Adventure Bikes and Dual-Sports

Over the last several years, motorcycling seems to be trending away from classic cruisers and moving into some new categories. Two of the most popular are Adventure Bikes (ADV) and smaller Dual-Sports. A third category that's gotten a lot of traction lately are trikes and Can-Am type machines, but they're hot for a different reason (primarily Boomers aging out of two wheels, but fighting the good fight to stay in the lifestyle). Sitting in a Pennsylvania multi-line motorcycle shop this April, I saw zero inventory of new ADVs, Dual-Sports, or trikes, but a showroom full of cruisers that were taken in on trade. The sales people said every crate that arrives on the dock is pre-sold and the phone's ringing off the hook. 

What gives? According the Motorcycle Industry Council, the AMA, and anecdotal evidence, a couple of events converged to truly push ADV and Dual-Sports center-stage: A desire to actually explore the myriad dirt and gravel roads we encounter while touring on our street bikes and COVID-19.

First off, what's a Dual-Sport? What's an Adventure Bike? Like many bikes in a highly segmented market, there's a little something for everyone here. Many great articles have been written on this matter; here and here, among others. Check the links out or search the forums for some exhaustive discussion, and if you're lazy, I'll sum it up in pictures and a few words:

Dual Sport

The Dual-Sport is basically a compromise between a dirt bike and a small street bike. The dirt bike guys will tell you it's inadequate for trails and your street bike buddies will give you flack because you can't keep up. Ignore all of that and feast your eyes on one of the greatest Swiss army knives in cycledom.

Adventure Bikes

To hear their owners tell it, ADV bikes are the greatest machines ever manufactured. With the ability to do extensive touring, the capability to hit the fire roads when you're out in the boonies, and room for gear and lots of power on tap to haul it (including mountain bikes, as shown above at Bikes and Breakfast in Clifton, VA), these bikes really open up the 33% of unpaved roads in America plus trails, Off-Highway Vehicle (OHV) parks, etc. I saw ADVs at our local bike nights for years and wondered if it's like the Jeep crowd with their mix of mall-crawlers and hard-core machines. Then, I met a couple of guys from Europe crushing the desert on a pair of Honda Africa Twins in Moab, Utah, and I started dreaming about off-road riding.

 Which Bike is Right for You?

There's no right answer to this, but like any high-dollar investment, advertising, impulsiveness, and our cadre of enablers (otherwise known as friends and riding buddies) can easily lead you astray. On this front, I strongly recommend test riding across the spectrum and thinking long and hard about what you actually intend to do with this thing. Ask a few questions, such as:

• How close am I to gravel and dirt? Proximity to what you intend to be riding is really critical. If you live in the city or suburbs, you could be hours away from your version of  'the good stuff'. That's a lot of miles on a Dual Sport that's oriented toward dirt, and possibly a compelling argument for an ADV with a 90:10 or 60:40 focus of on-pavement to off-road.
• Am I going to ride on OHV trails? This basically puts you in Dual Sport territory. Unless you have killer riding technique, you need to be ready to pick up your machine when it's on its side, one wheel over a cliff, fuel leaking out the tank, and way off-camber. Ask me how I know. ADV is great on gravel and fire roads, but personally, I'll take nimble and light any day in the really rough stuff.
  
• Will I be commuting? No wrong answer here. A Dual Sport is amazing for threading the needle of rush hour, but an ADV can fit work clothes, a laptop, and can throttle itself out of trouble in ways that a smaller Dual Sport can't. If you have > 20 miles of commute, an ADV may be the wiser choice, but 70 miles per gallon is pretty sweet, too!
  
• Do I know anyone else who rides this type of bike? If you want to go off-roading with your buddies, they need bikes that can go off road! The whole reason I bought a dual-sport is that I kept pushing my street bikes on gravel and felt that I needed to a) accept that I was simply going to lose traction and crash at some point or b) get a bike more appropriate for the type of riding I was doing. I went the latter route.
  
• Is this going to be my only bike? Advantage: ADV. They're way more appropriate for doing just about anything you can throw at them really well. High-wattage alternator for your heated clothes and cell phone charger, powerful enough to comfortably handle highway speeds, with 90:10 tires their handling approaches sportbike territory, and shaft drive can be pretty nice, too. If you're a country mouse and you're just looking for a farm bike, go the dual-sport route.
  
• Am I going to ride two-up often? Hands down, ADV. I took my son to school on my XT250 and the bike was saggy, slow, and every time he shifted his weight we were all over the lane. I've seen families of four riding small dual sports in Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic, but... 'Murica. Your pillion deserves better than a dual-sport.
  
• Will I cry if I drop it? Advantage: Dual Sport. When you sell your DRZ400 with some scratches on the engine case, the new owner won't care a whit. If he or she does, you should immediately direct them to a dealer you can't stand. Adventurous people dig scars, and dual-sports wear them proudly. ADV plastics tend to run closer to the price range of parts on a sportbike, while the body panels of a dual sport are cheap, small, and seem to shrug off anything short of gouges from rocks, and yet they still look good.
  
• Am I really going to go off-road, or do I just love the idea? Advantage: ADV. You can pose at the Starbucks on your Aprilia Caponord knowing you could go out and crush the trail, but you choose not to. In the real apocalypse, I'd want a dual-sport, but in the urban jungle with just a few occasional diversions down a particularly attractive gravel road? Go ADV.
  
• Do I worship at the altar of Valentino Rossi, Robert Pirsig, or both? No wrong answer here- there are some really powerful KTM dual-sports, some pretty plush big-bore BMW adventurers. If you like the slower and more technical, go dual-sport. You want to go over 70 on a regular basis, 100%, ADV.
  
• How much do I hate paying for maintenance? Shaft drive is low maintenance, but heavy. A single cylinder, air cooled engine can have its valves adjusted in under an hour. Can you do the maintenance yourself? With an eighty dollar maintenance stand, you can literally do every bit of dual-sport maintenance yourself, including tire changes and valve adjustments. An ADV will have longer maintenance intervals, but if you're whaling on your bike off-road, you're going to be replacing air filters and tires fairly often, and that stuff adds up over time.
  

In Conclusion...

After a few months of owning a Dual Sport, I've learned a few things that would definitely impact my decision to purchase had I thought about it more deeply when I pulled the trigger:

• Most of my friends ride street bikes, so I'm usually solo when I go on my gravel adventures. In my head, it was 3 other friends and me taking in an epic vista off-pavement. In the real world, not so much (yet).
  
• I was looking at buying new- I'm SO glad I didn't. I've already had a couple of incidents off-road that would have made me cry if I had a brand new bike, and I know there will be others. The only question I have is whether it was properly broken in, but I'll never know the answer to that- all I can do is maintain it perfectly during my tenure.
  
• These bikes are capable of highway speeds, but man, it's no picnic. I love riding so much that I enjoy the challenge (and the bike's limitations), but the <250cc mantra of never lift the throttle gets old after a few hours on the highway at WOT and getting whipped all over the place with 'knobby wobble' and truck gusts. On my other bikes I'm a 150-180 mile rider, but on the XT it's about 90 miles, tops.
  
• I'm a few weeks away from 49 years old. I was extremely proud of my ability to maneuver single-track, mudholes, and rock gardens like I did when I was 17, but I was sore from my quads to my shoulders after pounding trails for a day. How many years of this do I have left in me? Now I see why the ADV guys just stay (and fly) on the gravel.
• I'm too far away from the good OHV parks. I'm close enough to local gravel roads to get my share of solitude, amazing sunrises, and the paths less traveled, but I really want to hit the fire roads, OHV parks, and great terrain that Virginia and its surrounding states offer. I wanted to just jump on my bike and get to these places, but in retrospect, a true dirtbike and a small trailer might be a better option.

At the end of the day, I couldn't be happier with my decision to go dual-sport over ADV, but maybe there's room for both? I'd better unload the Dyna before they all get traded in on adventure bikes!