Can Aprilia’s heavily updated nakedbike seduce buyers in the competitive middleweight sector?
V-twin power has always had a way of grabbing people’s attention. It’s a highly desirable quality worthy of being placed in any motorcycle, and there’s one country that dominates when it comes to celebrating that special mix of pleasure and thrills. I don’t know what secret power the Italians have when it comes to making V-twins but they are masters, with Ducati, Moto Guzzi and Aprilia offering them to a drooling public.
The Shiver is not a new model. It came onto the market in 2007, and at the time it was cutting edge, being one of the first roadbikes to sport a fly-by-wire throttle system.
The 750 version of the Shiver has served Aprilia well, but to avoid this machine getting relegated to history, changes needed to happen. And they have – enter the new 900cc edition of the Shiver.
The naked Shiver 750 was designed as an all-round machine. It was a bike you could ride to work, travel on, or take for a Sunday ride. But while it was good for all those things, it lacked zap and its powerplant, although having the great undertones of a V-twin, was slightly dull. Thankfully the new 900 has seen a lot of changes, putting right the zap issues of the 750. And dull is no longer a word to associate with this new incarnation.
The biggest news for this year is the bigger capacity engine. The newly developed V90 is a longitudinal 90° V-twin that’s liquid cooled and sports a double overhead camshaft with a mixed gear/chain timing system for each individual cylinder. It’s the favoured four valves per cylinder that Aprilia has employed going back to its first dabble with big four-stroke machinery in the late 1990s, when it created the RSV 1000cc Mille.
The engine is now almost a full 900 at 896cc, and it is Euro 4 compliant. The extra capacity was achieved by increasing the length of the stroke by 11mm, and this was also the key to improving torque in the midrange, one of the main goals for the Aprilia engineers in the design phase.
Read the full story in the current issue (AMCN Year Book Vol 67 No 12)
TEST STEVE MARTIN
PHOTOGRAPHY MARK DADSWELL
