Thread: KTM 690 Enduro

Don't be put off by the name, this is not an enduro bike in the competition sense, it's a proper and highly capable trail bike, able to cope with quite serious dirt riding as well as mixing it with traffic on the roads. It's on this bike that the engine mapping options are at their most useful, at least for relative novices. Even in normal mode it demands some concentration at low speeds it has a powerful engine after all and at 138kg dry it's still a fair old mass to haul up a dirt track - so switch it to soft mode and the throttle control becomes much easier. You don't need the lost top end horsepower anyway, and the only pity now is that the engine maps can't be switched on the move, in situations where you're swopping between dirt and tarmac.

In the end more serious trail riders will still want something smaller and lighter, but this bike punches far, er, below its weight in terms of ability. The weight distribution is biased a little too strongly towards the front, although this is less the case than on most other trail bikes in the class, but on loose surfaces this still makes the bike feel uneasy and likely to lose front grip too easily. But clearly KTM has done its best to sort what is a generic problem in larger off-roaders by turning the rear of the machine into a monocoque fuel tank, and this seems to help - it's much more off-road orientated than most trail bikes.



The competition is not so widespread for the Enduro, and with its slightly lower price than the other two it looks like reasonable value. And thanks to KTM's towering experience, it's as good as you'll get dynamically when the going gets rough.