiting to hop across the pond to ride the new Aprilia Tuareg 660 in Italy, and I was thinking to myself how weird it is at this stage that we don’t have any proper photos of the Aprilia Tuareg 660.

Well, the minds in Noale must have been picking up what I was putting down, because there was a dump of high-resolution photos of the Tuareg 660 put on their press site today.

For $12,000, the 2022 Aprilia Tuareg 660 puts out 80hp from its parallel-twin engine, and tips the scales at 449 lbs at the curb.

A bike we have suspected from Ducati ever since the Multistrada V4 debuted, the Ducati Multistrada V4 Pikes Peak continues a long tradition from the Italian brand in making a sportier adventure-tourer.

That ethos gets taken to another level with this incarnation though, thanks primarily to Borgo Panigale positioning the base Multistrada V4 as a more all-round ADV bike, with its 19″ front wheel and double-sided swingarm.

Returning the Multistrada to its 17″ ways, the 2022 Ducati Multistrada V4 Pikes Peak features not only a smaller front wheel, but also a single-sided swingarm and other sport-focused choices.

What’s in a name? Well, if you are the new Ducati Multistrada V2, there is not much beyond some minor upgrades for the 2022 model year.

The first of the Italian brand’s new models that will debut in the company’s two-and-a-half-month-long teaser series, the 2022 Ducati Multistrada V2 is mostly a name change to keep the “mid-sized” adventure bike conforming to the rest of Ducati’s mid-sized lineup.

The name “DesertX” should be a familiar moniker for Ducatisti, as the Desert X concept was the belle of the ball at the 2019 EIMCA show.

Back then though, the Desert X was a concept bike built under the Scrambler Ducati name, and it featured a 1,079cc air-cooled v-twin engine.

Oh, how things have changed! Now being teased for a December 9th debut, it would seem that the Italians have done more than reformat the name, and that makes us very happy.