The new BMW R 1300 GS is lighter, more compact, more powerful, and more capable than its predecessor — despite being larger in engine capacity. And it nearly didn’t happen.
Five years ago in May 2018, when Markus Schramm took over as CEO of BMW Motorrad, one of his first acts was to cancel the projected update of the company’s biggestselling model, the R 1250 GS, in its entirety, ordering his engineers to start all over again. “It was too big, too derivative, and not sufficiently innovative compared to what we’d been making for the past decade or more,” he told me before his recent retirement. “I wanted a much bigger step forward than what they were planning.”
The result is the new clean-screen (design-wise!) 2024 R 1300 GS unveiled on Sept 28, 2023, the same day BMW celebrated the 100th anniversary of its first production motorcycle, the R32. It came just as Dr. Schramm retired to his villa in Crete, satisfied with his past five years spent reinventing BMW Motorrad as a combined electric and ICE manufacturer, thanks to the EU’s derogation permitting e-fuelled (carbon-neutral) combustion models on both two and four wheels to continue being sold after 2035. And that will include the future derivatives of this all-new GS model, as Schramm spelled out to me: “While I’m convinced that there will bean increasing number of people requesting E-mobility on motorcycles,” he said, “there will also be a lot of areas where an electric bike simply doesn’t make sense, and adventure touring is one of those.”
ONE MILLION GSs
Just looking at BMW’s new core model — more than one million examples of its GS family have been sold in the past 43 years since its 1980 introduction in R80G/S guise kickstarted the adventure bike revolution — it’s
