Without BMW’s original GS there may never have been adventure bikes as we know them today. Sure, there were large dual sport or multipurpose bikes that preceded the R 80 G/S, but that was the motorcycle that most credit for creating what we now know as the ADV category. As has been the case since the original R 1150...

Royal Enfield is the oldest, continuously manufacturing motorcycle company, having debuted its first bike in 1901. Over the last 123 years, the company hasn’t made its mark or gained popularity by racing at the highest level in the last half century. Royal Enfield doesn’t have any MotoGP championships, World Superbike championships, or major motocross championships. No, Royal Enfield took...

At face value, it appears Ducati has only mildly tweaked its Multistrada V4 S for 2025, which is why we arrived in Perugia, Italy, a few hours north of Rome, expecting a couple of easy few days on the classy adventure-tourer. However, it quickly became apparent that despite only mildly updating the Multi’s familiar looks, beneath the bodywork lies...

Shakespeare references aren’t the first thing that typically come to mind when thinking about a motorcycle, but after a few weeks aboard the 2025 101 Scout, it’s hard not to consider Romeo and Juliet’s famous “What’s in a name?” question. If a rose, by any other name, smells just as sweet, then wouldn’t the 101 Scout, by any other...

I’m following a Toyota hatchback at Bosch’s Shiobara, Japan, proving ground with the adaptive cruise control set. My prototype Automatic Manual Transmission (AMT) equipped 2025 KTM Super Adventure S follows at a safe distance adjusting speed as the driver speeds up and slows down. This is nothing new; radar-based adaptive cruise control made it to production on the 2021...

What makes a great adventure bike? Well, that’s about as loaded a question as there is in motorcycling. The class is so complex these days that there is literally a bike for every type of riding and rider. But there are a bunch of bikes that can just about do it all—ones that walk down the middle of the...

When I started being intentional about upping my off-road adventure riding ability, I realized I had a lot of mental baggage about dropping the bike. It wasn’t just that I was afraid of damaging the motorcycle, it was more that I thought that falling over meant I wasn’t any good. After dropping motorcycles like it’s my job (well, I...

BMW practically invented the ADV class back in 1981. In German, “GS” stands for Gelände/Straße which loosely translates to terrain/street in English. More than 40 decades later, BMW’s philosophy of the GS remains the same: Produce a motorcycle capable of tackling any terrain over any amount of miles. The R 1300 GS does that better than any other BMW we...

Pierer Mobility has offered class-leading performance, adjustability, and technical features in the lightweight category for years with the KTM RC 390—a 2022 Cycle World Ten Best winner—and 390 Duke. Meanwhile its Husqvarna Vitpilen 401 and Svartpilen 401 counterparts have fallen behind since their inception in 2018. But after years of being static, Husqvarna offers an all-new Svartpilen 401 and...

Racebikes are just different.Everything they do is informed by leanness and purpose, and the best ones exude the thought, development, and preparation that went into them.Like this 1972 BMW R 75/5 built in the spirit of the early Butler Smith 750cc superbikes constructed at the dawn of the class. Everybody knows the R 90 S of Reg Pridmore, but...

Here’s something to ponder: Would Tesla be today’s leading EV manufacturer if it waited for major automakers to popularize electric cars before investing in the category? What if Honda, Toyota, Ford, BMW, or any other large-scale manufacturer had gone all-in earlier, taking early EV adopters with them? Would we still see throngs of Teslas at every red light, or...

The 2025 Ducati Panigale V4 is the most forward-looking mass-production superbike of the modern sportbike era, but I can’t help but look to past versions as I throw a leg over the new bike. The last Panigale V4 I rode was a 2023 V4 SP2 during Cycle World’s superbike shootout. It was stunning, fast, and had an obvious electronic...

BMW’s decade-old R nineT has been upgraded heavily for 2024, but instead of leaving it’s quirky name alone, those crazy kids in Berlin just slapped a “12″ smack in the middle of the model’s name: R 12 nineT. The “nineT” moniker was to celebrate the 90th anniversary of BMW’s motorcycle production when the model was first introduced in 2014....

The automatic transmission has been around since the 1940s, and while the vast majority of automobiles are now equipped with one, motorcycles largely retain manual gearboxes. We are in an era where most new drivers have never operated a car with a manual transmission, so the concept of using the clutch and shifting a “standard transmission” on a motorcycle...

Like most motorcyclists, I have a bucket list of two-wheeled pilgrimages: the Italian Grand Prix at Mugello, the TT fortnight at the Isle of Man, the North West 200, the Barber Vintage Festival, to name a few. Holy places all. But not every holy place in the motorcycle world is my kind of place. The first to come to...