EICMA 2024 is fresh on everyone’s minds and the glamour value of all the new motorcycles lined up for global and especially India launch is insane. Bikes across all segments and displacements with the promise of new riding experiences catering to every kind of rider imaginable have shown up on the radar and if you’re planning on going bike shopping anytime in the foreseeable future, pretty soon you will be tremendously spoilt for choice, not that you weren’t already but it seems like many minute market gaps have been pretty convincingly sealed off with an onslaught of spectacular machines.

ADVs as a format are taking off in India which makes a lot of sense considering the nature of our roads (or rather the absence of any good ones) and the requirement for a lot of motorcycling enthusiasts to have a one bike garage that can handle basically anything that our thrilling country can throw at it. Put all these format requirements into a vehicle and you end up with an adventure tourer with lots of space, great suspension and comfortable ergonomics. While there had already been a pretty good number of new entrants in this space in the form of adventure bikes like the Himalayan or scramblers like the 400X from Triumph, this segment is really going to blow up in ‘25 largely but not solely because of the onslaught of orange from KTM in Italy last week. The new 390 Adventure R brings KTM’s true adventure DNA and the wicked 399CC LC4C engine together to spawn a bike that promises to be everything the current gen SW / 390 ADV platform in general should have been to begin with. Adding to the excitement and variety are the 390 SMC R and the 390 Enduro which share the platform of the Adventure but branch out into different riding experiences owing to different wheel sizes, tyres,  suspension tune, ergonomics and potentially different power delivery styles via sprockets, engine tune and gearing ratios, riding experience variations are purely speculative and indicative of the platform in question at this stage since these bikes have only been displayed at EICMA so far - nobody outside the brand has ridden them yet; and that is what forms the roots of this whole conversation. 

Motorcycle conventions’ customer bases have to think in a different way compared to say people who visit consumer electronics shows / gadget expos. While using an iPhone or a Playstation and getting hands-on experience is mega critical, the specs and live demos generally tell a vast majority of the story - leaving out any kinks / bugs / usage technicalities. A motorcycle is something that cannot be judged at all on the basis of its components. 2+2 could but for the most part does not equate to 4 here. A bike could be the sum of extremely humble and basic components and provide a wonderful riding experience and similarly can have the best elements in the world and not ride how you expected it to. Test ride and decide is the only logical way to go about this. While an exhibition display can point you towards a bike, whether or not it's working for you, doing the things you’d like it to do and how well it integrates into your lifestyle is something that only a hands on experience can give you. Taking a decision before you’ve saddled up onto the machine at least a few times is a massive gamble that for the most part isn’t worth the risk.

Sticking to KTM for an example here - the 390 ADV R has the engine and electronics and certainly quite a few other shared parts with the Gen 3 Duke 390; so does that make this bike an off-road capable, larger, adventure tourer style and more versatile version of the Duke? Hell no. Any assumptions should be classified as unanswered speculations and nothing more. There’s definitely a good amount of credibility associated with predictability regarding a brand’s previous offerings so a new KTM is likely more confidence inspiring than some EV startup you may or may not have heard of but that comes over time. 

Regardless of this, lucrative pre-booking offers that OEMs introduce with introductory prices might lure you to take the jump before you’ve even seen the bike in real life but that extra few week wait and few thousand rupee premium compared to the pre-booking offers is worth the peace of mind and guarantee that that is indeed the bike you’d like to be your companion for the foreseeable future. It’s a machine you’ll be holding onto for at least a few years - what’s a few extra weeks to be sure?

For now, we should all be excited about the new flavours of motorcycling showing up and consistently push brands to push the barriers - biking is here to stay and it’s only up from here.