The middleweight adventure bike class has become a wonderfully chaotic place. Once upon a time, you bought a BMW, Triumph, Honda, or Yamaha and called it a day. Now Chinese manufacturers are piling into the segment with increasingly serious hardware, and ZXMoto has apparently decided subtlety is overrated. And its upcoming 820X isn’t another budget parallel-twin ADV. It’s packing three cylinders, 116 horsepower, and some very familiar European-bike energy.
If ZXMoto isn’t on your radar yet, that’s understandable. The Chinese manufacturer is still extremely young, but it was founded by Zhang Xue, the same engineer who founded Kove. ZXMoto made its global debut at EICMA in 2025 with a frankly ridiculous collection of new motorcycles, including the 820RR sportbike which made history as the first Chinese motorcycle to win in WorldSSP, as well as an adventure concept called the 820 ADV. That concept has now evolved into something much more important: an actual production motorcycle.
