It is with a heavy heart that we report the death of Paulo Gonçalves, who died Sunday while racing Stage 7 of the Dakar Rally in Saudi Arabia.
Always one of the riders to watch each year at The Dakar, Gonçalves was competing this year under the Hero Motorcycles factory team banner, making his 13th start at this iconic and grueling race.
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.
The bike we never thought would make it to the United States is getting closer to actually landing on American soil, and today we have even more good news about the Yamaha Ténéré 700.
This is because Yamaha Motor USA has just shared with us pricing for the 2021 Yamaha Ténéré 700, and the Japanese brand has nailed things on the head with their $9,999 MSRP for this middleweight adventure-tourer.
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.
If there is a complaint to be made about the Husqvarna 701 Enduro, it likely has to do with the bike’s 3.4 gallon (13-liter) fuel tank.
The size of the tank isn’t unreasonable, mind you, especially since the Huqvarna 701 Enduro does pretty well at sipping fuel, despite its big single-cylinder engine, but if you really want to explore where the trail ends, there just isn’t enough go-juice on the bike…until now.
Say hello to the Husqvarna 701 Enduro LR, and as you can probably figure out for yourself, the two-letter designation stands for “long range”.
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.
It has taken a long time to wrangle this bike into existence, but the KTM 390 Adventure is officially a thing now and coming in 2020.
I could look back through the pages of Asphalt & Rubber, and see when we first started talking about this small-sized ADV bike, but it would be downright depressing for the Austrian brand. It has been…a while in the making, let’s just say that.
The good news though is that the KTM 390 Adventure arrives with an exclamation point, and it is certain to dominate in markets where the 373cc engine is considered quite large and peppy. It should be fun in the western markets too.
Every year, for the past five years, Husqvarna has worked like clockwork at the EIMCA show in Milan. This is because the Swedish variant from KTM has been steady in its approach of releasing one new street bike in Milan, and one new concept model for possible future production. For 2019, this trend continues.
Behold the Husqvarna Norden 901 concept, a uniquely styled adventure-tourer, with an 899cc parallel-twin engine, and plenty of styling cues to keep your pouring over the high-resolution photos below.
As the name suggests, the Norden 901 gets the upgraded “890” engine from the KTM 890 Duke R, but fit into a package that is similar to the KTM 790 Adventure platform.
A brand we often don’t hear too much about, Moto Morini is showing some interesting prospects that are set to debut at the upcoming EICMA show in Milan.
The biggest comes in the form of this teaser concept sketch (see above), which outlines the lines of an adventure-touring model from the Italian brand.
Now under Chinese ownership, Moto Morini is actually looking like it will have robust set of bikes debuting for the 2020 model year, with this ADV machine joined by both a scrambler and naked model.
It has always surprised me that while Dunlop is a huge player in the US motorcycle tire market, the American brand hasn’t really latched onto one of its domestic market’s biggest trends on two wheels: adventure-touring.
I am sure that if you asked the tire gurus at Dunlop if they had an ADV tire in their arsenal, they would reply with several models to choose from. The graphic near the bottom of this story seems to support this notion.
But, diving deeper into Dunlop’s lineup shows really a strong showing of DOT-legal dirt bikes tire, but with plenty of white space on the board when it comes to the sizes and expectations common with today’s big ADV bikes.
Well, that needle is moving a bit today, with Dunlop’s latest news in the adventure-touring space. This is because Dunlop has two big announcement for its ADV tire offerings.