this is the harley davidson pan america and we're a little bit late to the party and
there's lots of great videos out there already but we're going to give you our take on this
massive powerful adventure bike big thank you to sycamore harley-davidson uh in upping and rutland
for lending us this pan america special today if you're interested in this bike or you want to know
more about it get in touch with the sales guys at sycamore they're sure to be helping you out
as you all know if you regularly watch our channel we absolutely love adventure bikes
but we're going to give you our take on this bike on and off road and tell you exactly what
it's like to ride and we're not going to go into massive detail about the modes and the different
settings and the menus and sub menus and the various things it does because it's very complex
advanced electronically bike so it's more about the ride and how it feels and how it goes
than it is about all the technology in this video we're going to reveal
two features that this adventure bike has and some of the other larger adventure bikes also have
but they're never talked about so make sure you watch the whole video to find out what they are
so the 1250cc liquid cooled v-twin that's in this pan america produces 128 newton meters of torque
at 6750 rpm and 150 horsepower at 8750 rpm which is pretty impressive and the peak rpm
of this bike is nine and a half thousand rpm which is unheard of of something from
harley-davidson they're normally very low gra low down don't rev above five and a half
but this is very ready compared to that and if you're sitting at 70 miles an hour on the
motorway for example it's only doing about 4 000 rpm so you've still got plenty left and that's the
perfect sort of um rpm for a long motorway cruise it's not revving the nuts off of it
yes i've got a um i've got an iphone 12 at the moment
what deal have you got on at the moment
i'd really like to know
is it for free
now to be honest with you um i wasn't expecting that i was going to like this bike at all um
and when i started up and set off i very soon was pleasantly surprised as a road bike it really
is very good it's very powerful very fast the different modes change the characteristics quite
a bit so you've got the rain mode which is very numbed down and very gentle in sport mode it flies
it's got more horsepower than the honda cb1000r which we rode recently so make sure you see
that review it's very interesting it's very very powerful and very very fast but it's not snappy
and it doesn't feel at all dangerous so all that power is usable and it's a superb road bike
so this bike's got many different modes it's got sport road rain off-road and off-road plus
and then it's also got three user configurable modes so you can choose how you want your bike
to feel depending on what sort of riding you're doing and adapt it to exactly your needs so that's
a very handy thing to have and all these different modes make this bike very good in different
purposes so you can completely change the characteristics of the bike from on the road to
off the road which is very good feature now on a whole we don't normally like modes on motorcycles
because you get used to it in one mode and then when you change it the bike can
be completely different but this is not too snappy in any mode even though it's got 150
horsepower so it's not going to rip your head off if you suddenly change from rain to sport
and it's good to have an off-road mode because if you had 150 horsepower
off-road this bike would be lethal so it's very essential thing to have on this bike off-road
like all adventure bikes it's very heavy so it's not going to be like an enduro bike like a dual
sport or trail bike so if you want to go off-road and that's your main thing and you do it a lot
you want a much lighter weight bike have a look at our honda crf300 crf300l review that's really
good off-road only like 26 horsepower or so this has got 150 horsepower obviously in off-road mode
it won't be giving you 150 horsepower but riding off-road in the off-road mode it's surprisingly
good um it's not too uh snappy at all so you can go along the sort of fire trails as they call them
in the usa or the uh the byways as we call them here so for sort of gravelly roads and uh moderate
bumps it's perfectly fine and it's designed for long distances and if you've got long distances
off-road in unmade roads it's perfectly fine for that but it's no motocross bike so don't expect
it to be but the people that buy these sort of bikes aren't expecting it to be so you'd be very
pleasantly surprised at its off-road ability so your first service on this bike would be after
a thousand miles and then after that it's every 5000 miles or once a year whichever comes first
so riding along normally off-road is perfectly fine the weight becomes the problem when you
sort of want to spin it round and turn around once you lean it over it starts to become a
very heavy motorcycle the traction control kicks in it starts flashing lights the tyres
are pretty hopeless in the grass so you would need knobbly tires if you're going to go off-road a lot
but for the easy stuff for the light stuff you'll find it's perfectly all
right
so the base pan america weighs 245 kilograms that's a wet weight so all your fuel and oil and
every other liquid that's in it and the special which is what we've got here is 258 kilograms
wet weight and if you compare that to a bmw 1250 gs which is a very direct competitor to this bike
that's 268 kilograms so this is lighter and i think i know which bike i'd go for
this does have two unique modes that the larger adventure bikes have now when you drop this bike
off-road which you will do if you're riding in slippery conditions and grass and mud there's a
little switch here you switch it that way and it gives you a full body workout so you can do a half
hour full body workout with this bike and the workout ends when the bike's back upright again
so that's a great feature it saves a lot on gym membership the other feature if you flick the
switch this way is an anti-theft device so when you drop the bike you can just leave it you can
walk away go off with a friend come back later come back the next day come back a week later
or even a month later and the bike will still be there because nobody can pick it up you've got
a 21.2 liter fuel tank which is pretty large and with a full tank you'll get just over 200 miles so
that's pretty decent and you'll get 43 miles per gallon official figures that's the same as all
the harley soft tails so no difference there now this bike has got the adaptive ride height option
and on the lower setting it's 32.7 inches seat height and on the highest setting it's 33.4 but
we've also got the pad on the highest configurable setting you can lower that down slightly as well
so you've got a lot of adaptability there but you probably wouldn't want to be too short if
you're riding this bike i'm six foot one and even you can see i'm pretty much on my tiptoes
and that's on the higher setting once you start it up it goes down into the lower settings so
if you are a little bit shorter definitely start the bike on the stand and then get on it
because then you're not going to be falling over because you're only tiptoes
now the old man doesn't like the foot peg position on the pan america he thinks they're a bit too far
back i think they're perfectly fine so it really is personal preference with that sort of thing
the special which we've got here has semi-active suspension tyre pressure monitoring a center
stand which is very handy if you're on a slope because it will fall over if it's on a slope
multi-position rear brake which is good if you've got big chunky boots brush guard aluminium skid
plate on the bottom you've got a daymaker headlamp which is great at night and you've also got heated
grips wind deflector and a steering damper the rake on this bike is 25 degrees the trail
is 108 millimeters and the wheelbase is 1580 millimeters and those sort of dimensions are
very similar to what you get on a naked sort of sports bike um so my impression of it before i
wrote it would be that it's going to be very sharp steering and probably not ideal off-road now um
it is a very good uh sharp steering bike but not twitchy which is great um off-road you probably
would do with more stability if you were really hammering it but it's quite maneuverable the
turning circle isn't amazing but it's good enough so you can switch around in one or two shunts
now the base model of the panamerica starts at 14 000 pounds in the uk and that's in black and then
you've got the special which we've got here that starts at 15 and a half thousand pounds in black
and then you've got some other colors you've got grey and you've got dead wood green which we've
got here that's an extra 250 pounds and then you've got this orange and white color which
is an extra 450 pounds the adaptive ride height which we've also got on this model is 600 pounds
and then you've also got the laced wheel option which a lot of you will be happy to have as it's
got tubeless tyres that's an extra 400 pounds so i'm sure a lot of you would want to opt for that
one thing to watch out for with this screen and this is the same with
lots of other adventure bikes if you're leaning over the bars off-road and you come to a big
bump and you come off balance a bit you don't want to be hitting your head or neck on this
because it might slice it off it probably won't but it'd probably break before then but it still
hurt you considerably now the revolution max engine it doesn't give you that traditional
harley sound it's not supposed to it's a liquid called v-twin i think with a nice n-can you can
get the screaming eagle end cans i'd like to hear what they sound like this would probably sound
fantastic i'd like to see it in some future models it's rumored that it might be in the
show lots if you've seen the 1250 custom it could be the replacements of the sportster
who knows that would be interesting but one thing with this engine is when you're traveling along
off-road in first gear it does get very hot so you do need to be careful of that you don't want
to burn your legs on it or singe your trousers on the exhaust pipe so do be very careful with that
what i did like about it when you're riding along from the sitting position
it feels fairly narrow so some adventure bikes are absolutely wide so that's a good thing and um
compared to the honda africa twin the africa twin is more of an off-road bike than this is
um on-road they're kind of parallel i'd say this is more powerful and faster so it depends on
the sort of bike you want horses for courses as they say but this is a superb bike actually and
i've come away feeling happy about it uh when i was thinking i was going to say oh i don't like
it at all but it's good now this pan america isn't what you traditionally expect from harley-davidson
and it's definitely going to appeal to a new sort of rider or someone who wants it as a second bike
and probably have a soft tail as well you probably wouldn't want to see this engine in a soft sail
but i would be interested to see what they come up with maybe with a sportster replacement to
make it a little bit more sporty and sort of be in between a sports bike and a harley
still giving you a bit of harley essence but a lot more speed that'd be very interesting to see
now the seat and the rear seat on the pan america are very comfortable so on long
journeys you're not going to have a sore bottom you've also got grab rails for the rear passenger
and there's many different luggage options for this bike you can get a top box you can get
side boxes you can also get a sort of luggage thing on the on the tank there there's so many
different options and there's lots of aftermarket well harley parts that you can get for it
especially that screaming ingall and can i'd love to hear what that sounds like let us know in the
comments section below what you think of the pan america and if you've given it a test ride let
us know what you thought of it it'd be really interesting to get some other riders opinions
and if you've got another adventure bike would you consider trading that in for this i know i would
you've got this typical scooped out seat like all adventure bikes have which limits you
uh moving backwards and forward on the bike this is on the highest setting the seat comes down a
bit and obviously you've got the suspension which can go up and down depending if you've chosen that
option now if you like this bike or even if you don't and you just enjoyed the video
make sure you like the video it helps the video reach new people and if you haven't
seen our channel before make sure you subscribe we do all sorts of bikes and we've got plenty
more videos coming this year and the more of you that subscribe the better the production quality
will get if you want to help support our channel make sure you buy a t-shirt from us or other
sort of clothing we do hoodies and stuff as well i'm wearing one of our designs so is the old man
they were displayed in a row below the video but if you click on one of them and head to the spring
store and if you click the logo on the top of the screen you can see many more designs on
there that won't be in the row below there's more than that so make sure you check it out
so
i don't like insects