K TM 390 ADVENTURE PROTOT YPE
R I D E R E V I E W
P76
S
ince production began
back in 2011 of KTM's
125/200 Dukes, followed
soon after by the 390 Duke,
and then by their various RC
sportbike siblings, no less than
515,000 KTMs have been built at
its Bajaj partner's factory in India.
According to company Presi-
dent/CEO Stefan Pierer, volume
has gradually built throughout
the current decade, until in 2018
alone, over 100,000 such bikes
left the Pune production lines,
around half of them for two of
the top three bike markets glob-
ally, India and Indonesia.
The rest went to countries all
over the world from Austria to
Australia, and from Ukraine to
the USA, where over 20 percent
of KTM's total 2018 production
of 261,454 bikes headed, split
between its eponymous brand
and Husqvarna.
None of those Indian-built
KTMs, however, were directly
descended from the kind of dual
purpose on/off-road bikes that
have made the Austrian manu-
facturer so successful in the
marketplace since introducing
its first 620 Adventure multi-pur-
pose single back in 1996. That's
an absence widely attributed to
Bajaj boss Rajiv Bajaj's lack of
conviction that any real demand
existed for such machines in
his company's massive home
market—the largest in the world
for combustion-engined motor-
cycles.
One of the most talked about motorcycles of EICMA 2019 isn't
yet available for a test. But that didn't stop Alan Cathcart from
getting a spin on the prototype KTM 390 Adventure
ACCESSIBLE
ADVENTURE
BY ALAN CATHCART I PHOTOGRAPHY BY HEIKO MAND
