Kawasaki appears ready to reveal KLE 500 adventure bike
After seemingly being derailed last year, it appears a new legitimate adventure motorcycle is coming from Kawasaki.
A year after teasing us with little more than a tyre, it appears Kawasaki is finally ready to pull the cover off the adventure machine it was promising at last year’s Motorcycle Live.
That’s the assumption, anyway, based on a new video that’s popped up on the Kawasaki Motors YouTube page. The video, titled “Life’s a rally. Ride it.” features long shots of a dual-sport/adventure motorcycle being ridden hard on a mountainous dirt track.
“Where the pavement ends…the rally begins,” states the video’s description. “Est. 1991. Coming Soon.”
Some of this same messaging was to be seen on display at Kawasaki’s stand at Motorcycle Live and EICMA last year, which featured an offroad tyre on a spoked wheel (with a single brake disc) bursting out of a box, and the words “Life’s a rally,” and “KLE.”
Last year, we mistakenly suggested the bike would be called the KLE 650, conveniently forgetting that the KLE 650 already exists - that is the model code for the Versys 650.
The Versys 650 is a great all-rounder but it’s not exactly a dirt-eating adventure bike. Whereas the daddy of the dual-sports, the single-cylinder KLR 650, hasn’t been available in the UK market for more than two decades.
As such, there’s been a major gap in Kawasaki’s European/UK line-up when it comes to a motorcycle that can legitimately keep going when the pavement ends.
The bike that most industry watchers are now predicting we’ll see is a new KLE 500, a model that was originally launched in… wait for it … 1991.
The original KLE 500 was driven by a 498cc parallel twin engine producing 43 bhp and 30.2 lb-ft of torque. It was dropped in 2007 and replaced by the far more road-focused Versys 650.
We’d put our money on the new KLE 500 being powered by the same 451cc parallel twin that’s used in the Eliminator 500 cruiser and Ninja 500. In both cases, the engine promises an A2-friendly 45 bhp and 31.4 lb-ft of torque.
If we had to hazard a guess, it will be called the Rally 500 or some derivation thereof. Kawasaki doesn’t usually throw curve balls in its marketing. If it uses the same word over and over for more than a year, there’s probably a reason.
As to the reason it’s - so far - taken a full year for this bike to be revealed? We’re not sure. If things are back on track, though, we’d expect to see it fully breaking cover at EICMA, in about five weeks.
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Chris Cope is a fourth-generation journalist, originally from Texas. He has lived in the UK for roughly two decades and has been writing about motorcycles for most of that time. He has written for dozens of publications and websites in the UK, US, Canada, and Australia.
