Here's What I LOVE And HATE About My KTM 690 Enduro R After Owning It For Four Years!

[Applause] [Music] hey guys this is my 2017 ktm enduro r and i've had this bike for about four years it's the only bike i've had for that time because well it's an enduro so it's a bike i thought i could use for both on-road and off-road and that's a really great thing about having a bike that works as a dirt bike and as a street bike in this video i'm going to tell you everything that i love about it and everything that i hate about it but let's talk about why i'm selling it which i am and that's because if you guys watch some of the videos you know that recent the office we have gotten a triumph scrambler and i kind of have this thing where i really only want like one bike in my life so unfortunately it's time for the old ktm to go now there's a new version of this bike that's out right now that's got some changes but for the most part this bike has not changed a lot over the last four years so let's talk about what defines the bike and it's not the fact that it's a ktm it's not the fact that it's an enduro it's not even the fact that it's got a lot of orange let me show you what defines it it's this notice how i get on it i have to put my foot on the peg and then if you look i can almost kind of sit on this bike with both of my feet on the ground once you show them tommy what defines this bike is the fact that it's almost 36 inches tall it is a tall bike and i am 6'2 and at 36 inches of seat height i can barely ride this thing and at first when i got this bike i thought you know what i'm a tall dude that won't bother me but over the four years of having it it has bothered me it's almost just too tall uh and a tall bike is a comfortable bike for somebody of my sight size and stature but it's also a heavy bike at 320 pounds wet as a dirt bike it's getting up there to where it probably exceeds my limits now especially given the fact that this bike has a single thumper single cylinder that produces about 70 horsepower and that's a lot of power for what is essentially a dirt bike now don't be fooled by the fact that this is got the word enduro on it this is just a very big very tall very powerful dirt bike with almost 11 inches of ground clearance there's not a lot that this will not go over but perhaps it's a little bit too much bike for me and what i mean by that is you know the more advanced a variety you are the easier big bikes are to handle off-road but i would consider myself maybe an average rider off-road and with a bike that weighs 320 pounds and is extremely tall i can get myself into a lot of trouble on this bike and while i haven't broke anything on this bike i have come close to getting in situations that have terrified me uh so i think i'm gonna hopefully find myself something a little bit more manageable something a little bit smaller and then something that's purely dirt based you know around the 250 pound range i guess i've owned a lot of dirt bikes that's about where i'm comfortable and now that i have the scrambler i can get a dedicated off-road bike that won't be such well such a big old girl now i've ridden this on-road i've written an off-road i've written it on dirt trails i've pretty much done everything about everything you can do with the dirt bike and let's talk about the things i love first of all i love the look of the bike i also love the fact that it's got a rotex engine and it sounds really good let me start it up for you you can listen to it oh yeah i love the smell of the thumper that brings back some good memories and i haven't really uh changed out the pipe because well i don't need to change out the pipe i don't want it to be too hot i don't want it to be too kind of in your face you know i like the fact that it's a little bit more on the quiet side so that when you're going through a neighborhood people aren't like oh my god what the heck is that is that a harley some other things i love about the fa about this bike is that it has a very progressive gearbox the six-speed gearbox very easy to use one down five up it's kind of cool that it's still traditional and you have a real dial here plus it gives you your speed limit you can kind of cycle through the different uh applications so that it gives you things like rpm uh it just looks kind of modern yet old-school all right now i've turned the bike off so you can hear what i'm saying but basically i love poodles of suspension both front and rear great brembo brakes basically what you want out of a tall somewhat heavy dirt bike except for the fact of course that ktm has installed abs which is great on-road it you know saves your butt in rainy situations especially when you're on knobbies but i think for liability reasons i'm guessing here every time you turn the bike off and you turn it back on you have to disengage the abs and if you're like me and you ride with buddies or you dirt ride you spend a lot of time basically turning the bike off checking the world out taking a piss saying hi to your friends and then if you forget to turn off the abs then you get into very sticky situations i was going down a very steep hill once i went to grab the brakes and basically nothing happened uh that's terrifying and the way you turn it off is you have to hold down one of these little buttons and you have to hold it down to the light blinks it's unintuitive and for something as important as not you know dying off-road uh it's a little too complicated the other thing that i'm not in love with let me show you right here is the gas tank location they put it back here to give you a little bit more equal weight distribution which is grand but the bike doesn't have a fuel gauge it holds about three i think 0.25 gallons and if you forget to reset uh your odometer then you just basically don't know when you're out of gas you do get a little light that tells you you're low but i like to know especially when i'm touring how much range i have and i've gotten over the four years i've owned it into a lot of situations where i basically run out of fuel then the light comes on and then i'm like in the middle of the wood somewhere and i don't know how many miles i have before i'm completely stuck so a fuel gauge would be nice now probably the biggest issue with this bike and it happens to a lot of thumpers keep in mind this is a water cooled unit is that it constantly runs hot on a day like this where it's you know in the 30s here in the mountains and there's snow around it's fine on the highway it's fine but if it gets into let's say the 70s or the 80s and you're in places like moab uh this bike will run at its highest temperature now i've done some googling you can add different coolant to it to keep it a little cooler you can add a bigger fan uh but uh just it's unnerving when you're always looking at the gauge and you've got i think about ten little notches and you're at number nine or number 10 the whole time and then you hear that fan screaming another thing that's not granted of course if you're a dirt biker you'll know this ktm builds a seat that is rock hard even though it's long ktm always wants you to stand up on the bike and not necessarily sit on it but if you're using it as an enduro or dual sport you'll you will spend a lot of time on the highway and this is not the nicest of bikes the other problem is uh this pipe gets super hot i mean even now i've just ridden it probably for about a minute or two or it's already getting hot god help you if you were to touch that with any part of your body that isn't covered with cloth now when you're trying to do any kind of street driving on it you're of course in that classic dirt bike position where you've got the wide handlebars which is great you've got a little bit of wind protection but at about 65 miles an hour it does get buzzy uh and the wind is just hitting you dead in the shoulder uh and basically you know this if you ride dirt bikes and you ride road bikes the exact thing you want on road is the exact opposite thing that you want off-road and kind of the seating position on this and and the seating stance on it is not conducive for long dirt bike rides or especially long road bike rides however those are all small price to pay for what is an extremely capable and extremely powerful and perhaps most importantly an extremely fun bike if you're going to have a vehicle in this case a bike that does both on-road and off-road and if you're going to be like me and you weigh over 200 pounds this is not a bad choice ktms of course a little more expensive to maintain but this bike over the last four years has been rock solid it's never failed to start it's never gotten me stuck anywhere uh the worst thing that's happened to me once i was going up a gulch in boulder and i dropped the bike and because like i said my ability probably doesn't match well certainly doesn't match this dirt bikes ability i really had a hard time getting it back up and getting it up and out of a sticky rocky and wet situation so for me it was the best of both worlds but now that hopefully i have more of a street scrambler i can afford to go back and buy myself something that's a little bit smaller and a little bit more manageable and the thing i really love about it is that when you're at let me check my watch 9300 feet above sea level is that it's fuel injected even back in 2017 when i bought this bike there wasn't a lot of choice if you wanted a dual sport or enduro or dirt bike that was fuel injected and i've been in a lot of sticky situations not because of my ability but because the bike does not run well since it was jetted either for sea level or a mile above sea level which is where i normally live so when i take it up here it just runs like crap and fuel injection sorts all that out so i would say if you're tall and you're big and you want kind of a jack of all trades the ktm is certainly a good choice they've updated since i bought it they've kind of changed the tft around a little bit it's got a little bit more horsepower i believe this one was 67 the new one is about 75 uh they've upgraded uh the abs so that's a little bit nicer and a little bit more uh a little bit more refined but overall uh this has been a really great bike i'm gonna miss it but as i get older i want a little bit i want something that that you know i can own and flog around instead of something that flogs me and owns me and that's kind of how i feel on this bike especially when i'm doing anything that's very tricky and very uh technical so as always this is roman reporting for the fastlane bike thanks for watching uh and yeah it'll be sad to say goodbye uh to the ktm but you know what uh it's been a good bike uh and sometimes the best part of owning something is when you buy it when you sell it and when you get to buy something else to replace it and that's hopefully where i'm going to be at this summer see you guys next time ciao

Channel: TFLbike

Views: 44,594

Rating: 4.7357221 out of 5

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Id: pYInH0TUEtw

Length: 11min 26sec (686 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 20 2021