Big Read: The Ducati Multistrada at 20

Twenty years ago the biking world was still clinging to the peak of superbike supremacy complete with lurid leathers, loud pipes, and a black market in partially atomised kneesliders so that those who couldn’t scrape a knee still looked cool down the pub.

How times have changed. And few could have predicted that Pierre Terblanche’s new creation for 2003, which looked like Cyclops had been crossed with a wheelie bin, was going to help change the biking landscape, develop a new niche of adventure-sports bikes, genetically modify the very DNA of Ducati – and be the bike that transformed their reliability and reputation.

Four generations, a rotating cast of players, and well over 144,000 bikes later, the Multistrada is Ducati’s biggest selling single model (and the DesertX derivative is their third biggest). It’s a halo bike for the brand, and the market-defining
zenith of it’s ‘Many Roads’ ethos.

Ducati have form for being a bit early to the party, for pioneering just ahead of the market’s appetite, but while their Sport Classic range died away just in time for consumer desire to explode in its wake, the Multistrada has ridden the tsunami that they started with Terblanche’s quirky ripple two decades ago.

So how did a manufacturer utterly synonymous with superbikes make such a polar shift?