Yahoo Autos 2024 BMW F900GS: This Is It
BMW’s midsize adventure bikes are, for my dollar, some of the most fun you can have on two wheels. The punchy twin engines, the tall, narrow frames — I like them so much, I went out and bought one of my own. But the F850GS, like my F800GS before it, has a fatal flaw: It looks kind of dweeby.
This is particulalry egregeious when the bike’s competitors — ADVs like the Tenere and Tuareg — just look so damn good. Luckily, BMW’s new update to the middleweight line finally gives up on the beak and asymmetrical headlights, and it creates one of the company’s best-looking bikes in the process. Welcome to the era of the F900GS.
Read more
R.I.P. Gary Graham, Star Trek: Enterprise and Alien Nation actor
Masters Of The Air review: A brutal, beautiful World War II miniseries
Stop Everything You're Doing and Enable Stolen Device Protection on Your iPhone
Daredevil: Born Again Could Bring Back Another Marvel Netflix Villain
Of course, styling isn’t the only difference with the new F900GS. Its displacement is increased from the 850 up to 895 cc, finally bringing horsepower over the three-digit mark to 105 at 8,500 rpm, and the new torque figure of 68.6 pound-feet approaches Ducati DesertX numbers. We’ll need to see the bike in person to know how its claimed 483-pound curb weight, down a claimed 30 pounds from the F850GS, compares to the Ducati’s real-world measured 517-pound mass.
Like the F850GS, the new 900 uses a steel trellis frame with a bolt-on rear subframe, a favorite of off-roaders who love to bend steel with their biggest BDR crashes. Unlike the outgoing bike, though, the F900GS doesn’t have much else around that subframe. The standard bike sheds all luggage racks in favor of a slimmer, neater rear end with a flat rally-style seat. This is probably ideal news for Me Specifically, a person who wants a big enduro but does too much highway riding to tolerate a buzzy thumper, but it may not be as well-received by fans of hard panniers.
BMW does claim the bike has a new “luggage carrier” that allows you to mount “soft bags, rucksacks or an aluminum case system from the original BMW Motorrad accessories range,” but it’s not clear how that’ll work out for fans of third-party cargo carriers. The F900GS also shares new, updated suspension components with the F900GS Adventure, both using Showa forks up front and a lightened swingarm out back. BMW claims 9.1 inches of clearance up front and 8.5 inches in the rear, as well as seat heights just under 34.5 inches for both.
The F900GS will start at $13,495 before destination fees. If the current F850GS is anything to go by, expect base bikes like that to be rare on dealer lots — you’re likely to shell out another few hundred for an option package along the way, but such fees also net you the sweet São Paulo Yellow color option. It’s a give and take.
The F900GS Adventure
That shared suspension equipment is as natural a segue as any to the big brother of BMW’s middleweights, the F900GS Adventure. The usual accoutrement that make up the Adventure nameplate are all here — larger fuel tank, bigger windshield, wider foot pegs, aluminum skid plate, extra luggage capacity — but this ADV’s design differs more than usual from its little sibling.
