BMW 450 GS Trophy

[Esquire]

Having recently attended the BMW Off Road Skills course in Wales where I chose the 450 trophy for 2 days I'm considering getting one.

Interested to hear from owner's reviews generally .

My usage would like be 50/50 road/green lanes and I'm not the most experienced of off road riders.

TIA

[H40405J]

I’d recommend YouTube, and Advrider.com, both have got plenty of owner videos and comments. Might struggle for owner reviews in here, I don’t recall anyone having posted up that they have one (although I might be wrong).

My thoughts, having recently bought a bike for similar purposes to you (albeit 25% light trail, 75% road) was that the 450GS felt very much like a road bike to sit on, spoked wheels were either unavailable or a £1500 option, and that the overall price was high for a bike built by TVS in India.

[Esquire]

H40405J said:

I d recommend YouTube, and Advrider.com, both have got plenty of owner videos and comments. Might struggle for owner reviews in here, I don t recall anyone having posted up that they have one (although I might be wrong).

My thoughts, having recently bought a bike for similar purposes to you (albeit 25% light trail, 75% road) was that the 450GS felt very much like a road bike to sit on, spoked wheels were either unavailable or a £1500 option, and that the overall price was high for a bike built by TVS in India.

Thank you kindly .

I've watched a good few videos on YouTube but you never quite know how biased they might be.

May I ask what bike you bought ?

[H40405J]

Esquire said:

Thank you kindly .

I've watched a good few videos on YouTube but you never quite know how biased they might be.

May I ask what bike you bought ?

I bought an ex demo Kawasaki KLE500. It’s excellent and rides very well on the gravel trails of the Ridgeway but was specific to my use case (25% light gravel trails, will service at home, a good low seated touring bike for gf to take to Alps next year) so wouldn’t necessarily recommend it.

Depends very much on what your 50% off road involves. If it’s the Ridgeway on a sunny weekend at pottering speed (like mine is) then any good adventure bike will do. 450GS, KLE, CFMoto 450MT, Himalayan 450 will all be decent options. Plenty from the next class up do this well too, Tenere, KTM 7/890, CFMoto 800/1000MTX, Tuareg and will be much nicer road bikes than the 450GS.

If that 50% off road is more along the lines of a Welsh green lane in February then I’d go as light as possible as you’ll spend a lot of time picking it up. Either buy a cheap used CRF300 or Voge 300 Rally and treat it as a disposable item or a proper enduro bike.