Are the newer BMW's going to last?

f14rio said:

just get it . it will be fine. 2% of bikes have problems. people put these problems on forums and the other 98% don't sleep well.

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+1

My '05 R12GS has 77,000 miles on it, and it runs like a top. With rare and inexpensive exceptions, it's been all normal maintenance.

The most i've spent on it was at 65,000 miles when my rear stock shock finally gave out and started leaking. I put $2,000 into a set of Ohlins, so I ought to be set for another 70,000 miles!

lets not forget the F650GS single. they have known water pump problems, my '07 is on it's 3rd water pump in 36,000 miles. i also had to replace the steering head bearings, which is another known problem with these bikes as is the swing arm bearings. i also had to have a fuel pump replaced at 10,000 miles.

at one time BMW used to stand for quality and durability, today BMW is all about making money, not making the best bike for the money.

i am now looking into buying a new F650GS twin and i wonder what kind of new problems i will encounter with this bike. are they prone to water pump failures like the single cyl 650? within 15,000 miles will i have to replace the steering head bearings because they were not properly greased from the factory?

combine some of the recent known BMW troubles with the ever shrinking BMW dealer network, high initial cost of the bike, it's a wonder we keep coming back and buying them.


for me personally not being able to get decent service within a 100 miles of my home, combined with some of the known issue stated above and BMW's unwillingness to even acknowledge some types of problems is making me look long and hard at other brands. if BMW wants to keep me as a customer they need to address their dealer and reliability issues.

I owned a '86 Kaw Vulcan 750, '87 K100LT for 2 years and now a '91 Honda ST1100 in the last 5 years. All were great bikes and fixable by me. All are around 20 years + old. With all of the electronic wizardry on today's bikes, regardless of manufacturer, I would not want to own one 20 years from now. I don't have to worry, in 20 years I'll probably be too old to ride if still alive.

Ralph Sims

88bmwJeff said:

The days of working on vehicles (cars and bikes) have passed given the amount of computer controlled systems.

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Then what is it I'm doing when I've got hexhead pieces spread all over the garage?

Much of the bike is still mechanical and mechanical stuff sometimes breaks. When it breaks I try to fix it. So far none of the electronic bits on my bike have broken. If one does break I'll do I'll do the same thing a dealer's tech would do... replace the broken item or trash the bike. You don't think they actually fix such stuff, do you? The difference is that I might take it apart to see what makes it tick.. the dealer tech doesn't have time to do such stuff on the company dime.

BCKRIDER said:

My current '92 K100RS and friend's GS1150 have one thing in common, non-functioning ABS. My friend took his bike to the local dealer and paid $300 to be told he needed a $2000 part. He tried to buy it used from someone in England and got ripped off. I'm still waiting for a local repair shop owned by a guy I trust to get the download for his latest gizmo so he can really read the problem. ABS is good on a car and should be even better on a bike the rare times you need it. (Cars skid, bikes fall over.) But spending $2000 on a bike probably worth no more than $4000 if perfect? I"ve had two Subaru cars with ABS, used it seriously twice, combined mileage about 500K, and no problems with either car. I ride without ABS protection.

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Let me just address this part of your post since I've had my own experiences in this area.

I owned a '93 K1100RS (ABS1) from '03 to '09 that developed the dreaded ABS flashing light. I diagnosed my problem using this procedure:

http://www.largiader.com/abs/absfault.html

using the Radio Shack 276-011B 12V LED part.

It's diagnosis was a non-functioning left-side ABS modulator. To verify the accuracy of this technique I later had the bike tested on a BMW diagnostic computer, same result (but a heckuva lot more expensive).

I tried all the fixes I found online, no cure (except a quoted $1,900 modulator). I rode it without ABS and sold it a couple years later. Then I came across this in the MOA forum:

http://forums.bmwmoa.org/showthread.php?t=44187

wish I'd known about it earlier.

There's no guarantee the above will work with your K100RS, but you'll only be out $3 for the light and a hour or so of your time.

As for my owning another BMW, I can see that. It'd either be a K75S (non-ABS) or an an Airhead (really like the monolever R80)

As the OP, I am very glad I started this thread. Lots of thoughtful and very different opinions expressed.

As a start, I would like to comment on two of Paul Glaves remarks: "Have a true professional fix you oilhead final drives..." Gee, I thought BMW mechanics at a dealership should be expected to be exactly that! If some (many?) of them can't install factory parts to factory spec's, what does that mean to us non-oilhead owners?

Also from Paul G. "I would be afraid of a 2 1/2 year old very low mileage bike..." Seems to me this kind of bike might be a GREAT deal from a private seller, provided you bought insurance from Contego. (Somebody, please reference that thread in this thread!) Does this insurance cover all the dreaded high cost items?

There are numerous other posts I would like to quote from and reply to, but I don't know how to do that. If some kind soul could send me a PM telling me how to clip partial quotes from previous posts I would be most grateful.

BCKRider, you have a PM about quoting messages.

marchyman said:

I don't feel offended. The bikes are not perfect. Never have been. And that's the point... I think too many folks look back at the older bikes through memories of the great times they had on the road. They forget about failed diode boards, failed rotors, failed light switches, tranny spline lubes that may or may not have been needed, carbs that left the bike breathless at altitude, etc.

BMW was considered bulletproof when the competition was Triumph, Norton, and the early Japanese imports. Guess what! The Japanese caught up (and maybe surpassed) BMW. Triumph and Norton died and so far only Triumph has made a comeback.

Today I think all major brands are equally reliable. Individual bikes are a different story. Some are great. Others break often. Yet there is one area where the other manufactures fall far behind BMW. Go to your favorite non-BMW dealer and ask for a part for you mid-70s bike. Chances are they not only don't have it, they can't get it. Well, except for Kawasaki which is probably still selling that mid-70s bike.

I can still get most of the parts I need for my 45 year old BMW, in official BMW packaging with an official BMW part number. The dealer won't stock it, but he can order it when I give him the part number.

I maintain both my old (R69S) and modern (R12GS) bikes. The GS is easier to work on and needs work far less frequently.

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I'm with you, man. The threshold of what "reliable" is has changed. There was a reason your airhead came with those tools: you needed them. Yeah, you could fix it sometimes, but if you rode motorcycles back in those days you damn well better know how to fix them.

When I hear people gripe about poor reliability, I can only imagine they're new to riding.

I think the internet has a lot to do with the awareness of problems. When I got into dirt bikes it was the era of Ossa and Penton bikes. All of my knowledge was from word of mouth and it was second hand at best. I had never talked to an owner of an Ossa or Penton and I knew they were the best bikes at the time. They may have needed a complete rebuild every 500 miles but I had no way of finding out something that magazines weren't willing to publish.

Also, it would seem to be a rare bike that these newer, feature rich bikes could go very long without something going wrong. Newer bikes have ABS, ESA, electronic windshields, tire pressure monitors and lots of computer controlled stuff.

The only thing I ever asked my old Honda 750 to do was start and not stall.

zoridog said:

The only thing I ever asked my old Honda 750 to do was start and not stall.

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I was the same way. When I bought a new (but wrecked) 75 CB500T, I was shocked to discover that the kick start had been eliminated. All of my older Hondas and a Suzuki had one that was used frequently.

Also, back in the "good old days", many if not most bikes were junked before they reached 20,000 miles. The 500-600 mile days many of us frequently ride today just didn't happen bacn then due to both the roads and the punishment we endured on the bikes of the day even if they didn't break down.

Many of the problems most often complained about now are at miles seldom reached years ago or even now on most other brands of bikes.

I'm with marchyman.

I don't own anything else that is as easy to service as my 08 RT although my nearly 20 yr old highly modded Lexus SC300 comes close.

Only bikes I ever owned that were this easy were all two stroke smokers where even a complete motor rebuild was a simple job and clutches took minutes, not a day. But I probably spent enough time oiling and adjusting those old chains to do all the routine service on an R1200RT for a couple hundred thousand miles. When you rode in the 60s you had to know how to fix stuff- was no such thing as "roadside assistance" for bikes. And only the intrepid few did the longs runs that so many of us who contribute to this forum consider just a fun way to spend a few days.

Only issue with the modern stuff is that workarounds aren't possible for some types of electrical/electronic failure (though there are workarounds for most of the common ones) and some parts that can fail are hugely expensive and both cost prohibitive and too large to carry as spares.

Friend of mine who services BMWs just had a customer bring him a bike with a dead battery, saying it made a noise and died on the highway and he hadn't been able to restart it. While starting a routine service my friend drained it and found only 1 qt of black oil in it. When refilled to correct level and started it ran fine for a few minutes but when warmed then made so much noise that his wife heard it in their house that adjoins the shop and came out to see what had destructed. Owner had trashed the lower end bearings thoroughly for failure to do any normal maintenance and not noticed the bike only had about 1/4 of the required oil fill in it. You've got to wonder how many complaints you read about come from folks like that owner who've got not the foggiest notion of how to care for a machine, manage to ignore warning lights, etc etc. He's got similar stories for other brands so BMW owners aren't unique.

as i see it....

A motorcycle functions entirely in accordance with the laws of reason, and a study of the art of motorcycle maintenance is really a miniature study of the art of rationality itself.

...
There is no physical training regimen so strict that it can't be undermined by a rigorous program of deferred motorcycle maintenance.
...

If BMW's Were Built By Microsoft (or ridden by Bill Gates)

1. For no reason whatsoever your bike would crash twice a day.

2. Every time you wanted to ride a different road, you’d have to buy a new bike.

3. Occasionally your bike would die for no reason, and you would accept this, restart and ride on.

4. Occasionally, something as simple as a left turn, would cause your bike to shut down and refuse to start, in which case you have to reinstall the entire engine.

5. Macintosh would make a BMW that was powered by the sun, reliable, five times as fast, and twice as easy to ride, but it would only run on five percent of the interstates.

6. You wouldn’t be able to ride more than one bike on the same road unless you bought "BikeXP" or "BikeNT".

7. The bike would say "Are you sure?" before applying the brakes.

8. For no reason whatsoever, your bike would sometimes refuse to run until you grabbed the plug wire, stuck your finger in the exhaust, and used the kick start, all at the same time.

9. You would be required to wear riding gear manufactured by the same company who built your BMW. Deleting this option would cause the bike's performance to drop by 50% or more.

10. Every time a BMW introduced a new model, buyers would have to learn to ride all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old bike.

11. You'd press the "Start" button to shut off the engine.

"Untrue statement" "Hog wash"

"The question put "Are the new BMW's going to last?" The answer is yes, but like most other new vehicles, they will need to be serviced by trained technicians. The days of working on vehicles (cars and bikes) have passed given the amount of computer controlled systems."


The new bikes/ cars with all the computer controls are easier to fix than older bikes/cars.


The so called factory trained tech at the dealership has access to spare parts that he/she can install to test ie "part swapper's" no diagnostic ability.


Undererstanding and diagnosing a problem is a real skill but does require time in this day and age of instant gradification

Think about it!!

Undererstanding and diagnosing a problem is a real skill but does require time in this day and age of instant gradification

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U got that right!
I recently took one of my cars, a twenty year old SAAB with the "anti lock" light on constantly to the nearest dealer (400 mile round trip) and the service department recommended replacing a pressure switch as the first step in diagnosing the problem at a cost of nearly six hundred dollars. This after they had the car in their shop for two days while wife and I languished in a motel. I asked them if they were sure if that was the problem and they replied if the light stayed on they could be sure the switch WASN'T the problem. I told them to forget it and paid them their two hundred bucks for looking at it and brought it home. I found that sitting still the anti lock light would go out after the ignition on self test completed and only came back on at speeds over twenty miles per hour. Thus I deduced the problem had to be in one or more of the wheel speed sensors. I took the car into my shop and began pulling wheels and tires off to inspect the speed sensors. The second one I removed, the right front, revealed that the wire from the sensor had been rubbing the inside of the wheel and worn through the outer insulation, the shielding braid and into the core of the wire itself, shorting it out. I have ordered a new sensor and wire assembly from SAAB at a total cost of less than two hundred dollars. I'll figure out how to replace it when it arrives. Diagnosis by replacement is a dealers best salesman. And an indication of poorly trained wrench twisting idiots in their service departments.:

MPMARTY said:

Diagnosis by replacement is a dealers best salesman. And an indication of poorly trained wrench twisting idiots in their service departments.

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AMEN!

When I purchased my '98 RT in 2008, it was due for its 48K check-up. I'd started having problems with the ABS lights not extinguishing and asked them to take a look at it.

When I got the bike back, the problem was worse than before. Before I brought it in, I could usually stop the bike, turn it off, restart it, then the lights would go out. After I got the bike back, nothing I did would get the lights to extinguish. So, back to the shop I went.

The "technician" was convinced the battery was the problem. Well, let's put a new one in and test that theory. Nope. After a protracted wait in the show room that included a walk down the block to the local diner for lunch, the conclusion was the ABS unit. How much? $2300--just for the part.

Um, no thanks. Never had a bike with ABS before. Don't think I'll miss it.

I started doing some more research and figured I could change it myself and found one on eBay for about $400. I got it changed out (with a little help from a buddy of mine) and STILL no ABS.

Fast forward about a year, and I needed to take the bike to the shop for something totally unrelated. Because I'd had such an unpleasant experience with my local BMW dealership, I took it to another dealership about 2 hours away. While it was there I asked them to try and diagnose the problem with my ABS. $75/ hour--minimum 1 hour to take a look. As my father-in-law always tells me, "It's only money."

It took the new technician all of 2 seconds to diagnose the problem. When my local shop replaced the rear brake disk, they FAILED to reinstall the ABS ring.

I took the bike back to the local shop and, to their credit, they replaced the ABS ring at no charge (as they should have).

And the ABS has worked perfectly ever since. I have a sneaking suspicion the ABS unit was never the problem. Unfortunately, I got rid of the original unit before I found out about the ring.

Sorry for the rambling. I hope BCK Rider and his friend can find ABS tranquility.

Freightdawg said:

It took the new technician all of 2 seconds to diagnose the problem. When my local shop replaced the rear brake disk, they FAILED to reinstall the ABS ring.

I took the bike back to the local shop and, to their credit, they replaced the ABS ring at no charge (as they should have).

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That is truly frightening!

TexasT said:

My '07 R1200R has 161k miles on it and still works like it's brand spanking new! No issues whatsoever. And that ABS has certainly saved my 6 more than once!

I had the great mechanics at the local BMW shop in Austin take a look at it before my summer trip, and all they really had to do was change the fluids and slap on some new rubber! Wonderful machine! I'd match my Roadster with any other bike out there as an example of near-perfect engineering!

I too look forward to riding this BMW well into the next decade!

T

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So you have ridden 53,600 miles on average for the last 3 years? How does one do that?

2BikeMike said:

So you have ridden 53,600 miles on average for the last 3 years? How does one do that?

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Maybe he meant to say his '37 R12.....that's only 2205 miles per year

The '85 K100RS I bought new and the '79 R100RT I inherited after my dad quit riding were both bullet proof, as was the R1150 RT I rode for a few years and also the 1200 Triumph Trophy I bought after that. In fact the only bikes that have left me stranded in 31 years of street riding were both V4 Honda's with melted electrics.

I admit I was a little apprehensive about buying another BMW after reading the horror stories about flaming rear hubs and can-bus failures. However as previously noted they total about 2% of the bikes sold, hardly cause for alarm IMO. Besides, the GS is about as basic a bike as you can get and the only thing I really require is the ABS. I can live without electronic suspension and a trip computer if I it is prohibitively expensive to repair assuming it even fails in the first place......