That’s 60,000 miles

The Aprilia Futura is, after all, Italian, so you you can’t expect it to be reliable, right? Wrong!

One problem with building a site like this is that it tends to list faults more than good points. That’s for two reasons:

* The fact that many owners have clocked up very high mileages on their bikes and many faults have only come to light with heavy use. At the time of writing I know of at least one bike with 100,000 miles up, and plenty more to cover more than 50,000 miles, many with few, if any, problems.

* The wealth of information shared by owners from all over the world on the apriliaforum. The enthusiasm of owners the world over for the bike is staggering, as is their willingness to help each other out.

The Futura was designed to do big miles and many owners have taken full advantage.

RPB in Volgagrad. That’s Russia. All the way from the Netherlands

If the bike was unreliable you wouldn’t even think about riding from The Netherlands to Volgagrad, as RPB did or on a marathon trip from Bath around the Balkans, taking in Albania, as Spitfire Triple did.

And trips like theirs are not unusual.

It’s fair to say the Futura is no more or less dependable than your average Japanese bike. It’s certainly no fragile Italian thoroughbred – and Aprilia aren’t known as the Italian Honda for nothing.

Like any bike there can be bad ‘uns but the majority are solid, reliable machines – so long as you don’t neglect them.

But you should look after any bike or expect it to let you down. Unfortunately, at least in the UK, a fair few neglected bikes have made it onto the second hand market in the last few years and it seems like it’s these that give the trouble.

But always with buying used, look at the condition of the bike very closely. Despite their rarity plenty have been well looked after and these should get the best prices.

However, most of the faults listed on this website have only occurred to a handful of bikes – often after extremely high mileages, and most remain relatively trouble-free.

It’s arguable that the Futura, once a few common issues have been taken care of, can be as reliable as any Japanese and European sports tourer.

It’s certainly more comfortable.

So don’t let any faults you read about on these pages put you off buying one, because you’d be missing out.