Just like the 125 Duke and the forthcoming 350 Duke, KTM 200 Duke has been designed and built by the Austrian manufacturer – in cooperation with Indian automotive giant and stakeholder Bajaj – with the flourishing Asian markets in mind.
Versatile motorcycles with small and mid size engines turned out to be pretty popular in countries like India and China, and this particular segment has been constantly on the rise in the past few years, and this is a trend that the company wants to exploit in full.
However, there’s a particular feature of the model that seems to worry the Indian customers: the under belly exhaust.
The point is that daily commuting in India is something pretty different from what we Europeans would associate to that definition: it might imply riding on heavily dirty and/or dusty roads, crossing the woods, and even wading some water course.
This last thing is actually what is worrying the Indians right now: they are afraid that the bike might just get stranded by the water flowing inside the exhaust and leave them in the middle of a stream.
With the Monsoon season just around the corner – which makes flooding in certain Indian regions more than just likely, it is basically a given – KTM just had to address this issue in order to avoid undermining the predictable success of the 200 Duke in those lands.
For this reason, the manufacturer has just released a two-minute long video featuring a specific few tests that proves beyond any reasonable doubt that the baby Duke can actually swim and all: you could even park it in a river, have a drink, come back half an hour later, turn they key and off you go.
Point proven, and we guess the news will soon reach about a billion people.