Suzuki V Strom 800 DE review • First Dates

HI folks! I hope you enjoy this first ride review (well second ride really after the usual GoPro problems). I do have to state for the record that I do not ride the bike off road – this is a road based review. I still live in hope that one day when I can borrow motorbikes directly from the importers, I’ll be able to ride a bike over several days and not only for two or three hours. That will only happen if people keep hitting Like and Subscribe to gain more influence and clout… so please click on the magic buttons!

Timeline:
0:00 Hello!
0:34 Good first impressions on the road
1:32 Comparisons with the GSX-8S
2:10 Slower speed observations
8:20 A little quicker…
9:41 Walkaround (wheels, brakes, suspension, instruments, lights)
19:09 Watch out for whiskey throttle!
19:47 In gear acceleration
21:03 A bit of bend-swinging
22:48 A bit of vibration appears
23:44 Fuel economy
24:24 More bend-swinging
25:19 Gratuitous plug!
25:55 The bike gives confidence in slow speeds
26:22 Second thoughts on the front-end feel
27:17 Sorry I should have described the tyres as 80/20 here…
27:24 Comfort
28:19 Instruments again…
29:00 Clutch feel
29:20 Maintenace intervals and pricing (in the UK)
30:02 Summary Pros and Cons

P.S. My GoPro problems continued on this ride but this time it was mainly my fault in using the wrong recording mode with the 360 camera on the handlebar and so I couldn’t use that footage. The few clips I used from that camera were actually from the other ride I made on this bike!

P.P.S. Sorry if you think this video drags on for too long, I tried to trim it but I guess I’m not good at deciding what stays in and what gets cut!

Hi folks Ricky tank oh that smells hi folks Ricky tank here and uh courtesy of those lovely people at frasers of Gloucester I am out today on the Suzuki feom 800 de I’ve been curious try this bike taking a little while to get around to

It one of the first things I noticed is that it goes around medium speed bends like 40 50 60 MPH bends like a bike without a 21in front wheel more like a 19 it kind of just feels like a tall road bike to uh some degree and that’s a compliment uh we’re

Wearing Dunlop mixtour tires so you know not exactly off-road bi us I’m sure that helps with the road manners there’s a little sensation of the the front wheel kind of um leading the bike a little bit when you lean over and turn in but not

Much so if you’re looking at this in the showroom and thinking well that’s not going to be much of a road bike without FR wheel I think you might be surprised another thing I really like about this bike is the uh the low down torque as we’re about to discover

Now the engine is share the GSX 8s which I rode earlier this year and enjoyed and I was a bit concerned that with the extra uh Timber that this bik’s carrying that the engine performance will be dled somewhat so I was worried that the uh the actual weight would uh kind of take

The edge off this engine and make it feel a little bit less special cuz I think it feels pretty special wow on the gsxs so let’s uh start with low speed behavior on this bike the lumps and bumps of Britain’s roads are damped quite nicely on top of that I’m

Impressed to see that the suspension at the front is fully adjustable compression rebound and preload at the back I’m not 100% sure I think it’s a pre-o and rebound I think it’s two out of the three but I’m basically uh purposely aiming for the speed hubs just to feel how the bike

Behaves and yeah Everything feels a little bit remote not in a bad way okay the poth hole edges going up and down feel smoothed out that’s the nice thing about this big 21in front wheel I’m in third gear here at 30 let’s try and keep it in thir here 19 miles

Hour 20 M hour oh yeah third gear of P 20 without any complaints I’ll wait here shall I another nice thing since we’re on a you know off-road Star Bike we got great vision looking ahead comfortable riding position for the slow speed stuff very upright my legs are not cramped in the

Slightest better tell you my Dimensions I’m 5′ 7 170 cm with a 32in inseam or inside leg and if if I bring the camera down maybe I’m still looking forward you can see buts how my legs are bent from the knee I.E not very I can get my toes down with my 32in

Inside leg so I get my toes down you know fairly comfortably on both sides at the same time on the flat ground the uh brakes are conventional non-radial maybe saved a few pennes there for a bike in production uh but um despite a slightly soft initial

Pull there seems to be uh plenty enough power they might not have the bragging rights at Starbucks but they seem to work perfectly well we’ll go a bit faster shortly and we’ll see how they perform on the a roads at these slow speeds the engine is feeling really smooth SS pretty

Decent the clutch take up the clutch is nice to engage and uh to to to pull away except the uh the the biting point is really quite early and it’s not span adjustable front brake lever is but the uh clutch isn’t so you have to go in a bit more

Conventional old schooled adjustment if you want to try and uh fix that little issue now the bike does have a quick shift so you don’t always need the clutch now this bike has the Suzuki drive mode selector this gives different levels of throttle response and uh torque

Delivery um I’m in mode B there’s basically three modes a b and c a is hilarious C’s like the soft iie rain type mode and I’m finding b well even a Works quite well but B kind of works brilliantly really for uh normal Road riding a certainly has a bit of a a

Kick when you twist the throttle but if you’re tired it’s been a long day on the bike sometimes you don’t want that um liveliness in the throttle so B works well then or even C mode if you really actually should be pulling over cuz you’re that tired or in sketchy condition

Look at the state of the road here so I’m going to find uh if there’s no traffic coming right in front of me or try a couple of potholes oh lovely look at this bad boy the bike’s hardly being deflected from those potholes did get a bit bouncy but didn’t get at all

Scary and that’s why why I like these sorts of bikes on the road the one thing uh at these beads is a little bit frustrating and I’ll definitely be coming back to it is uh wind noise even at 40 m hour there’s a beginning of a bit of a a raw hitting my

Helmet and I wouldn’t really be expecting that of any bike at less than 40 mph but here we are now the screen is adjustable in free positions but you got to get an allen key out in order to adjust the screen there’s no adjuster for it I am tempted

When I stop the bike shortly and do a little walk around very tempted to go look for the tool kit see if there’s an Al key in there that we can uh use to uh bring the screen up now when you get on the brakes on this bike particularly at the front you

Do unsurprisingly get a fair bit of fork dive so that’s a bit disconcerting if you do have to get on the brakes quickly but if you’re used to traal style bikes then you’ll know what that’s all About let’s get the speed up a Bit Now we’re going a little bit quicker for a short while I can tell you I’m really impressed with the quick shifter very smooth going up the box door behind me I’m going to slow down actually let’s go down the box once we pass this car so we don’t scare them Yeah positive click going down on the um Auto blipper but I would say I might want to adjust the gear lever um I had to kind of bring my foot well almost level with the peg the gear Peg and lift up slightly just feels like the the gear levers just one notch too

High I’m sure that could be adjusted Uhoh we got a cow think I’m going to try and beat the cow beat the cow so let’s take you through some of the specs on this machine you may already know 776 CC parallel twin one of those 270° cranks now which gives it a more v twin type

Character the Bor and stroke on this machine is uh 84 mm x 7 the compression ratio is 12.8 to1 which actually I think is quite a healthy compression ratio for a bike that’s tuned more for low end power whatever they’ve done it does it well and the

Output is around about 85 horsepower at 85,000 RPM and the torque is 57t PB at 6,800 RPM that’s quite high so it’s delivering a a fair amount of torque down low for a bike whose um Peak Tor at nearly 7,000 RPM now some other specs and one thing

That’s got quite a few people’s attention is the curb weight 230 kilos which is a fair bit of weight when you’re trying to get the bike off the side side stand if you’re doing it just with your hands alone or your arms it takes quite

A bit of effort so best to get your hip into it a little bit to help push the bike up now one thing that does affect the uh the weight of the motor bike really is the fuel capacity being 20 L that’s a fair bit of fuel that it’s carrying

Around um but it’s carrying it well once you get riding afternoon so big old 21in front wheel um 90 by 90 so you can see the conventional caliper there on the front well twin disc obviously uh but uh yeah no issues with those really they they work

Perfectly well as far as I’m concerned so far the discs here petal shaped which I thought was kind of more The Preserve of kazaki but maybe I just haven’t noticed these sorts of um discs on Suzukis recently so uh 310 mil at the front floating discs and 260 mil that’s

A decent size rear disc as well with a kind of single piston caliper at the back we got a 15707 uh tire there obviously ABS the rear ABS is switchable you can turn that off um also with gravel mode on the traction control you can get more

Flexible traction control so you can uh get a little bit layy in the dirt but it will still kick in if it thinks there’s going to be a potential tip off but it can’t work miracles bear that in mind now we got fully adjustable uh front forks

Here with have a tension there come on focus and I can see an adjuster at the bottom well done to Suzuki fully adjustable on both Forks engine not too many cables hanging around pretty tidy although I noticed something similar on the GSX a some of these sleeves which I like the look of

They just end in unusual places I I don’t quite see the point of not continuing the the sleeves here the protective sleeves um odd Choice looks untidy to me but not a big issue in the grand scheme of things we do have uh a rear carrier which is

Handy with have decent grab rails as well for the plion pan pegs H there’s a decent distance below the seat I think I’m finding the seat very comfortable so far no complaints there and although we’re on slightly unlevel ground not the best what I will do for the benefit of

That camera and for you folks is to sit on the bike now so you can see what my stand over is like make sure my jeans are up there for maximum clearance there you go no that that feels similar to what I’m getting on the

Road if you can see that my heels are not down on both sides but my toes are comfortably down um on both sides uh it’s just you might be able to see there the peg just well I want to put my feet the pegs are there but you can’t do

Much about that that happens on a lot of um offro star bikes with pegs in this sort of position I can tell you but I can’t show you yet I’ll try I will try side stand quite easy to get to can you see it there oh there you go

Actually look how much it sticks out from the uh from the bike so that’s really easy to get a hold of overall I’m pretty pretty happy with the styling of the bike the blue and the plastic hard wearing I guess and probably the kind of stuff you do want if the bike’s likely

To tip over um but it doesn’t for me doesn’t really job with the black very well this this blue plastic but still for me anyway not ugly so yeah that’s a pretty handsome machine quick look at the instruments mostly well pretty much all controlled through here let’s um

Hold that down I guess we’ll get into the settings shall we no we don’t we’ll hold it up then and see what happens yay there we go ride mode we in Focus we are now press the middle button RPM set where are we oh yeah that’s in the right place

Go quick shift is set just on or off I presume yeah exit down info that’s not that interesting I don’t think uh what’s down here settings brightness day night mode units State and time reset System Info what we got on the electronics there you go there’s the electronics

Exit so one sad thing to note about this is there’s no connectivity to a smartphone um there’s no app um that lets this bike speak to uh to your smartphone so would be nice if that was there it’s there on the gsx1000 GT um but not on this or the

Gs88 oh one thing I was interested in um screen adjustments so yeah it’s done by Alan bolt or alen key and I’m wondering if we can get and have a look under the seat if I can find the oh there you are find the key let’s have a little look under

Here okay so here’s the back end I think of the airbox there’s the air intake down here by the battery and there is the toolkit apparently this and that I imagine there’s a screwdriver handle cuz this is like a a screwdriver bit imagine there’s a handle somewhere but I I can’t

See it but I do see see this so um I’ll put this camera down and we’re going to adjust that screen oh this is too big and this is a screwdriver bit with a flat blade and a Phillips on the end so unfortunately it doesn’t look like the tool you’re most

Likely need on this bike um is present well that’s that then at least you can uh see what’s going on under here not much um storage space Maybe under here what’s going on at the back of the seat these two bits that go into the ah screwdriver handle there you go so this

Takes up a little bit of space in this void here so there’s not much space to uh stuff stuff that’s the third time I’ve tried to say that uh now um the one thing that will upset some ofro purists is that these are tubed tires and not

Tubeless so uh you have to fact that into your buying decisions um LED lights all around though right we get to some good light or will it flicker in the camera oh I don’t think we’re flickering actually that’s uh pretty decent well done makes a change most lights end up flickering

Oh we got some cows coming I think I’m going to have to disappear soon cuz I can’t really control what they do anyway there’s your lights indicators let’s do the hazards quickly see what we got I would say not particularly bright but yeah kind of remind me remind me of the current BMW

Ones they seem to be quite bright if you hit them just right looking at the right angle but off angle maybe not quite so uh clear but you can see they’re kind of lighting up the glass on the edge of the indicator could be worse but could be

Better we need to get back on the road before these cows come or they are coming so I need to go so one thing this bike is not lacking in is uh throttle response at low Speeds so much so that in uh second and first gear you’re at risk of a risk whiskey throttle where you might accident the uh whack the frot open and it will respond quickly there there is no waiting especially in uh a mode on the sdms the front map a lot of these

So-called cows are actually balls they got horns and big fourth gear 40 m hour let’s see how long it takes to get to 60 3 2 1 59 then so fourth gear at 40 I whacked the throttle and uh it was a little bit subdue to begin with didn’t respond

Immediately let’s try third gear from 40 40 I said yeah that uh the initial response was a good bit quicker there why what the revs at 40 and fourth that was um or three and a half And uh 40 in third about 4250 40 and second I might want to hang on for this one I don’t think I’ll get to 60 Whoa the front wheel came up ever so slightly but it did the strange thing about the wind noise is well it is quite loud but there not a lot of turbulence it’s not Uncomfortable not a lot of turbulence there is a bit but uh yeah could be worse I felt worse with this amount of noise So I’ve had a little chance to uh twist the front back the front end does dance about a bit when your uh Bend swinging at higher speeds not um unnervingly so but it’s not quite as solid as it feels at slower speeds the engine it revs nicely but you

Can feel that the power is dropping off towards the top end of the revs there’s not kick it seems to be um doesn’t hang on to the power quite as well as a GSX a from what I recall from what I remember from riding that bike but it’s Keen

It doesn’t feel uncomfortable riding the bike in in the higher revs it’ll do it it’ll let you have fun if that’s what you’re looking for then we slow down again 45 miles an hour here and we’re back to relaxing now as the revs did go up earlier on um I was riding quite

Dynamically and what I mean by that was the RS were going up and down I didn’t have the space to keep it set um position in the rev counter but uh there were some Vibes kicking in there on the higher revs like past like 6,000

RPM in the foot rests a little bit on the lever I I tend to leave my fingers on the lever as a rule so um I’m bit susp susceptible to to feeling Vibes there so around about 6 7,000 RPM when you’re getting on the throttle and accelerating basically that’s when the

The foot Peg Vibes seem to come in a bit but if we roll back to a kind of a constant throttle then uh the foot pegs do get calmer so I’ve ridden this bike uh twice now this week facts phrases after the first ride or test ride was a bit of bed

Due to camera issues and I can’t tell you how much fuel I’ve put in this bike but it looks like I filled the tank up certainly not going to get a tank’s worth of riding done I’m averaging apparently according to the trip meter 55 m per

Gallon and at 55 MP gallon we’re talking a 200 mile range if not More Oh brakes are impressive I did use both of them just to play it safe and kind of minimize the diving a little bit at the front end but they haul you up pretty quickly sadly I haven’t ridden the uh the Hond trans out or or any recent Honda because I haven’t got a

Relationship with any Honda dealers so unfortunately uh I have to uh give up comparisons to to other channels but the more viewers I have and the more subscriptions I get uh more likely is other motorcycle dealers retailers and importers maybe one day we joining the fun so please do that like

And subscribe thing if you’re still watching after many minutes have passed so far in this video again big front wheel means that if you are pushed basically to the side of the road because of traffic conditions and you get into the the rubbish bits where the road isn’t even

And there’s a few holes in the TAC um the bike isn’t getting upset by that actually i’ got to say I did mention that the front end felt a little bit flighty at speed earlier on well I’ve done a bit more speed and uh actually it’s not that

Bad felt a bit more composed this time so uh perhaps it does depend on the road surface what’s underneath you I mean the first time when I commented that it felt a bit less than solid still wasn’t bad it’s kind of what I expected I a bike like this but the

Last little push on I just did the bike actually simply felt good okay we’ve been on a little bit of a a higher speed Raz there and I’m walking back even more from my previous statement about the front end it doesn’t feel like a sports tour

It doesn’t feel like a bike with a 17inch front wheel for sure but it is impressive for a bike with a 21in wheel wearing um you know 50/50 well probably 703 Road biased rubber it at higher speeds it was good I cannot tell a lie I’ve been on a bike for about

I don’t know uh getting on 2 hours now the seat is very comfortable I find for that distance it’s nice and supportive doesn’t squish very much down but it doesn’t feel hard there’s a reasonable amount of space to move around might be a to show you if you’ll

Excuse the uh the cables uh in view there but yeah you can move forward or back it’s okay can’t go any further back cuz there’s a seat hub for the passenger seat and the passengers looks like uh they’ll be well cated for as well so you can see at the top there

Traction control sdms to drive mode and the ABS just press mode there to kind of cycle into those think can push up and down got to let the throttle off to do it oh traction control off I don’t think so drive mode we kind of talked about AB andc

ABS now funny thing is there is I can’t adjust it maybe I have to be at stand still so you got there and there and off all right that’s turned off ABS at the rear as you can see thank you that’s quite clear Suzuki much appreciated put it back to uh two for

The next Rider I think clutch isn’t exactly light it feels like there’s a a spring in there feels a bit spring bound like it takes a little bit of effort to uh to operate it not the heaviest clutch by a long shot that I’ve sampled but you know it could be

Lighter I’ll put up the um maintenance intervals on the screen as well that’s something I didn’t dig into let’s hope they’re uh very reasonable I know this bike is a good bit more expensive than it’s direct competition the transalp a bit more expensive than the ailia t EG uh more expensive than the

T7 but I think basically you’re getting a lot of bike for your money with what feels like good suspension solid chassis that’s behaving itself uh on road with a winning engine that’s not quite like the competition so quick summary uh downsides wind screen rubbish didn’t

Have any Allen key to adjust it which is a bit of a shame I expect it will take a totally different screen to solve that sort of problem with the wind turbulence and the noise but it might not affect everybody um weight it takes a bit of a

Heave to get it off the side stand on level ground so if you’re a bit weaker than I am and I’m not very strong and uh if you on uneven ground that might make life a bit more difficult so not really comparing its weight against its

Competitors it’s just it’s a bit of a lump to get out right generally but the positives there are several loving the engine engine is great Suzuki did a great job there with a low and mid-range torque and the bike hangs in there at the higher revs as well it’s not very

Powerful at the higher revs you can feel the power tailing off but it’s still a willing rer it’s still accelerates up there especially in fifth gear fourth and fifth gear on the back roads quite a bit of fun and the chassis I’m impressed with this 21in front-wheel lead chassis

That it feels as neutral as it does and that’s why you know I go towards classing it not really even as an adventure bike but as a great commuter and a sports tourer with the emphasis on touring so aside from the screen for me

I’m all in on this bike I really like it I applaud Suzuki for this new model first new engine in over 20 years they’ve hit it out the park both the engine and gearbox so yeah I hope uh you’ve enjoyed this video thumbs up and uh subscribe if

You like my content let me know what you think of this bike and what you think of the video in the comments and uh I’ll see you in another one soon hopefully take care folks ta