Japanese ought to be ashamed!!

so according to the doofonian theory postulated a few posts earlier, the Japanese bikes being priced so close to the euro's means, if you wait a few months they will all be heavily discounted in order to dump them as the doofus buying public wont stand for expensively priced Japanese bikes based on the perception they should be cheap cos they're Japanese?

I don't give a shit what country a bike is made in. I buy what is best for me.

That USED to be a jap bike. For the last 10 years it has been Austria.

It may China in a few years.

My KTMs have been WAY more reliable than ANY jap bike i owned.

Possibly...

But I am talking about Australians, so your results may vary.

Hey, maybe Polaris should buy the rights to the Hodaka brand and do with it something parallel to what it's doing with Indian. ;-)

Meanwhile, rather than wait, I'm expecting to soon replace my 2012 DR650 with either a 500 EXC or 690 Enduro. Ever since acquiring my 990 SMT (3 months and 7,000 miles ago), my quality judgement has been...well, recalibrated.

JET

If I had my way, what we'd soon be seeing is a 500 version of the Freeride, made street legal in the same manner as the 500 EXC.

The dirty little "secret" is--outside of closed-circuit triple jumps and all-out berm racing--most any mere mortal weekend off-roader could actually ride better (I dare say even faster in the claustrophobic twisting hilly woods here east of the Mississippi) on a modern trials bike than on any standard-fare enduro, MX, or dualsport bike. And they'd have all the longevity, ruggedness, and easy-maintenance rock-like reliability which most equate with Japanese brands, but which the entire trials community has enjoyed for decades from Gas Gas, Sherco, Beta, (Honda owned) Montessa, (Yamaha engined) Scorpa, et al.

But the eternal frustration is trials bikes just don't garner as much popularity in the US as they should. I'm convinced it's a rock-star-ego/marketing-neglect phenomenon. Too much unrealistic focus on white knuckle racing by non-racers.

And once again, KTM steps up as the first seriously effective innovator here. The Freerides are not perceived so much the "wimpy girly old guy bike" as have been prior half-hearted attempts at trials-inspired dualsports (Kawasaki Super Sherpa 250 being one example.)

So make it minimally street legal so it doesn't have to be trailered, base it on an appropriately-tuned 500 engine to give it enough road-worthiness to get to the riding spots (and to deliver the exhilarating wall-climbing grunt of a Gas Gas 321), and give it the trials-inspired geometry of the other Freerides.

I'll be first in line to buy it, and (hopefully) the US dirt bike press will loose its narrowly-focused blinders and at long last add some long-needed breadth to the serious off-road market.

JET

I do find it interesting why some of the Japanese manufacturers don't sell varied dual sports in the US these days. I kinda figure it has something to do with region-based interest in certain styles of riding. Think back to the late 80s and early 90s, with Honda's NX650 and Transalp. If they weren't big enough sellers, Honda would likely have dropped the sales in this market. If it doesn't sell like hotcakes, maybe best not to sell to that area? In America, the only real large-bore dual sport you can buy from Honda new is the xr650L. And if you want lots of range or a fairing, you gotta pony up more cash.

I'm sure all the reasons are based on simple economics.

As for the discussion of reliability, my personal belief is that reliability is a state of maintenance. Moving parts fail. Chain and sprockets wear. Seals leak. Springs lose tension. Wires corrode. All of this can be attributed to personal maintenance.
You should be looking over your bike before every ride. Period. That's just intelligent riding. You should do preventative maintenance at regular intervals based on how you ride and where you ride.

Yes, I have had problems which each of my KTMs. All of those problems were maintenance related. I failed my bike; my bike didn't fail me. Only issue that wasn't maintenance related (and actually was already present when I purchased the bike) was my 06 950 having a Rekluse clutch issue with a broken plate that I later figured out was common in that early kit.

Every other time it has been me being careless. I think most modern machine are just as "reliable" as anything else engine wise. Keep in mind that your own performance modifications and jetting and all that good stuff will affect engine "reliability".

I get what your saying kind of, but a 500cc road trials trail bike seems a contradiction in terms and besides, trailering a trials bike is a small price to pay for their handling awesomeness on the challenging/fun trails.

The 250freeride is road legal here in NZ and by all accounts is a near perfect trail /trial crossover bike (as long as the factory recall on the bendix has been done). Almost pulled the trigger on one myself but keep leaning toward a 500exc an keep my 250 Rev3 Beta for hardcore exploring. Fact is....KTM make too many cool bikes which you cant say about many other manufactures at present.....especially Japanese ones

sorry, but i'm calling interweb bullshit on that one....

saw a stadium super enduro race on the internet once.... whatta ya' call those?...(sorry, too many gin and tonics.....)

they had some trials bikes in it... so long as it was in the rocks and log jumps, they did fine... on the open parts, they got smoked....

i dunno how you do hard, flat track styled turns on one when you can't sit down over the front wheel?.....

if they worked, you'd see em' in GNCC....

they do crazy shit great, but they don't go that fast.....

YMMV....

yup, agree 100% Dave.....you have had too many G n T's

the point of a trials or trial/trail crossover bike isn't speed its more slower technical riding so not unsurprisingly they get smoked on the track.

Perhaps the market for them is way smaller than KTM & Ossa's imagined when they invested in the Freeride and Explorer - For those too old and/or broken to go fast, they seem like a great idea.

99.5KG/219.35Lbs 350 4 stroke w/E-start from Austria.

No competition in sight.

http://www.ktm.com/freeride.html

That's a really interesting idea. The only fly in the ointment is Hodaka's glory days all involved 90 and 100cc engines. By the time the Thunderdog 250 came out, Hodaka was already dead. There doesn't seem much market for six cubic-inch engines today, when a WR250R is disdained as a slow boring beginner's bike.

Come on up and let's go for a ride in the forest this spring! PM me …

Be there in October if the S500 is run again. I rode one with a guy on an XR650L a few years ago. He did OK in the slick stuff and loose rock.

a xr 650 l is more then capable of anything off road. you are just a little more tired at the end of the ride. i rode the s500 two times on a 650l. its the perfect bike for that ride.

what i would like to see is a e start xr 400 with better suspension.

I will say one thing for the inimitable XR650L, KTM should hire the person who designed the seat. Probably the best stock seat I ever parked my ass on.

KTM's seat designer should be made to sit on one for 48hrs

Amen to that. I don't know what those Austrians are thinking when it comes to seats, like it's some sort of decoration or something, never to be sat on.

The Husky seats aren't far behind.

It's not that hard to make comfortable seats. Companies like Seat Concepts and Reznaco seem to make good ones without all that much effort.

I had a typical Austrian brick of a seat on my '95 KTM 300. I ended up swapping in some foam and a cover from Malcolm Smith and it became one of the most comfy dirt bike seats I've had. It was that easy, why can't somebody introduce decent foam to KTM?

I'd buy that.

who cares what allegiance do we have with the japs?