Dakar Winner GasGas’ 400cc Adventure Bike Spotted

KTM’s subsidiary brand GasGas looks ready to enter the mid-capacity segment with a 400cc adventure bike

Last month, a hardcore-looking adventure bike was spotted testing. Its focused design, trellis frame, rally-inspired boneline, engine casing, WP suspension setup, all suggested this was KTM working on a new 390 Adventure. Possibly a response to the community asking for a more hardcore variant of the adventure tourer. But as it turns out, it is, in fact, a GasGas motorcycle. 

GasGas are the same guys who won Dakar last year. Unsurprisingly, their portfolio has nothing but hardcore, off-road bikes. So, what’s GasGas doing with a 400cc (likely) street legal adventure bike? If you look closer, the dots in the story seem to connect.

With a Dakar win under its belt, the KTM-owned brand can now look at capitalising on its rally laurels to entice new and not-so-hardcore adventure riders in Europe to buy a product. Make it a sub-400cc adventure bike, one from KTM’s arsenal, and you’re in A2 license territory. Think of A2 license holders as 20 to25-year-old Indian bikers. They’re not new to motorcycling, but still fresh in the game. A2-compatible bikes are meant to have enough power to excite and thrill, while ensuring it’s not too much to handle, especially as it’s a step-up bike.

This is the first GasGas bike to tread this mass market line and the motorcycle appears to wear a new 399cc, liquid-cooled, single-cylinder motor that’s also rumoured to power the 2023 KTM Duke 390. Likely to make the A2-friendly  43.5PS and 37Nm for Europe, GasGas can offer its brand experience with a more potent engine than the current 373cc KTM engine. But for other markets this new motor on the upcoming GasGas ADV will be offered with its full potential as a direct consequence of the increased displacement. Hence likely to make more torque and power while ensuring a strong low- and mid-range grunt.

The new ADV was spotted wearing a rally setup with a tall 21-inch front and smaller 18-inch rear wire-spoke wheels. The motorcycle also was seen with a single disc brake at the front and at the back. The vertically stacked headlight looks very rally inspired, and the instrument cluster may be the same as the KTM 390’s TFT unit. We do expect smartphone connectivity and navigation for extra practicality.

In Europe, the KTM 390 Adventure currently retails at around 6,029 Euro (around Rs  5 lakh). Hence, we can expect this to somewhere under 7,000 Euro (around Rs 5.82 lakh) given the hardcore hardware it proposes over the 390 Adventure which is essentially road-biased adventure tourer. The GasGas ADV is likely to be launched in early 2024. That said, it’s highly unlikely to come to India. Fret not, India has the Hero 450 ADV and Royal Enfield Himalayan 450 already in the pipeline.