this is the honda africa twin adventure sport and in this video we're gonna do a comprehensive
now to quote honda themselves the africa twin adventure sports offers continent crossing
long-haul ability and practicality on an off-road it's got a larger tank extended wind protection
height adjustable screen which you have to use two handfuls you can't do it on the move
um a larger engine sump guard aluminium rear carrier which is really good
come on to that um the africa twin is more of an off-road orientated uh adventure bike than this
but saying that this still has very good off-road ability
and much better than many of the alternative adventure bikes from other manufacturers
it has 1084 cc parallel twin engine and it produces 75 kilowatts or 100 brake horsepower
at seven and a half thousand rpm and the torque of 105 newton meters at 6250 rpm and this
particular model has the dct automatic or it's an automatic changing but it's a double clutch
transmission which will go into more detail in a minute the rake that's the steering head angle
is 27 and a half degrees and the trail is 113 millimeters and that's about typical for most
off-road bikes so that gives you a combination of stability at speed and agile cornering
it's got a massive 24.8 liter fuel tank and it does 20.4 kilometers a liter which is 57 miles
per gallon and uh on the tank you get about a 505 kilometer range which is 314 miles official
figures so in the real world probably less than that depending how you write of course
the ground clearance is 250 millimeters and it weighs 238 kilograms which is quite heavy um and
that's the limiting factor of an adventure bike of this capacity and it's the same for all megs
they are heavy so off-road don't expect it to be a motocross or a trials bike
is designed for the open unmade roads going across desert roads and long distance halls like that
but you don't expect to do tricky trial sections on it but saying that it does make quite a good
green laning bike for occasional use but if that was your main purpose then you'd be better off
going for a smaller capacity 450 or 250cc enduro bike to be honest or one of the trail bikes but
it makes it a great long distance adventure bike the seat light is 850 millimeters
and you can raise it up to 870 millimeters which is what it's on now there's also a
lower seat option at 825 millimeters or a taller seat option at 895 millimeters and
i'm six foot three and you can judge by looking at me how you fit on the bike um it's probably one of
the better bikes for a taller person being nice and high and quite long in the wheelbase um so
pretty good if you're i'd say from five foot ten to six foot three you're about the ideal
range any taller or lower then you might have to do something about the seat heights more have you
the wheelbase is 1575 millimeters and on the front you've got 230 millimeters of travel
on the suspension which is 9.05 inches and at the rear you've got 220 millimeters of travel
which is 8.66 inches that's quite good for a road orientated bike uh compared to a motorcycle spike
which has got about 12 inches of travel so it's pretty good it's got a 21 inch front wheel and an
18 inch rear and it's got the tubeless tyres so if you're out somewhere in the middle of nowhere and
you get a puncture it's much easier to fix now it's got a usb socket cruise control very handy
it's got bluetooth and apple carplay so you can connect your phone to it and do whatever you have
on your phone um it's got cornering lights which are fabulous so obviously when you lean over
it uh changes the angle of the line for the corners and it's got heated grips as standard
so if you've ever ridden in cold conditions you'll know how important that is because after half an
hour or 15 minutes in the cold you can't move your hands up so very useful feature there so
as i said before this has got the dct double clutch transmission with an s or sport mode
and basically you can run it as an automatic and it changes for you you've got various modes
that you can go through and ride on which we'll come on to in a minute um but in the sport mode
it's very responsive and uh it holds the gear for longer and changes later and the revs come higher
and yes it's very responsive indeed in the normal mode the normal riding mode
the tour mode um to get it to kick down you've really got to open the throttle up
and then it will sort of go into another gear and then you've got the other mode which we'll
go into as well but um yes in sport if you want it to be lively it's certainly lively
i'd say there are pros and cons to the dct in an off-road situation um sometimes it's good to
be able to pull the clutch in and disengage the driving wheel to stop slippage and what have you
you can't do that with the dct so you can only throttle off um but the the advantage i suppose
is that it's always it's always in drive so it never loses traction um so the the purpose of
this bike is for long hauls and for sort of unmade roads and what have you and for that it's fine
but i wouldn't say it's a perfect transmission for very slippery muddy green laning
manual for that you can of course change up and down the gears with the little switch
or pedals on the front and rear of the left handle bar so you can ride it like a manual
but the dct is so good you may just as well let it do its thing because it's very well engineered
indeed now this rear aluminium rack that it comes with is very useful indeed there's lots of places
to uh strap things to so if you've got some bungee cords and what have you you can put a lot of stuff
on here and strap it to it you've got the little mounts here for the accessory panniers or boxes
either side and then you can put another one here and have one on the back but if if you're going to
do that you might just as well buy the adventurous sports plus model which comes with all that anyway
you've got the double disc brakes at the front and a single one at the rear i must
say the stopping power on this is extremely good so you've got no worries about braking whatsoever
it's got a nice exhaust note it's not loud so you're not going to draw attention to yourself
when you're traveling but obviously if you wanted to allow the pipe you can change that
but to be honest it's good for what it
is
the tyres that this comes with are the metzeler karoo street and because it's a more of a road
orientated adventure bike they're very good in the road of course but there's enough grip in
there for sort of normal off-road riding and as i said unmade roads are fine if you wanted to
get into the really wet muddy slippery stuff you would definitely need to put some knobbly tires on
it this adjustable screen is nice you can have it on the lowest setting like it is now and it
still protects you from the wind if you really want to get the wind off your face then put it
on the higher setting the only disadvantage to that is that you can see the edge of it quite uh
strongly in your vision so um it sort of it does get in the way of your sight line a little bit but
it's not nothing to worry about really this bike actually makes an extremely good road bike so if
you wanted it as an everyday bike for commuting going to work backward forwards it's perfect
you could also do the odd little bit of off-road riding at the weekend nothing too serious in
the uk because it's always muddy and slippery but for the long haul ride through continents through
different countries absolutely fabulous and once you find yourself off the beaten track on the
unmade roads it would be perfect and the ideal uh sort of situation would be an unmade sort of
uh desert-ish road or going through the mountains and because of the good suspension travel if
you're traveling along at 50-60 miles an hour and then you hit a big bump it's going to soak
it all up and that's the purpose of this bike really and it's fabulous for that so the price
the manual version is 14 649 pounds on the road in the uk or 16 049 the es version of
the manual which down to electronic suspension so it's electronically adjusted this one isn't
that this is the dct so the basic dct version is 15 849 pounds or 17 349 with a dct and the
electronically adjustable suspension whether you want to go for all the bells and whistles is
entirely up to you it has its advantages obviously it's more expensive but it depends on sort of like
you work at the end of the day now the modes on the left handlebar you can scroll through
you've got various buttons to control all the modes now you've got the tour mode which is your
standard mode and in that mode you can adjust various things as well why is it going off
come on now i was just about to explain the modes and the battery's gone flat so um there's a little
key you can take the rear seat off it releases a lever and then you can pull the seat off which
i've done and there should be a little uh allen key which we can undo the battery box cover
to charge it up so i'll do that now so yes it's actually under the rear seat here
so that's very handy to have and we simply undo this to charge now that's one of this
advantages of all this electronic gadgetry because it saps the battery power um so that's a bit of a
problem so if you leave the bike for too many days you're going to find this as flat as a pancake and
we've been riding it around quite a bit but left it for four days and it's got nothing left so the
manual told me to undo this side to get to the battery well in fact it's the other side so i've
undone that and it's very heavy this little cover and it turns out inside it is a little tool kit
now while the battery's charging um it's made me think if you were to get the dct version and you
were somewhere say 100 miles from any civilization and your battery went flat so you could have
left the bike somewhere going off exploring up a mountain and come back and found it flat
there's no way of starting the bike well at least with a manual you can bump start
it and get it going again so that's a very important consideration with a bike like this
now this bike has four modes and two user selectable modes so you've got the tour
mode which is your um general touring mode for long distances and what have you the urban mode
obviously speaks for itself gravel and off-road the purpose of this video is not to go into
detail about these modes because there's plenty of information on the honda's website about that
but basically the user mode you can set your own sort of desired settings and there's a favorites
button which you can save your favorite mode but the modes kind of speak for themselves and there's
lots of um different settings within the mode you can change you've got wheelie control how much the
bike wheel is the torque control and various other things it's very advanced electronically
personally i'm not a great big fan of too many electronics on a bike i think it interferes with
the simplicity of the riding and it would be much nicer in my opinion just to have a button
when you can just select each mode and it just does it all for you
it's it takes a lot of time to sort of set the bike up how you like it but once you have it
would be easy but jumping on from another bike you need to spend half an hour with it just fiddling
with switches so um i'd prefer an analog dial and a very simple as i said a simple mode switch which
you can go from one to another and keep it like that but there we are this honda's um you know
a very advanced bike a lot of people like that sort of thing and these are very popular so i'm
not saying it's a bad thing it's just uh depends on who you are and whether you want that or not so
our verdict on the africa twin adventure sports is that it's a very very good very capable motorcycle
i would definitely recommend it if you need a long distance of venture bike
or something to commute on as an everyday bike as well it's very good for both so it's extremely
well engineered extremely well put together very good build quality as you'd expect from honda
so definite thumbs up don't forget to like and subscribe if you haven't already and
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