A constant theme you will hear in the ADV space is how you can’t do real off-road riding with a big dual-sport, like the Ducati Multistrada 1260 Enduro and its siblings in the category.
They are too big, too heavy, and have too much power to be real off-road machines, some will tell you. Of course, to say that, you have to forget some history – namely that iconic off-road races like the Dakar Rally were competed on machines that aren’t all that different from today’s ADV bike.
It looks like we are resurrecting a rumor from five years ago, as once again there is talk of a midsized adventure bike from Honda in the pipes.
It remains to be seen if this new model will take over the “Transalp” moniker (Honda canceled its Transalp trademark in 2016 for the USA, after reviving it in 2013), but right now the rumors from Europe are suggesting an 850cc twin-cylinder ADV bike is coming from Big Red.
Whether the rumor is true remains to be seen, but there is plenty of ammo to see a so-called Honda CRF850L hitting the market.
When it comes to long-range dirt riding, the Husqvarna 701 Enduro LR seems like the perfect choice, with its potent 75hp 690cc single-cylinder thumper, and its 6.6 gallons of fuel capacity.
The model is a new one for the 2020, and was shown to us at last year’s EICMA show in Milan with quite the positive reception. There is just one problem though: what if you already have a Husqvarna 701 Enduro?
Realizing that many riders are not going to trade in their bikes for one that simply has a larger fuel capacity, the smart minds at Husqvarna have decided to make the cleverly named “Additional Fuel Tank Kit” available for current 701 owners.
One last entry from our wandering lens at The One Motorcycle Show, we bring you this BMW R1200GS from Roland Sands Design.
The machine gives a throwback to the rally machines we saw in the 1980s competing in the Dakar Rally, particularly those made by HPN-Motorradtechnik, which were based off the BMW R80 G/S
Right on schedule, the Triumph Tiger 900 has debuted with an updated ADV offering for fans of the three-cylinder adventure bike. As was expected, the 2020 Triumph Tiger 900 comes in five slightly less confusing varieties.
That said, there is the base model Triumph Tiger 900, the road-going Triumph Tiger 900 GT, and the off-road focused Triumph Tiger 900 Rally.
On top of this, there are “Pro” options for the Rally and GT models. There is also a low-seat height option for the Tiger 900 GT model.
While still a handful of models for what is essentially one motorcycle, the designations are still clearer and easier to understand than Triumph’s “XR, XRx, XRt, XCx, and XCa” alphabet soup of uppercase and lowercase letters.
If the Husqvarna Norden 901 was one of your top picks from the 2019 EICMA show, then we have some good news for you, as the adventure-touring bike has been given the green light for production by the Swedish brand.
The news shouldn’t come as a surprise to astute ADV fans, as spy shots of the new Husky have already been spotted in the wild, and Husqvarna has a strong track record of bringing its EICMA concepts to reality.
What will be interesting though is where Husqvarna lands on the feature list, and more importantly, how the Husqvarna Norden 901 is going to be priced against its competition.
It would seem that Triumph Motorcycles didn’t quite show us everything at the EICMA show in Milan (which is a good thing, since the British brand didn’t have much of note on display in Italy), as we are gearing up for the release of a “new” Triumph Tiger 900 in a few days’ time.
The news comes from Triumph itself, which is teasing the Tiger 900 on YouTube, and the rumormill is suggesting that the increase in displacement also brings a number of improved features to this popular middleweight ADV machine.
While the Streetfighter V4 S was center stage at the Ducati stand at EICMA, our eye drifted over towards the Scrambler setup, where the Italian brand was showcasing two concept bikes for the Milan show.
At the Ducati launch event in Rimini, the Ducati Scrambler Desert X concept was the big tease, with the Italians saying very little about the bike.
Really, all that was revealed (beyond a couple sketches) was that the motorcycle would use the brand’s 1,079cc air-cooled engine, and instead Ducati encouraged fans to see the bike at the EICMA booth, if they wanted more than a rendering. So, we obliged.
For us, the Ducati Scrambler Desert X concept was the star of the Ducati EICMA experience, perhaps because we knew so far in advance that the Streetfighter V4 was coming, and had a pretty good idea about what this 205hp street-shredding machine would look like.
Continuing their glacially slow trickling of information, Harley-Davidson has sprinkled a couple more details to us about its upcoming Pan America motorcycle.
Expected now in late-2020, the Harley-Davidson is an American v-twin adventure-tourer, which the Bar & Shield brand hopes will attract new blood into its cult of two wheels.
At the core the machine, is a 60° liquid-cooled v-twin engine, which Harley-Davidson is giving some specs about at EICMA.
No press releases. No social media hype-posts. No big fancy displays. In fact, it was very easy to miss that Aprilia was giving us a glimpse at its next middleweight motorcycle at EICMA at all. But, it was there if you were careful to look at your surroundings.
Now granted, it is very hard to tell what is going on with the Aprilia Tuareg 660, since…well, the Italians covered it in shrubbery. Such is the state of their display at the Milan trade show, as they try to tease us with this ADV model.
But, we can pick out some details between the vines, bushes, and leafs…and they are intriguing.