Kawasaki has been super-quiet this show season, with a new Z900, Versys 1100, Ninja 1100 and… that’s about it. But get this: They showed a new machine at EICMA that sure looks like a new adventure bike is coming.

The weird booth display says the bike is a new KLE, and that “Life’s a Rally. Ride it.”

For those who don’t remember, the KLE series was a line of street-biased adventure bikes that ran in Europe, but never came to North America. We got the KLR650 here, while they got the KLE500, which had the same engine as the Ninja 500. Kawasaki built the KLE from 1991 through 2007, and then they brought in the Versys 650 instead, when the 500 twin-cylinder was replaced with the 650.

Since then, we’ve had the Versys 650, which has held down that street-biased ADV slot, and we’ve also had the Versys-X 300 in more recent years, based off the Ninja 300 engine. When that model was superseded by the Ninja 400, people wanted a Versys-X 400, and that never happened, despite years of complaints from buyers including a lot of inmates.

Photo: EICMA

Now, it looks like that Versys-X 400 will come, except it will be a 500 (using the same engine as the Ninja 500) and be called the KLE. The box that Kawasaki used to hide their project bike even had the “est. 1991” slogan to throw it back to classic KLE history.

Taking a closer look, you can see this appears to be aimed at more off-road riding than the first-gen KLE. You can also see a set of dual headers, tipping that 500-class twin engine (well, actually 451 cc in its current iteration).

Photo: EICMA

Remember that Kawasaki currently makes this engine and sells it all over the world. If they want to make and sell a new KLE500, they could do so quite easily, as the engineering behind the chassis is stuff they’ve studied for decades. And as such, we expect to see a production version of this machine revealed in mere months.