RETURN of the TUAREG

It’s been a fair while since Aprilia have had a midrange adventure bike in its line-up, and if you ignore the focussed mini-vee 450cc and 550cc dirt bikes, it’s over two decades since the Noale factory produced anything midrange that wasn’t focussed purely for the Tarmac.

Of course, the ‘soft road’ adventure bike market is a huge part of the motorcycling world in the 21 century. While Aprilia hasn’t had a Tuareg in the range for a while (the original was last in the range way back in 1994!), the large market segment that an adventure bike offers means that all manufacturers want to have a bike for this category in their range. And, in the same way that the 660 RS and Tuono have slipped neatly into the Aprilia range and proved to be fiercely competitive against larger capacity rivals, so the Tuareg faces up to larger bikes in the adventure market, given that just about each and every model of that style is bigger than a litre in capacity, although the Tuareg will