Whining & Gushing about the new KTM 790 Adventure

Reviewing a bike you have already purchased is like deciding whether you like kids after they are already waking you up at 3am for food or something: that ship has sailed. After swooning over it for a year as the perfect bike for my needs, I slapped down the £10,000 proceeds from an unused engagement ring and rode it home. Contrary to the proposal of marriage, there was zero question that this was the right decision. 100%. It is lighter and more off-road capable than the BMW GS I rode around the world, more street legal than my KTM 450 EXC enduro, and has more all-round usability than my Royal Enfield Himalayan. The perceptive among you may be bracing for some bitching.

Yeah, a bit.

Ferry from Dover to Calais

The first thing I realized after a couple hundred miles on this bike was, if I was ever going to appreciate it, I needed to blow up everything I know about motorcycles .. and I’ve owned 16 .. because I have never ridden anything like it. The BMW R1250 GS is heavy and soft, the Triumph Tiger is cool but squishy and the Honda Africa Twin is pretty but fat. Not that they aren’t all beautiful machines because they are. This rethinking was necessary because the Adventure has more in common with my 450 EXC than my GS. Let me explain.

If a radical left-wing political party were scrappy enduro riders and the ultra-conservative wing were Fat Boy riders, the Adventure would be a dreadlocked, peace-loving supporter of Greenpeace. My EXC is tall and narrow, like the Adventure. My EXC has a 21” front wheel, like the Adventure. My EXC has WP shocks with lots of travel. Ditto the Adventure. The message is this: the 790 Adventure is more off-road orientated than any street-legal bike I have ridden and, depending on your intentions / expectations, you will either be super stoked and desperately disappointed. Let’s start with the disappointments, shall we?

The motor below 4,000 rpm annoys me. Even though it has two counter-balance shafts, below that threshold it feels crankily unbalanced with each powerstroke seeming to want to shake the engine from its moorings. Ok, I am exaggerating but you get the point.  I have ridden lots of parallel twins but none felt as unsettled as this one. The obvious solution is to keep it above 4,000 where everything just seems to fall into place and it begins to snarl. With about the same horsepower as the Africa Twin but 43kg less lard, it’s here you’ll appreciate the glory of power to weigh ratios.

KTM 790 Adventure rider view

The transmission has pissed me off from day one. If I ignore the fact that it ‘feels’ like the factory loaded it up with way too much sand before sending it out the door, getting it into neutral is an ordeal like no bike I have ever ridden, with the exception of some very old BMW airheads. The sales guy rolled his eyes about this complaint saying “it’s a new bike” at which point I grabbed his Canadian head and mashed it into the ground (in my mind). Having rebuilt a transmission or two I knew what was going on in there. Tolerance of the gears on the shaft and/or shifter forks too tight, perhaps? Anyway, I’ll keep an eye on it during the warranty period. Speaking of which, I have already had the front discs replaced under it due to warp. Shit happens.

KTM 790 Adventure with cases

Some additional, less mortally-wounding wind-ups:

-It doesn’t have a centre stand (WTFuck?) and the order I placed for one 5 months ago has yet to be delivered.
– The switch gear, especially coming from beauty of the GS world, is Dollar General / Pound Land quality. In other words, shit. Or at least looks that way.
– The design is particularly adept in funnelling furiously hot air from the exhaust manifold to your inner thighs and manbits necessitating periodic, unbecoming splaying of the legs, outrigger style, to cool off.
– The fuel gauge goes from “we’re good man” to “feed me now!” in the blink of an eye.
– The barkbusters are decorative only (crap) and should be upgraded if you are going anywhere near dirt.
– Obviously, if your grandparents cursed you with the short gene, that’s your (my) problem. But if you ever ride dirt or adventure bikes as a shorty, that is the reality of the geometry of ground clearance.

Ok, I’m done. After all that whinging you probably think I want to drive it back to the factory in Austria and ask for my money back. Nope. Wanna know why? Surprise!..it’s awesome off-road. Fit for purpose, as they say in the design world. It actually took a few hours of riding tractor paths through the chardonnay vineyards of Champagne for this epiphany to shake my buyer’s remorse. When I opened the throttle wide and let the orange madman tear through kilometres of rough gravel and dirt paths, terrain similar to what I have encountered in India, Pakistan, Laos, Cambodia, South Africa, Nepal and elsewhere on our planet, it…felt…perfect. Just like when when flying through the Nevada desert on my 450 EXC, nothing unsettled it. The dirt-oriented big front wheel smoothed out the ruts, the WP suspension polished off the rocks and holes, the ground clearance assured everything hard remained at an arm’s length. It possesses some of the most battle-hardened off-road characteristics of the EXC but it also swallows hundreds of kilometres of autobahn like an Audi A8..or at least an A4. But, and this is a big but, if your true intentions are to never roam far from the tarmac, the GS, Tiger, AT or a bunch of other adventure bikes will likely be a better fit.

I bought this bike for one thing: To use it as a platform to explore new terrain and create new expeditions for our company. And I am not aware of any other bike on the planet more up to the task.

KTM 790 Adventure and Roro

Note: Expensive stuff I purchased to make the bike better, as follows:

– Offroad mudguard, bark busters and centre stand from KTM

– Offroad bashplate and crashbars from Outback Motortech

– Luggage frames and side panniers (Zega Evo X) from Touratech

– Enduro tires (Karoo) from Metzler.

Click for more on the KTM 790 Adventure 

Robb La Velle

Roro La Velle is the founder and Maharaja of Client Experience with Two Wheeled Expeditions. He has ridden around the world twice and laid tracks through over 40 countries on 4 continents. He is also the author of ‘The Places In Between‘, an account of a husband & wife team circumnavigating the world on two wheels