Although the Austrians from KTM have tried to keep a low profile in what their all-new Freeride electric motorcycles are concerned, German magazine Das Motorrad published the first leaked pictures of the much-awaited KTMs. Damn, why can’t we feel sorry about this?
Expected to retail for approximately $13,500 (or just under €10,000), both bikes rely on 30bhp and 33lb/ft of torque while weighing in at 198.4lbs. Hmm, that cannot be impressive. At least the 2.5kWh lithium-ion battery pack is capable to keep the good stuff coming for around 1.5-hours.
One a supermoto and the other an enduro, both bikes feature what appears to be a tubular steel frame.
This pretty much blows KTM’s element of surprise, but at least we can see the Austrian company entering confidently into a totally new segment mainly dominated by Zero Motorcycles in the United States.
New kinds of motorcycles are born when different makers think at combining this and that to achieve what they believe the market asks for and when it comes to downhill riders, we usually don’t expect to hear an engine roar, but we’ve come to find that someone did thought at using the power from a 125cc four-stroke single on a light bike – 125.6 lbs (57 kg) – in order to get across high ground with greater ease. The bike is called FX Mountain Moto and it is the only engined downhill two-wheeler that we know about.
Light and nimble as a mountain bike and enough powerful to put it up against your everyday dirt bike, the FX Mountain Moto is a very successful combination coming from New Zeeland. In fact, this thing is claimed being the world’s lightest adult-sized dirt bike. Does that motivate you to pay $5,040 (€3,700) for it?
Yamaha Supercross rider James “Bubba” Steward will have his own show called Bubba’s World on FELD Motor Sports and we just came across the recently released trailer indicating March 28th as the date of the premiere. We wish Steward good luck and plenty of fun with his TV career, but we can’t see him giving the sound of a cheering crowd over big audience figures any time soon.
Kawasaki has created the KX85 for riders who aim at improving their skills in or out of designated competitions and it also achieved the best bang for the buck in this class. It intends on keeping things this way for 2010, so it carries on producing the entry-level dirt bike, which is also the one reviewed by us today.
The Kawasaki KX85 Monster Energy remains a 2009 model year, but still brings a fresh feel among all that green. Still affordable, but definitely a change, the Monster Energy offers nothing different but color. See it yourself!
As you may already know, Travis Pastrana – the kind of guy that backflips a shoe bike, jumps his motorcycle over a hovering helicopter, backflips from one building to another etc for a living – has actually pulled off his latest stunt behind the wheel of his Subaru WRX STI rally car on new year’s eve. The stunt consisted in the daredevil jumping off a ramp mounted on a boat and onto a barge-mounted landing ramp. In between those: over 250 feet of water.
What you most likely don’t know is the extensive training required to pull off such a stunt and we’ve come to find that Pastrana practiced with both a car and motorcycle for this specific world-record-setting jump and even crashed the racing Subaru car after misjudging the speed required to land smoothly over the hump of the…whatever, just watch the behind-the-scenes video that Red Bull only recently made public.
