2020 and 2021 KTM 300 XC-W Full Review

hey there everyone this is dirtbike channel i'm your host kyle brotherson and today we're going to be reviewing the 2020 and the 2021 ktm xcw line i've got a 300 here i had a 300 before that i gave away and i want to review that right now [Music] i should mention before we get started that i pay full price for all my bikes and i don't work for the manufacturers i don't care what the manufacturers think of me i'm saying my mind on these things i'm speaking my mind if they screw up they screw up if they do good they do good you guys are who i'm working for because i'm trying to give you guys the the the perspective of the common man who lives lives with these bikes and rides these bikes and puts a few parts on them and just goes out there and having having a good time i'm working for you not the manufacturer so if i say things to get the manufacturers like you know panties in a ruffle too bad so yeah i realized i actually hadn't done a full wrap-up review on the 2020 ktm xcw line i gave one away a couple months ago but i never actually did a full review on it i did a number of videos where i talked about good and bad or whatever actually i just did a video where i talked about the bad and then i just praised it while i was riding it but i wanted to give you guys a review of it now please please excuse the fact that this is a dusty bike i usually don't show you dusty bikes but i didn't wash it because i thought i was gonna ride it like two days later and then it snowed like a million feet in my yard and so it's here in the shop and it's dusty but the thing i wanted to say is the 2020 and the 2021 bikes are so stinking similar all they really did in 2021 is update the plastics they gave you some gray plastics rather than black plastics i like the black better but hey in 2021 they went with gray but that's essentially the only changes that i've really been able to tell in the hours that i've put on the 2020 versus the 2021. i also want to say that for the first time since 2014 i feel like i personally don't want to live without an xcw for so long when i got my 2015 ktm xc bike a 300xc bike i kind of moved over and there's some advantages to the xc bikes and i thought i'm an xc fan and i still am an xc fan but what i'm saying is they made some changes in 2020 to these bikes which basically made it so that i cannot i do not want to live without one of these bikes because so much of my riding in the last few years has gotten slower and more technical and nasty and that's where this bike really shines because of a few things which we're going to get into so i feel like i've got to have a an xc bike i've got a 250 xe and then i got this 300 xcw and it's kind of the best of both worlds and i'll talk about why i feel like i cannot live without this thing real quick let's talk about the things that they changed from the model year of 2019 into 2020 and then carried over to 2021 the things that i'm very very excited about the best things about it that they changed are all in the frame the geometry of this bike got so much better it was a brand new frame for 2020 and they carried it over to the 2021s and it feels more balanced to me than ever before gone are the days of the xcws with the high kind of like stinkbug back in and they had kind of weird knifing issues with the front end those issues are gone it is the most balanced front to back xcw that they've ever made and i just absolutely loved it those were that was the biggest change for me the forks they also did some valving in the forks i think the forks that came on the 2020s and the 2021s are the best forks that ktm has put on any of their xcws it is so soft and is so plush it just absorbs all of those stiff edges all those sharp edges when you're going slow but it also can get out there and move too this bite can do absorb the nasty stuff and get that fork moving and absorb those bumps and absorb those rocks and ledges and stuff but it can also get out there and pound whoops so it's a pretty cool mix i mean it's not going to be the best bike at pounding whoops but it does it actually really really well they did some really really cool things with that another big change that they made at least for me is the fuel mapping on the efi system the tpi system from 2019 over to 2020 and then maybe even refined a little bit in 2021 is these bikes start so much better see the 2019 bikes were really really cold-blooded they didn't want to start whereas the 2020 bikes every one of them that i've been around they've been much much better at starting and the 2020 or the 2020s were much better at starting and this 2021 is even a little bit better i feel like even the 20 21 fuel mapping is even a little bit richer a little bit more fuel than the 2020s and so they've continued to massage that and the bikes run awesome the other thing is the ambient air pressure sensor that came into these bikes in 2020 it just works they have not skipped a beat for me and that has been really really cool the motors have been really snappy although every one of these bikes is an individual so they don't all run the same and you might get your bike and you'd be like hey this thing's kind of muted and so there's a couple things you can do you can you can take that little key and adjust your power valve a little bit i go quarter turns every one of those things is a little different so you tune them accordingly accordingly depending on how the power how the how that motor delivers power and how you want the power to come on the other thing you can do is you can adjust your throttle cam they come with a gray cam inside these things typically it's a more mellow cam if you want it to hit a little bit harder you can put the black cam in there and that makes a big difference so you get the bike and you tune it a little bit so while i don't want to live without one of these xcws like i mentioned and if you put everything out on a spreadsheet and you assigned you know 50 different components to a bike and then you gave them a value from 1 to 10 these ktms are going to probably score higher in my opinion they're going to score higher on aggregate than any of the other manufacturers out there there are some things about these bikes these 20 20 and 21 2021 ktms that i think need to be improved and so i want to go through that here first thing i want to mention and this is in no particular order and i've graphed about this stuff before but first thing i want to mention is the rear fender the rear fender the way that these things hook up and the way that all the plastics come together on the xcws and on the xcs is just ridiculous it it the first time you loop the bike out everything pops apart and there's like these little you know thing these little nubs down in there that just pull off and it just there's a way better way to design it you don't have a way a good place to grab onto the thing to pull it over so you're having to install some sort of a strap or or whatever it just there's a way better way to do this ktm has done it better in their older models and i think that they need really really need to redesign that rear fender design on these bikes another thing i'm going to keep griping about it is they don't have a kickstart we want a backup kickstart on these bikes it's good enough for your race teams your race teams want to have a backup kickstarter but you're taking it away from us i understand you'll probably take it away eventually it's it's down here where you can split the cases and put a kickstart kit in it and stuff and ktm is going to think no one buys it no one cares and we just want to save weight and whatever that's garbage we would like to have the backup kickstarter on the bike if we can keep it please please please that is something another thing that needs to be changed is the fact that these somewhere around i don't know 20 50 of these bikes have a little bit of a leak down in the power valve area i don't know how many of them have it but i know a significant number of them have it none of the bikes i have here currently this bike and the bike out of the frame the 220 2021 bikes they're not leaking yet but it is something that's super annoying it's transmission fluid that leaks out there because of a bad gasket the gasket that you changed to in 2020 is a lot more faulty than the 2019 gasket and i don't it doesn't appear that you changed it for 2021. you need to fix that so we don't have leaking power valves down there something else that's pretty stupid is the air bypass screw now i understand that we all have to kind of understand that tpi came to us because ktm is selling and creating too many bikes and they have to have they have to um adhere to the euro 5 standards in europe for emissions and so a lot of that stuff kind of came tumbling with it here's the thing though ktm and guys the only way that ktm has given us to adjust our idle on these bikes unless we do some modifications is an air bypass screw on there the problem with that air bypass screw is all it really does is make the bike leaner so yes that will increase your idle but it makes the bike leaner so most people a lot of people are taking that glued in screw they because they actually glued in the idle screw we're taking our throttle bodies apart ungluing that screw putting an aftermarket um an aftermarket idle screw in there so that then we can adjust our our idle circuit independently and that's something that needs to be fixed on these bikes i've said it before and i've said it again but they need to come with spark arrestors most of these bikes are being used on public land and even in it's a good idea to have a spark arrestor if you're not on a motocross track and so they could easily give us spark arrestors something else that needs to be addressed is although they they drop the radiators down a few years back and that makes it easy if the radiator gets pushed back to sever to make a little hole a puncture in your lower radiator hoses we've kind of turned it the power valve puncture because it's your power valve down there on that side of the on the motor that comes and like puts a little stress cut in the uh in the hose down there so there needs to be some better bracing to help those radiators stay forward or just a redesign of where the where the hoses are in the radiator so in that area so that it doesn't get cut and cut your rides short the last thing i'll say about these bikes is they need to come stock with a capacitor so what are you saying kyle this bike in its stock form the xcws will not bump start on a dead battery because it doesn't have a capacitor the funny thing about this is the xc bikes which is why i have one right here outside of the frame the xc line does have a capacitor in it so it will bump start on a dead battery you'd think it'd be the other way around because isn't this the bike that's supposed to be doing the got the wide ratio gearing going wide out into the into these crazy places you'd think this bike would have a capacitor it doesn't so you have to put an aftermarket capacitor in this bike so that it will bump start on a dead battery which is very very important in my opinion so now let's talk about some of the amazing things about these xcw bikes both the 2020s and the 2021s these are the tightest turning bikes that i have ever owned and that i have ever ridden other than my trials bikes you can take your steering stops out up here on the front and because they lower those radiators down this bike will turn super tight and that is awesome in the really really nasty stuff the more that i practice full lock turning drills and the more i practice static balance drills on my trials bikes and things the more i become a comp accustomed to being able to crank those bars and keep my balance and i love the fact that i can get such good turning radius on a bike like this really helps for tight switchbacks really helps for just the techno technical and nasty stuff if you're always going flat out super fast it doesn't matter but since so much of my riding on the bike like this is super slow that really tight turning radius is a lifesaver plug for the smooth tpi motors i understand there are some people out there that don't like the way the power comes on on these tpi bikes you want your bike to run a certain way with a carburetor you've gotten used to that but i'm just gonna tell you these bikes make a crap ton of power and it's super smooth it's very linear and i think it is awesome it these things don't vibrate hardly at all after they counterbalance the motors in 2017 and now that it's a tpi motor the power delivery is just smooth and linear and yeah it's a little different than the carburetor two strokes that i have but honestly it is so good and i feel like it just kind of like you conserve energy by the fact that you don't have all this vibration and you know exactly where the hit is going to be in and how that hit is going to come on i just love the way that these things run and i'm always reminded how much time i spend finicky like much time i spend tinkering on the carburetor bikes like i've got a carburetor bike right here and my son's bikes are carbureted and i spend a ton of time tinkering with those things i didn't realize i didn't even realize how much i was tinkering with carbureted bikes until i got bikes like this and this where i'm not tinkering at all with how they run that's a really big advantage something else that's cool that no one really talks about and that's not exclusive to the xcws but the oil reservoirs on these things give you a lot of run time you can you can go at least five tank full tanks of fuel on the oil that you put down in that oil reservoir i've never even ridden it long enough where i had the oil light come on because after maybe three or three or so rides i just put a little oil in it but you can go for a long long time on the oil these things sip oil i think based on the the research that i've done and the people that have asked and me buying oil and then tracking things i think they're only using about one quart of oil or one liter of oil for every 100 hours of run time and i know this because i've asked i don't say i know this but i suspect this because i've asked a bunch of guys i've asked guys that bought their bikes and then bought a su like a specific amount of oil i had one guy that seriously bought his bike put 300 hours on it yes 300 hours and he didn't change his top end 300 hours on the top end and 300 hours on his oil pump no failures he bought four liters of oil four quart four quarts of oil at the time and he still had one left over which means he went 300 hours on three quarts of oil through his tpi system pretty amazing how lean these things are and how little oil they actually take i already mentioned it but these things start super great the 2020s and 2021s are start monsters they just fire up they're not cold-blooded they're awesome and that's a big improvement over some of the tpi bikes and it's honestly it's an improvement over most of my carbureted bikes these things now start just as easily just as quick as my carbureted bikes i know this is a little thing but you actually get some suspension rings on these bikes it's those little red you know rubber bands or plastic bands that move up move up and down on the forks this is typically something that you would only get in an aftermarket situation if you go and pay a suspension guy i just really like that because it helps me to see how much of the stroke i'm using it's it's actually good to be able to bottom your forks out every once in a while because if you're not botting and bottoming them out you're just you're just leaving you know travel on the table so i love that i have that there and i can kind of see how much uh how much suspension travel i'm using on that front end let's talk air filters this is something that doesn't get talked about enough the air filter on this bike is tool-less you don't need tools to get your air filter out which i love and that's kind of across the board on a lot of the ktms and then all of the big bike ktms it doesn't matter two-stroke four-stroke everything 125 and up is the same i shouldn't say 125 and up i'm not 100 sure but i'm 99 sure that this 125 right here is the same air filter yeah i'm 99 sure but you go to the 150s you go to the 200s the 250s the 300s even the 254 stroke the 354 stroke the 454 stroke it's all the same stinking air filter which is awesome because you can just buy three of those air filters or three or four of those air filters and just be cycling them through and you don't have to buy a bunch of different sizes and these things if you've got a fleet of bikes kind of like what i have everyone complains about the seats on the ktm saying the foam is too hard i will tell you something the foam on this kawasaki is harder the foam on the betas that i've had is harder the foam that i've had on the yamahas is harder so the seat foam hey you either want it too sick too soft or two or too stiff that's what everyone wants to say but these aren't that bad and then it's one bolt to take the seat off which i kind of like on some of the other bikes like kawasaki's and sometimes on my yamahas and stuff you have to take two bolts out to get the seat off so one bolt is probably the right way to go you could make it better makes them where it's a push button a lot of times but then some people have said that they had some problems with their seats flying off in races or hair scramble or something like that so i think one bolt is totally fine for the seat kind of a good compromise between everything i like the lock-on grips that you get with the ktm they come with odi lock-on grips some guys don't like them because they want something a little bit softer but i like the lock-on grips because it's easy to change them i have full wraps on this bike it doesn't it doesn't come with full wraps they come with a flag style handguard just like what this 125 has which are they're actually they're actually pretty decent because they'll flex a lot so they don't bend and break it isn't such a brittle plastic that ktm uses and so these will give you it's kind of like one of the best it's probably the best flag guard that there is in the industry um and so that's a good thing obviously you're getting brembo brakes you're getting brembo clutch you're getting all these super nice components i've kind of like said that until i'm blue in the face on these bikes but they are super super nice on on your controls between your clutches that's another thing is the clutch levers they're all interchangeable the clutch lever on this 125 is the same clutch length lever on that 250 xe it's the same clutch lever on this 300xcw it's the same clutch lever on the 254 stroke 354 stroke 454 stroke so it's pretty cool a lot of these parts are standardized standardized and a lot of them will swap over from one bike to the next so it's just kind of a nice thing in that ktm line something else to know that is pretty cool is in 2021 they raised the pipe up even more kind of curled it back in on itself and so it doesn't stick out as far on either side it's kind of got like a corrugated thing on it so it's got all these you know kind of bumps on it it's actually really really strong people have said for a long time that the aftermarket pipes are so much better than the stock pipes and i'm just here to say that's poppycock i've tried multiple aftermarket pipes and they're not better they don't always fit as good and the metal that they use i haven't been able to tell that the metal on an aftermarket pipe can take any more abuse than the metal on a stock pipe i know that's going to be controversial and some people are going to say kyle that's not true but that's just been my experience and i buy a lot of these bikes i have three of them in this room three of the ktms in this room right now and i think the stock pipes are amazing you're not going to get better performance off an aftermarket pipe you just won't some of them make the bikes run slightly different but for the most part we're splitting hairs and it's an awesome pipe on the bike when you get it the only reason i would say to replace the pipe is if you want to replace the bike right off or replace the pipe right off the bat so that then you can put an aftermarket pipe on the pipe immediately or on the bike immediately and then go back to your stock pipe when you go to sell the bike that would probably help it to sell faster but as far as just changing it out to get better performance you're not going to get better performance by changing that out some things that you might want to add to the bikes i've got videos that talk about all the things i do i go through a 60 point checklist with all these bikes as far as tearing them down and checking things out and checking for grease and doing this and that and the other i've got protection videos i would say if you're going to ride these bikes really really slow through the slow nasty technical terrain where you're off the bike pushing it and all that stuff you're probably going to want to put a radiator fan on these bikes it's always been important to have a radiator fan if you're gonna do the slow nasty technical stuff but on the tpi bikes it's even more so because these bikes run so lean in the low rpms that they do get a little bit hotter a little bit faster so think about a radiator fan also maybe think about a rear discard down here to protect your rear brake disc you can put a front disc card on discard on as well also think about a good skid plate there's some really good aftermarket skid plates out there s s x s is the one i've got on this bike i've used axp extreme on a lot of my other bikes they're both very very good skid plates and so i would look into a really good aftermarket skid plate for this depending on how nasty you're going to get you might want to put full wrap hand guards on a bike if it's going to go supernar i know handguards are a complicated subject a tricky subject for a lot of people but that's something to think about you also might want to do some radiator hose protection i've got videos on that where you can kind of put a little bit of guarding a little bit of shielding between your radiator hoses and your power valve down there to keep from puncturing what did i miss i think i mean there's a million things we could talk about with setup but i won't do that i've got other videos on that so that was a lot we covered a lot there i'm sorry these videos are so long but when you're spending this much money it's nice to get a real world view of some of these things uh some of the things that matter of course i can't cover everything in these videos but i try to cover the main bullet points and the things that i've noticed with these bikes i love this bike this is a bike that i don't want to live without right now so they're really really cool if you would like to support dirt bike channel the best way pretty much the best way you can do it is use my links to rocky mountain atv and amazon and motorsport they're down in the links or they're down in the description of this video they're also over on my website dirtbike channel dot com upper right hand corner on a web browser and on the computer it says links up there if you're on your phone just click on the little three lines it drops down the menu and you've got the links down there when you click on those links and then go do your shopping as normal i get a kickback a referral bonus especially with rocky mountain atv really really uh appreciated there so okay that's my review of the 2020 and the 2021 xcw bikes everything that i said about the 300 could also be said about the 250 they're just subtle differences and i didn't really talk anything too specific about the 300 that wouldn't also apply to the 250 because i've got a 250 sitting right there it just happens to be the 250xc out of the frame so okay that's what i have for everyone today and until next time leave a single track thank you

Channel: Dirt Bike Channel

Views: 95,506

Rating: 4.9422221 out of 5

Keywords: enduro, motocross, dirtbike, ktm 2016, ktm motorcycles, shootout, ktm, range, erzberg, graham jarvis, johnny walker, best dirtbike, 125, 200, 250, 300, 350, 400, 450, 500, 525, exc, sx, how to, 2 stroke, 4 stroke, video, review, ktm, husqvarna

Id: AeExu5svat0

Length: 22min 34sec (1354 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 21 2021