The early launch of the highly anticipated Yamaha 700 Tenere in Europe has many people in the rest of the world pretty unhappy. Seeing all the Europeans having fun on their new T7s while we have to sit on the sidelines and watch straight sucks. As an ADV enthusiast, this is not fun for me either but as a parts manufacturer, waiting a full year longer than my European competition is a whole different level of terrible.

We've had a deposit at our Canadian dealer of choice for 21 months already (placed Nov 2017 after the EICMA bike show) so we should be one of the first in the country to get a Canadian spec T7. That's cool and all but still quite unacceptable!

We enlisted a friend of a friend in Switzerland to order a Euro spec T7 as soon as the online ordering opened this spring. It was a bit unnerving to wire the full purchase amount to someone I'd never met before so he could go and buy the bike on my behalf. When I look at the chain of events, I could have just as easily lost all my $$$ on this deal. Anyway it's all worked out well so far (few snags but OK).

How did we get this Euro spec T7 into Canada? We applied for and received a special 12 month permit that allows businesses to temporarily import vehicles for things like exhibition, evaluation and testing, shooting of movies and TV shows etc. The catch with the permit is that after 12months, the vehicle has to be exported out of the country or crushed. Heartbreaking really. After a year of abuse, will it be worth enough to justify the paperwork drama and freight cost to ship it back to Europe, unlikely but time will tell.

For the next 11.5 months we'll be riding the wheels off this thing, seeing what we can break and what needs upgrading. We also plan on starting #TenereTuesday on our social media channels with new T7 content every Tuesday. If you haven't already, subscribe on Instragram, Facebook and YouTube so you don't miss out. There will be updates here as well as an FAQ section for the bike.