Used test: 2016 BMW S1000XR SPORT SE SPORTY ADVENTURER

Ensuring success in the motorcycle manufacturing business requires many skills, one of which is accurately reading the market and its constantly changing trends. It really doesn’t matter how good your bikes are – if no one wants to buy them then their excellence is wasted. You have to build machines there’s a demand for. The story of BMW’s S1000XR ‘Adventure Sports’ bike is a good case in point, and arguably has connections with the changing success of one its other models.

Back in 2010, despite having very little experience at the sharp end of the superbike manufacture, when the German firm introduced its superb S1000RR superbike, it was instantly hailed as a huge success with appetite for it being considerable. Unless you’d got your order in early, you had to join the waiting list for one of the very speedy and technically advanced machines. It took nearly a year before supply caught up with demand.

But that crucial importance of maintaining an overview and prediction of market trends was very much underlined during the following years. As the popularity of superbikes generally began to wane – largely because of the increasing average age of motorcycle riders, their reduced desire to ride less comfy mounts and need to go everywhere at ten tenths – the S1000RR’s popularity dipped. Given the overall success of the German brand’s range of bikes, the downturn in