Certainly not any form of 'travel' bike. Going away on a 3 or 4 day trip would necessitate an oil change. Madness
My whole point. For me (and I suspect many like me who fancy greenlaning or trail riding both here and abroad) being able to ride 30/50/70 miles on road to some nice trail riding area, spend a few hours doing just that and then riding home via a petrol station shouldn't be beyond the comprehension of a firm like Honda. 105 miles is laughable. I thought this was going to be a larger CC version of the 250L
The cfr450l is a cfr450x made road legal by Honda, it’s not in the guise of the CRF250L, which bears no relation to a crf250xrl. It’s been thoroughly re-engineered to pass the most stringent emission regs, but is vastly superior to any other road legal trail bike. There are better more powerful Offroad bikes, but theyre not designed for road use. Have a go on a Honda CRF250L and then ride a crf250xrl, one weighs 146kgs and the other 115kgs, one cost £4600 and the other cost £6700, there’s a huge difference in every way, because the crf250L is not a serious Offroad bike, it’s a road bike that looks like an Offroad bike.
How many times do we read someone say “why don’t manufacturers take a competition bike and make it road legal”, we’ll that’s exactly what Honda have done. If you added a oil cooler and auxiliary oil tank to increase the volume of oil, it would do many more miles without an oil change. A crf250L takes 1.8 ltrs of oil, a crf250xrl take about 1 ltr of oil, an L has a relatively easy life, an xrl has it’s neck rung everytime it’s ridden.
If you have a 70 mile road ride to a trail, refuel before you get there, spend a couple of hours on the trail and then top up on the way home. If it had a 3.5 gallon tank, everyone would be saying it’s too wide.
Adventure bikes are too heavy Offroad and Offroad bikes are crap on the road, unfortunately no one wants to make a 450/500 Offroad bike that is a great road bike too. The CRF450L has been made to replace the XR650L, it’s more powerful, much lighter and a much better handling bike, it ain’t perfect that’s for sure, but it ain’t bad either. And anyway, who rides stock bikes, they’re the platform to add to, to make the bike better suited to your own requirements.