Bajaj's First Adventure Bike Just Got Spotted, and Now I'm Doing Ladakh Math Again

I've spent enough evenings this month with a Bajaj Pulsar spec sheet open in one tab and Google Maps zoomed in on the Manali-Leh highway in another to know exactly how this goes. I will not be riding to Ladakh this year. I say that now, up front, so we can both relax.

But God help me, Bajaj just made it a lot harder to let the idea go.

Spy shots have surfaced of a camouflaged test mule spotted rolling with a fleet of Bajaj Pulsars and a KTM Adventure — and no, the KTM wasn't just tagging along for the ride. Bajaj has been quietly building adventure bikes for KTM's Indian lineup for years now. This looks like the moment it finally puts its own badge on one.

The clues are all there

The taillight and swingarm are dead ringers for the Pulsar NS200's, which is the giveaway that this is a Bajaj and not just another KTM prototype in a bad disguise. Past that, though, the family resemblance stops. The silhouette — raised front fender, long single-piece seat, upright bars, a slim mid-section built for standing on the pegs — leans hard into KTM 390 Enduro R territory, except with a noticeably bigger fuel tank bolted on for actual touring range instead of just weekend trail duty.

Here's the part that had me sitting up straight: the engine casing doesn't match anything currently in Bajaj's lineup. It looks like KTM hardware — most likely a 250cc liquid-cooled single, which would give it enough grunt for real touring while keeping the bike affordable and easy on fuel. Long-travel suspension front and rear, spoke wheels in a 19-inch front / 17-inch rear combo, an upswept exhaust, and — this is the detail that got me — a top box fitted to the test mule with room left for a pillion. Someone at Bajaj is already thinking about two-up touring, which is exactly the kind of detail that makes a spec sheet start writing its own adventure-trip fanfiction in my head.

My one gripe, and it's a real one: please, Bajaj, tubeless spoke wheels. Patching a tube on the side of a mountain pass is not the bonding experience with your motorcycle that people make it out to be. I would know. I did it once, on a much smaller trip, and I have not fully recovered.

What we don't know yet

The spy shots don't give a clean look at the instrument cluster or headlight, so that's still a mystery. What is fairly clear is the timeline — this looks close enough to production-ready that a launch during the festive season or early 2027 seems realistic, with pricing expected around ₹2 lakh (ex-showroom). At that price it'd be squaring up directly against the TVS Apache RTX 300, Suzuki V-Strom SX, and KTM's own 390 Adventure — which, if Bajaj really is using KTM-derived hardware here, makes for a fairly spicy bit of in-house competition.

None of this changes my actual plans for the next twelve months, which remain: ride to the grocery store, think about Ladakh, close the tab. But a sub-$2,500 ADV with a KTM engine and a top box already fitted in the spy shots? Ask me again in the spring. I make no promises about my answer.