Every motorcycle rider knows, that cold hands is something terrible while riding. So we checked for third party options of heated grips. We were recommended to try Oxford Heated Grips and ordered two pairs of Oxford Hotgrips Premium Adventure.
The Adventure version is longer than the Sports and Touring version. They have a length of 132mm and can be cut down to 122mm if needed. The waterproof heat controller has 5 heat stages. If you set it to 100% you could probably prepare a sausage on them. They get extremely hot.
You need some time for the installation and you should consider to install them accurately. Roughen your handlebar and your throttle tube – otherwise they will start sliding after a while, because of the permanent temperature differences.
Don’t place your wirings too tight. Especially the cable coming out of the grip starts breaking, if it gets highly bent. It happened on Miriams grips, but we could strengthen it with tape.
We would replace the connectors with smaller and waterproof ones, or simply solder them together instantly. Like that, you won’t get a loose or corroded contact after a while.
Although the intelligent heat controller has a battery saving mode, we wouldn’t connect it to your battery directly. We always connect all our electronical devices over a relay. This guarantees, that nothing can start draining your batterie, if anything goes wrong.
What we like
- They heat very fast and the different heat settings are selected really well.
- We had almost no trouble for more than 85000km.
- The grips are comfortable and don’t seem to wear off that fast.
What we don’t like
- The metal bracket for the heat controller is a simple and cheap metal sheet. It looks terrible, but does its job.
- The connectors are cheap, not really waterproof and too big. It can be difficult to place them in your headlight area and we had a bad connection several times.
- Miriam’s grips start dissolving and the rubber became very sticky. It seems ok after all these kilometers, but we wanted to mention it.
Conclusion: Heated grips is one of the best upgrades you can do on your adventure bike. We had so many situations, where they made a quite uncomfortable weather a bit more bearable. The Oxford Hotgrips are reliable and never really let us down. Install them accurately, replace or remove the shitty connectors and enjoy warm hands forever. We would puchase them again any time.
