How Reliable are KTM Adventure Bikes? Because I Want A KTM 1290 Super Adventure R

Hi, it's Francois from AdventureBikeTroop.com. I want to chat about KTM reliability

Are the 1290 and 1190 adventures reliable? Because it seems like many people are asking the same thing

Ever since I rode a 950S in the desert, I've been in love with KTMs, but for some reason, I've just been concerned

and I wonder where this comes from. Okay, well, thank you for your time

Thank you. Bye-bye. They think that we might fail. And then we'll do it in BMW

and so what a f***ing big f***ing mistake. What a f***ing business

Fail. How dare they say. Now in order to find out whether they really are that unreliable, I did some research and

this is what I found. Now you can check out the full post at adventurebiketroop.com slash reliable KTM

So first I had a look at Consumer Reports So they do surveys of thousands of bike owners and then rank the bikes according to how many problems they get Now obviously it was no surprise that the Japanese were the top four spots with Yamaha being right at the top

And I can attest to the reliability of Yamaha's. This little MR50 from 76 has been standing in the rain for three years and yesterday just kick-started it and it just fired up

There's no way to kill a Yamaha. So where did KTM rank on this Consumer Report survey

Well, they were 8th overall. So if you eliminate the obvious four Japanese

that means they were still 4th of the bikes that aren't Japanese bulletproof

So 8 doesn't seem... I mean, 8's very far from number 1

but then I compared it to BMW that was all the way down in 13th place and for

some reason people aren't that concerned with BMWs as with KTM so how bad can

they really be now obviously I know there's a lot of caveats with consumer

reports it's a survey it's not a study but at least it has to say something the

fact that KTM is five places above BMW that is the round bike then number two I had a look at how many people actually ride their KTM around the world or across continents and there quite a lot of them

you'll see it in my post I have links to some blogs of people riding KTM's and one great example

being around the world Paul you can check out his website and he's done it many times and

his current bike is a KTM 500 EXC and we also on our trip through Africa

followed Fanny and Rupert on their 990 adventure or 990 adventure Oz

we were a couple of months behind them so we never actually met them but we

followed their blog as we wrote the same route behind them and and he said after

four years riding his 990. Gee, he hasn't had any problems at all. It's like a new bike

So that has to count for something. Then what about the Dakar Rally? So the Dakar Rally is

thousands of miles in the desert, 100 degree plus temperatures. It's the ultimate test of

reliability. The bikes need to last in order to do well. So how did KTM fare in the Dakar

so I actually didn know this because I haven followed it closely in the last couple of years but since 2001 they won it 18 times in a row only being dethroned in 2020 by Honda so yeah they do make reliable bikes now

I obviously obviously know it's it's their race bikes it's not the production bikes and but you

can't win the Dakar 18 times without learning something about reliability and then not having

some of it filtered down to the production bikes so again it has to count for something now looking

at all of this together i'm not that worried anymore so maybe a ktm is on the cards in the

future you'll have to decide for yourself and i know chinese bikes has the same or actually much

worse reputation for being unreliable and falling apart and i know from experience having ridden one

for 3 months, 9600 miles through Africa without any problems, that you can do almost anything

on any bike if you look after it. So check out my post at adventurebiketroop.com slash reliable KTM, so that's adventurebiketroop.com

slash reliable KTM, and post in the comments if you have any problems with your KTM or if

you feel like it's done you a good service over the years

Cheers guys