I figured I should go sit on some BMW bikes since they are the iconic adventure touring bikes so I zipped over to our local BMW dealer. The sales guy and I talked for a bit about the stats the bike had and then he asks if I want to ride the Demo F 800 ... DUH!
Today I showed up, signed my life away and took it for a spin.
my thoughts went as follows: The seat is really high and Im 6ft. The standard seat is flat like a glorified dirtbike seat so you kinda end up sitting all over the place. I sat on the "low" seat and it felt better. they also had a "comfort" seat which was curved and looked even better yet. The gears are really tight which is OK, just different than im used to. Its standard shift and with no shift linkage there is basically no good way to make it GP shift like my street bike. it handles well at low speed because of its wide handle bars and wide steering range. The low tight gears help when putting around sharp 180 bends and it was orange!
Since I am planning on riding a bike to Alaska I needed to test it out on some gravel roads. It felt stable and its suspension didnt feel jittery or sloppy. The bars were raised enough so that it was totally natural to ride standing up. when I hammered the throttle it slid predictably and in a way that was totally controllable.
I had been told that ABS sucks off road but I didnt realize just how worthless it really is. I mashed the rear brake to see what would happen and my foot just got kicked right back up by the ABS which decided that i didnt really mean to apply so much brake. The brakes front and rear basically did nothing when applied off road. I turned the ABS off it felt much better.
Final thoughts on the BMW. its a cool bike but its not 13,000+ dollars worth of cool bike.
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