MV Agusta adventure bike concept

NORMALLY student design projects are flights of fantasy with little bearing on reality but this concept bike from IED Turin (Insituto Europeo di Design) has been created with the blessing of MV Agusta and could shed light on the firm's official future plans.

The very fact that the 'Tricruiser' concept, which is basically an MV-styled take on the Multistrada theme, is based on the as-yet-unavailable F3 reveals just how deeply MV Agusta is involved. You don't go handing out prototypes of a new bike to just anyone. And it also fits so neatly with the plans MV has for the future.

As well as the F3 and the Brutale 675, many months ago the firm revealed to its dealers that it was planning a road-going supermoto based on the small triple. This design study could well be seen as a research study into how such a machine could look.

Beyond that, we revealed many months ago that MV has applied for a trademark on the name 'Elephant' to be used on a forthcoming new model. Inevitably, such a model would hark back to the Cagiva Elefant – one of the first entrants in the 'adventure bike' sector that was a tiny niche back at the Elefant's mid-1980s launch but is now the hot marketplace that every manufacture is desperate to take a slice of.

An MV Agusta Elephant (it's 'ph' instead of 'f' on the new trademark, and the old Cagiva brand seems unlikely to be used given MV Agusta's more desirable image) could be just the bike that the firm needs to compete with the likes of Triumph's Tiger 800, adding a dose of Italian, Multistrada-esque style into the mix.