Why is a motorcycle called an 'ADV' bike?

Any Indian rider scrolling a KTM 390 Adventure or Royal Enfield Himalayan 450 group has typed the word "ADV" without thinking about where it came from. It is short for adventure motorcycle, and the short form exists because of two things that happened roughly twenty years apart: a BMW built to survive the Sahara, and an internet forum built by a man who could not stop talking about his ride to Mexico.

Where the word 'adventure' came from

BMW launched the R80G/S in 1980. The G/S stood for Gelände/Straße, German for terrain and street, and it was the company's answer to a motorcycle that could do both without falling apart. It worked. Hubert Auriol won the Paris-Dakar Rally on the R80G/S in 1981 and again in 1983 on an uprated 870cc version. Gaston Rahier then won it twice more, in 1984 and 1985, on a 1,000cc version of the same basic bike, according to Wikipedia's history of the model. BMW kept building the R80G/S until 1987, by which point 21,864 had rolled out of the factory.

None of those wins came with the word "adventure" stamped on a tank. That bike was sold as a G/S. But journalists and riders needed a word for a motorcycle that raced across deserts and still had a number plate, and "adventure bike" is the one that stuck, long before BMW ever used it officially.

The year 2001: a nameplate and a forum

BMW finally put the word on a motorcycle in 2001, with the R1150GS Adventure, a long range version of its then current GS with a bigger tank, taller suspension and a single piece seat. Wikipedia's production figures for the R1150GS line show 17,828 Adventure models built against 58,023 of the standard bike, meaning roughly one in four R1150GS owners chose the Adventure.

The same year, a rider named Chris MacAskill came back from a trip through Mexico and could not find anywhere online built specifically for people who rode this way. He started what became ADVrider, as he told the Adventure Rider Radio podcast, a beat member that has interviewed him about the forum's beginnings. Riders on the site shortened "adventure rider" to "ADV rider" the way forum users shorten everything, and the abbreviation spread with the community. ADVrider now counts more than 350,000 registered members and 33 million posts, according to the media directory Muckrack, numbers that reflect the site's own reporting of its size.

What 'ADV' means on Indian roads today

In India, the word now covers everything from a KTM 390 Adventure and Royal Enfield Himalayan 450 to a BMW R 1250 GS Adventure or Triumph Tiger 900 brought in by a dealer, and riders use "ADV" as casually online as the original forum members did. The category still means what BMW's marketing meant in 1980: a motorcycle you can ride to work and also ride to a place that has no road. The forum that gave the category its slang is still running, still full of trip reports, two and a half decades after a trip to Mexico started it all.

Sources

• BMW R80G/S, Wikipedia
• BMW R1150GS, Wikipedia
• The Story Behind ADV Rider Forum, Chris MacAskill, Adventure Rider Radio
• ADVrider media outlet profile, Muckrack