Almost 34 years after the spawning of its first unloved KLE500 was born, almost 20 years after it finally disappeared from showroom floors, the Kawasaki KLE500 has finally returned and some of you will have seen my brief and less than flattering remarks about the promo video on the community page.
Last year after the teaser we got at EICMA I followed up with the video “NEW Kawasaki KLE500 – FIRST GLIMPSE “ and I like many others had hoped that Kawasaki would deliver the goods this time on what was always seen as a bit of a dull bike in its day.
Now here I can talk with some authority as I was a KLE500 owner, and I have to say although I think it was misunderstood in many ways, I always thought the KLE was a very underrated bike and I had some thoroughly great times on mine.
It wasn’t a dirt bike, but it was a better all-rounder than the sacred cow they kept serving up as the various KLR650’s.
What it was, was a far better road bike than the KLR and a far more dirt focussed package than most of the then fairly rare “Adventure Bikes” of the day.
Roll forward over 30 years and I was waiting with bated breath to see what Kawasaki had done to make this bike a better all round package than its unloved predecessors.
All we had was a disembodied 21” front wheel and a tagline at EICMA last year, but the line “Life’s A Rally, Ride It” was a promising start.
Well if “Life’s A Rally, I can think of many new bikes I would choose to Ride It than the new KLE500, I wasn’t impressed and it is an example of simple bad design for me, but here I am going to look at some things we now know and what we can expect.
But I also want to try and make a point with this, a video that is being born into a world on youtube where just a day after the initial marketing video was published, endless lists of video’s and slideshows were uploaded on the back of the KLE’s launch.
These weren’t well made, well prepared or well researched, had little detail because we still haven’t, and were in all honesty all a little bit pointless. But youtube doesn’t care, it just wants more content, even if that is empty pointless content.
Most of the videos were just cut and paste AI creations thrown together automatically from a limited number of Promo pictures and a few of them will have done very nicely for the channels concerned.
But so little information had been released that there really wasn’t much to say and there still isn’t.
Yet Youtube is flooded and any one person, however interested, can only watch so many KLE500 video’s.
That means all the views are watered down to a point where even if you tick all of youtubes boxes, or are one of the big channels run by a team of producers, you will unlikely get to 100,000 views, so any advertising revenue is minimal.
But I digress, just try and remember to like the video and subscribe to the channel. Do go and go and see what we are doing in the KOFI group too, you won’t be disappointed.
But back to the new KLE500.
We do get that 21 inch front wheel that was sticking out of a large wooden box at EICMA last year, but what else will we get?
Where will the New Kawasaki sit in the market, and how good will it really be?
For those of you with no attention span in short, its boring, is a 450 not a 500, has a trellis frame but is still too heavy, its got KYB forks but they are the cheapest unadjustable ones just for the KYB logo. It’s got a Uni-Trak rear suspension they are calling new even though it wasn’t even new 35 years ago, but you do get a dedicated Kawasaki app for your phone, so your phone and motorcycle can talk to each other even when they aren’t talking to you.
It goes on, Kawasaki tell you that you get an adjustable “Rally Style” windscreen. Well come on then Kawasaki, where are all these Rally bikes with adjustable windscreens you copied the style from?
Don’t worry about that they say, because you get Rally Inspired styling too with a tall front cowl?
Oh I nearly forgot, there’s the all new Rally Inspired Graphics pack too.
You’ll notice that a lot on this bike, its got Rally Inspired pretty much everything. Even though it has absolutely no real resemblance to any real Rally bike.
It was obviously just the AI marketing departments statement of the day when they wrote the marketing statement.
The two figures that should accompany every new bike launch are always the same, people want to know the power, and the weight, after that, then maybe they will start asking about the price, but in this case that was a very short conversation, because we got no power figures and no weight, just the price. Which in the States will be $6,599 for the standard model and $7,499 on the Special Edition version.
UK prices haven’t been announced officially yet, but are expected to be around £6,800 for the standard model and approximately £7,700 for the SE version.
For that there are 2 questions that come up immediately for me. Does it do anything better than all of the opposition, and is the complete package just better.
We won’t know for sure for a while yet, but I think you will get an idea from some of the observations I make.
Kawasaki even went to the trouble of preparing a slide with a graph of the power and torque curves, but they neglected to include any numbers or scales on the graph.
The first thing I noticed in the launch video as you saw in my post, and yes I admit it is a pet hate of mine, was the exhaust.
In Kawasaki’s words, “Getting rid of spent exhaust gases is an upswept exhaust cannister” which Kawasaki says “Improves off-road performance and maintains maximum lean angle”.
This is where I am starting to loose the plot when it comes to my bullshit detector going off. For a start, if that is what Kawasaki consider an upswept exhaust, then there really is no hope left.
Its a low slung unprotected piece of design atrocity that should never have been put anywhere near an adventure bike in my humble opinion.
Internal volume of the whole silencer is so small that there will be none of the lower frequency notes we all love to hear and it will probably sound more like a rattle can if my years of experience is anything to go by.
It will certainly make a clatter or two as it slides down the road on its side gradually grating through the first thing that will make contact with the ground on whatever surface you are riding.
We recently saw the Brixton Crossfire from what is a pretty inexperienced company, and its exhaust was carefully routed around and upwards so that almost its entire length was kept inside the frame and subframe to minimise any chance of damaging it in a roll over.
But Kawasaki chose the cheapest and easiest option possible with no thought about the actual use the bike was supposedly intended for. It looks like they just took the silencer straight off the Ninja 400 except that if anything the Ninja 400’s exhaust is swept up more than the KLE500’s.
As to Improving off-road performance and maintaining maximum lean angle. There are 2 problems there. The first, nothing about the exhaust will improve performance on or off road, it could equally well have been designed to run higher with no detrimental effect. Secondly, even with the design as it is, the first metal to contact the road will still be that damned silencer.
So it neither improves off road performance or improves maximum lean angle over what could and should have been a longer internally mounted exhaust system with a big fat silencer to kill the high frequency notes of the exhaust which do often get a bit annoying on smaller capacity twins.
They go on to say that heat management has received careful attention, and we have included a unique radiator fan cover that redirects hot air away from the rider and critical contact areas like the frame, tank, and side covers, to keep the rider comfortable even in heavy traffic or during long days on the trail.
What I want to know, is if the heat is being directed away from the rider, side panels, frame and tank, where is it going? Either back towards the engine or out of the front so it can circulate back into the air box maybe?
You can tell I’m sure I was already giving up.
Then we got the bumf that the new KLE500 is built with a high tensile steel trellis frame and Kawasaki say they purposely stayed away from using motocross geometry and concentrated on a geometry that offers versatility and comfort across diverse conditions.
Well seeing as its an adventure bike not a motocross bike that would seem quite a basic decision really, and the frame looks quite nice underneath. You just can’t see it because they covered it up with all the unnecessary plastic.
What they mean, is instead of designing a new frame we just squashed up the one from the Ninja 400 and braced it up a bit.
They say the bike’s frame weighs in at 41.8 pounds, which is just 19kg, but is that weight without the steel subframe? It certainly doesn’t include the weight of the tangled mess of tubes around the front and sides of the engine.
It does have an aluminium swingarm though which is good, but is connecting the swingarm directly to the engine on an adventure bike built to tour and ride off road a good idea?
I guess we will have to wait and see there.
So anyway, they got the weight up somehow. So either the engine is built from lead or they have lined all that plastic bodywork with steel to make sure it stays within A2 licence regulation limits. Either that or the engine is only going to produce around 40hp stock.
Kawasaki say that the trellis frame provides both light handling and rugged capability, with the engine acting as a stressed member and rotated forward to lower the bike’s center of gravity.
Then I saw the pictures and as you can see, although the engine is a stressed member within the chassis, they have run a network of extra tubing around the front and side of the engine just to keep that power to weight ratio inside the regulations.
For those that carry luggage, the KLE500 uses a rigid rear frame that supports two panniers and a top case simultaneously. No weight capacity was provided, so you might not be able to put anything in the panniers, but you will still have paid for them so Kawasaki don’t mind.
Because they didn’t want the hassle of building a whole new frame that was purpose built, it means to mount a skid-plate, a whole front subframe had to be built to support the skid plate, but I guess I shouldn’t complain too much because unlike some, they didnt just bolt it to the engine casings.
Unfortunately, it did end up weighing more than a twin cradle frame would have weighed in the first place, and the exhaust is sandwiched very nicely between the skid plate and the bottom half of the crank case.
To add some luxury you also get an aluminium triple clamp with a rubber damped handlebar holder to reduce vibration too, so don’t you dare complain.
Next we come to a basic bit of maths that has been picked on by a fair few people already.
And let us start with the basics.
The ground clearance is 6.8 inches, yes thats right, just 6.8 inches. With I would guess at least an inch to 30mm of sag, that comes down to under 6 inches.
Front suspension has just over 8 and a quarter inches of travel, and rear shock has 7.8 inches of travel. Average that out and you could in theory get around 8 inches of travel at the seat, and sump.
One thing is for sure, it equates to more than 6.8 inches of travel at the sump as you can so plainly see from the kind marketing video that shows how easily it will be to land the sump plate on a piece of plain open dirt never mind if it happens to run over a decent sized rock.
Take sag out completely and 6.8 inches minus 7.8 inches if the rear bottoms out and you are already almost a whole inch into the dirt with that bash plate.
It might honestly be the first bike I have ever seen that is designed to bottom out before the suspension travel is all used up.
Brakes look adequate with a single 300mm disc up front and to give them credit Kawasaki have put a dedicated ABS off switch onto the bars. Sadly, it will automatically reset to its default fully enabled mode if you should so much as dare to switch the bike off and then restart it again.
Steel spoked aluminium rimmed 21-inch front and 17-inch rear wheels are not tubeless, so I guess Kawasaki didn’t get that memo either.
Then we come to the dash.
The KLE500 standard model’s display is a high-contrast LCD instrument panel designed for clear visibility and intuitive operation, with a prominent bar-style tacho that arcs over a digital speedometer and other display information.
You get an odometer, gear position indicator, fuel gauge, dual trip meters, remaining range, current and average fuel consumption, coolant temperature, clock, service indicator, and connected device notifications such as mail and telephone alerts.
There’s an Economical Riding Indicator too which tells you if you are being an idiot if your wrist starts to get too twitchy.
If you want more, don’t worry, if you pay the extra for the special edition version you will get upgraded to a full colour TFT display.
And don’t forget, using Kawasaki’s RIDEOLOGY THE APP motorcycle application, any rider can spend hours in the endless menu system rather than actually riding. They can even link their smartphones wirelessly to the instrument panel.
Essential vehicle information like the fuel gauge, odo reading, and maintenance schedule can be monitored directly through the app, while GPS route and vehicle performance data can be logged and reviewed using the Riding Log function.
When using the app, even incoming phone calls and emails are shown on the instrument display. So that sacred time all to yourself, just you and the bike, man, or woman, and machine, has gone, forever.
No more will the words “but I was just out riding” be seen in the same way again.
Kawasaki go on and on about the KLE500’s relaxed and versatile rider triangle, high, aluminium handlebars and slightly feet forward foot-peg placement, which provide a natural, comfortable position, both when seated or when standing off-road.
That is before they wax lyrical about their slim fuel tank, smooth bodywork, and flat engine cases until I began to wonder if I had entered some weird alternate reality.
Then came the killer, Kawasaki say that the KLE500’s seat has been specially designed for comfort and freedom of movement. Really? A seat built for comfort and freedom of movement? Talk about stating the obvious.
Or maybe like the Tenere 700 they seriously considered designing it as a torture device made to create permanent damage to even the most well padded posterior.
The said seat is just under 34 inches high, but figures like that can be misleading. The old KLE’s seat was higher but narrower than many are today, so we will see.
Another thing you loose though is the single piece bench style seat that the old one had for so many years.
What is it they say, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it? But I guess the old KLE500’s seat wasn’t its piece de resistance.
The new KLE does have removable foot-peg inserts though, so again that is a plus. A removable rubber insert means you get the choice between road-friendly comfort or spiked, off-road grip without the need for tools. You just need big pockets.
So if you’ve heard all of this and are still thinking that sounds great, I’m interested, lets talk money. There is one thing left you really should ask that no one seems to be talking about.
Is this bike better than the old KLE500, and is it better than all the other similar 500cc twin adventure bikes on the market right now?
And is it better value for money?
So let us see. The old KLE weighed in at just 178kg or 392lbs dry, and produced about 45hp unless you dropped a GPZ500 block into it.
Although we don’t have confirmation so far, the maximum power allowed in A2 licence regulations is 35kw, or 47hp, but the bike also has to fall within a 0.2kw per kg power to weight ratio.
That means although we don’t have a confirmed figure, the absolute bottom weight limit for any 47hp bike is 175.75kg or 387.5lbs.
So almost 35 years of research and development might have possibly saved us around 2kg or 5lbs in weight, and that could be accounted for by the aluminium wheel rims and digital displays rather than analogue clocks.
What can I say, I guess it didn’t get worse.
I asked “Does it do anything better than all of the opposition” my answer is that unfortunately no it doesn’t.
Then I asked if the complete package was just better, and we won’t know for sure until it has been on the market for a while, but there is nothing that screams out BUY ME to me.
And I am in the market for a competent but lighter alternative to my trusty old Vstrom.
Do you think it is better than the Honda NX500? Or the CF Moto MT450 Ibex? The Kove 500X or Voge 500 DSX? Which have both now been pushed up to 625cc with the latest version of the Loncin engine?
Let me know your thoughts.
