Adventure bike tyres have a hard brief to fill: they must offer grip on two completely different surfaces, while resisting wear on the blacktop sufficiently to give good life. Has Metzeler got the balance right with the Karoo 4?

Is The Metzeler Karoo 4 The Best Adventure Tyre?

Designing an adventure tyre can be a thankless task. It needs to have two completely disparate qualities, neither of which are complimentary.

Firstly, being an adventure tyre, it needs to perform on a wide variety of off-road surfaces, from loose shale, to mud, to grass, to sand, to, well, anything you can think of. it also needs to be tough enough to resist punctures and getting chewed up excessively.

However, being a tyre for an adventure bike, which are designed to get you to the wild trail along ordinary roads, they also have to perform well on tar surfaces. Not only that, but as long running on tar plays more havoc with a tyre than riding off-road, it needs to be able to last as long as possible and longevity means tough and hard, which is the enemy of grip.

The blocky tread pattern of off-road tyres is most definitely not suitable for road tyres: it generates a lot of heat and vibration and, if you ride with a heavy throttle hand, the blocks can rip and tear off, which is no good when you get to the soft stuff. Also, wet weather performance can be a little sketchy.

For a long time, the Metzeler Karoo tyre has been one of the best-selling adventure tyres. Now, the Karoo 4 has been released and, as you would expect, it's better than ever.

As always, the new tyre is designed to give the best compromise between road- and off-road performance, longevity and grip. Another factor is the increasing sophistication of motorcycle rider aid electronics. Surprisingly, these can have an effect on tyre performance off-road and vice versa. The Karoo 4 has been designed to work in conjunction with these electronics to get the best out of both the electronics and the tyre.

Perhaps rather obviously, Metzeler says the Karoo 4 is ideal for “riders who use their motorcycles for journeys 50% on-road and 50% off-road,” and who “want to test their skills and their bike’s capabilities.” Isn't that everyone who rides an adventure bike as it's been designed to be ridden?

As would be expected, a lot of the work going in to making the Karoo 4 better than the Karoo 3 has gone into the tread design. It features a “revolutionary patented tread design,” according to Metzeler, designed to optimise performance both on- and off-road and maintain safety in wet conditions.

Metzeler says the tread blocks “are repeated with an irregular cadence to mitigate the impact of the tread against the asphalt and improve rolling smoothness." The number of tread blocks in the contact patch has been increased for the Karoo 4 compared to the 3.

Also, Metzeler’s Dymatec technology “preserve the functional geometries of the knobs and the tyre performance over time. In detail, this technology features variable groove wall angles depending on their position along the tread band to maximise tread pattern solidity and wear uniformity.” What that means, in layman's English, is that the tread should wear less on asphalt, meaning it will behave as you expect it to on dirt.

The front Karoo 4 is made from one compound of rubber giving excellent abrasion resistance. The rear Karoo 4 is dual compound, with the harder compound as used in the front tyre, in the centre band and a slightly softer compound on the shoulders of the tyre for better asphalt cornering grip.

The Karoo 4 is available in three 19-inch and one 21-inch variations and four 17-inch and two 18-inch rear variations so there will be a tyre combination for every adventure bike out there.