Εγώ αυτό που ξέρω είναι ότι κάποτε η BMW θεωρούνταν συνώνυμο της αξιοπιστίας. Μου έχει μείνει στο μυαλό να το γράφει σε κάποιο σημείο και ο R. Pirsig (R.I.P) στο "Ζεν και η Τέχνη της Συντήρησης της Μοτοσικλέτας", το οποίο βέβαια κυκλοφόρησε το 1974. Σήμερα αντιθέτως, τουλάχιστον στην Αμερική, από τα μεγάλα brands η BMW φαίνεται να βρίσκεται στον πάτο αναφορικά με την αξιοπιστία. Πολύς κόσμος το συνδέει με την αλλαγή πολιτικής που οφείλεται στο ότι ανέλαβε τα "ηνία" το τμήμα αυτοκινήτων της εταιρείας από κάποιο χρονικό σημείο κι έπειτα.
Αναφορικά με τις BMW λοιπόν (πολύ πριν το πρόσφατο θέμα με το πιρούνι), παραθέτω αυτό, το οποίο είχα βρει κάποια στιγμή από link στο advrider. Απ' όσο γνωρίζω είναι γραμμένο από μηχανικό BMW. Οι έχοντες εμπειρία από την προπέλα και οι γνώστες μπορούν να αξιολογήσουν καλύτερα τα γραφόμενα, γιατί εγώ από πενφέ δεν σκαμπάζω και δε μπορώ να εκτιμήσω τη βασιμότητά τους:
Some thoughts regarding
BMW Motorcycles:
As everything in our motorcycling lives becomes more reliant on computer controlled devices such as electronic computer controlled
ignition and
engine management systems, computer controlled braking systems, computer controlled
tire inflation monitoring systems, etc. some questions come to mind that I think are worth pondering. Do you ride a motorcycle to get away from life’s daily complexities? Do you prefer a motorcycle that is simple, reliable and inexpensive to maintain? Are you going to keep your bike for many years or do you feel the need to replace it with the newest, fastest, ‘State of the Art’ model each time one comes out? To help answer some of these questions let us look back a few years. Years ago
BMW Motorcycles had a well deserved reputation for lasting several hundred thousands of miles and it is still not uncommon to come across a BMW from the 1970’s or 1980’s that has well over 300,000 miles on it. This reputation has been tarnished in the last decade by some design deficiencies and lack of quality control which has even been admitted by BMW AG!
Motorcycle News: BMW Admits Quality Problems
In 1999 during the Dealer Introduction for the new K1200LT in San Antonio , Texas , I listened to a speech by someone from corporate BMW. The speech was preceded by a few video advertisements that were going to be the basis for BMW’s new ‘Target Market’. We were told that BMW was going to target “The smart new BMW owners, the ones who makes $250,000 or more per year, the ones who ride just 1,000 miles per year, the ones who buys a new bike each year or each time a new model comes out. You dealers will be making lots of money by taking in and reselling low-mileage trade-ins that are still under warranty”. When someone asked “What about the guy who rides the same bike for several hundred thousand miles?” the BMW figurehead snapped back “They are not helping our bottom line”!!! When another dealer mentioned that that one person who rides the same BMW motorcycle for hundreds of thousands of miles actually boosts BMW’s sales by getting other people to buy a BMW because of the perceived longevity of the BMW brand, the BMW figurehead stated “The purists will still be loyal”… but for how long?
The typical BMW rider was fiercely loyal to the marque, unlike riders of Japanese brands of motorcycles. During the next Iron Butt Rally, there were several BMW’s that did not finish the event due to mechanical failure of the rear drive. Many of these were brand new BMW motorcycles with low mileage on them! This has been repeated at each Iron Butt Rally since then causing many loyal BMW riders to abandon the BMW brand for other brands and even Harley Davidson!
Problems discovered at Iron Butt Technical Inspection
Sadly, BMW has lost the hard-earned, well deserved accolades regarding reliability. Besides the reasons given above I would like to elaborate a bit on the cause of this matter. Starting in 1999 the BMW motorcycle division was, for the first time ever, being run by staff of the BMW car division. The car division has held a grudge, if you will, against the motorcycle division for several years. BMW motorcycles were built as a passionate endeavor and never made much, if any, of a profit for the company. The car division was the money maker and the bitterness between the two was based on the perceived waste of money by continuing motorcycle production. The car division felt that they were making the profits for the company yet these profits were being squandered on the motorcycles that weren’t ‘earning their keep’. The car division staff had ideas of how to make the motorcycle division ‘profitable’. Now how could that be done, you might ask? Simple… cut back on build costs and quality control expenses, out-source production to foreign countries ( China , Czech Republic , etc.) where costs would be less than producing the part in Germany and reduce the time and expense of research and development i.e., thoroughly testing the product before it is released for sale to the general public.
You are skeptical? I don’t blame you so let’s look at some basic facts before you write me off as being crazy. The Para-Lever rear drive: This type of rear drive unit was first introduced on the R100GS back in 1988. This same rear drive found its way onto the
16 valve K1 in 1989, the 16 valve
K100RS in 1992 and all the
K1100 models up to 1997. It is a very rare occasion that any of these rear drives have a failure and even when they do it usually merely a leaking pinion seal evidenced at the accordion boot between the rear drive and swingarm pivot. This same rear drive made its way onto the new, in 1993, R1100RS models, followed by the rest of the ‘Oilhead’ line (R, RT, GS). These also rarely fail and I have had only one in the shop that had been assembled wrong at the factory and failed at 34,000 miles. For the 1998 model year, BMW introduced the K1200RS followed in 1999 by the enormous luxury tourer, the K1200LT. The K1200RS of pre-2000 model year rarely had a rear drive failure while the 1999+ K1200LT’s have been plagued with rear drive failures. It is the same design!
In 2000 when the new R1150GS came out, I was still employed at a BMW dealership. We had sold six of these new GS models and five had been in for their 600 mile service before I left employment there. All five of these new GSs had leaking rear drives. This rear drive was identical to the earlier models! The only logical explanation for this sudden failure was quality control, or the lack thereof. Regarding model year 2000+, I have had over 130 leaky rear drive units in my shop. This problem can be cured by Bruno Sax in Iron Bridge , Ontario , Canada . Bruno re-shims these rear drives to the correct preload and I have never had a failure with any of his rebuilt rear drives. This validates the lack of quality control theory even further. If Bruno can rebuild these units to be fail-proof, then why can’t BMW produce them that way?
Let us look at another issue,
clutch /
transmission input splines. From the 1970
R75/5 through the two valve
K75 & K100 models, the
transmission was to be removed so that these delicate splines could be cleaned and re-lubricated every 20,000 miles or ‘annually’ a process which takes approximately 4 hours of labor. The motorcycle press ridiculed BMW for this ‘required maintenance’ as no other motorcycle had such a requirement. What was the last vehicle that you owned that required the transmission to be removed on a regular basis as ‘routine service’? Was this a bogus requirement, enacted to ‘pad’ the dealerships pockets with extra service monies? No, it really does need to be performed. When the
16 Valve K1 was released, BMW stated that they were using a ‘new material’ for the shaft and
clutch hub and that the spline lube interval was now 40,000 miles for these new models, a process which takes between 5 to 7 hours labor depending on the bike being equipped with anti-lock
brakes and of which generation of
ABS it is equipped. Still, the motorcycle press complained. Forward to 1993 and the release of the new R1100RS
Oilhead. BMW stated that they had again changed the material and that spline lubes were no longer a required service! Really? The design was the same. And if you remove the
transmission from a 60,000 mile
Oilhead you will likely find that the splines are rusted and that the
clutch had some odd engagement traits for the past 20,000+ miles. Why did BMW do away with this much needed required service interval? To make the bikes more appealing and a little less maintenance intensive… all in the hopes that sales would increase (which they did). They didn’t ‘fix’ the problem they merely ‘masked’ it and deleted it from the maintenance schedule.
Let me continue with the saga of the splines. Regarding the 1998 model year, BMW introduced the K1200RS and in 1999 the K1200LT. Both of these models had hydraulic
clutch actuation via a master cylinder / reservoir on the handlebar and a difficult to access ‘slave’ cylinder at the rear of the
transmission buried between the
transmission and the front of the rear swingarm. Again, there was no interval to lubricate the splines of the
clutch hub / transmission input shaft and the labor required to do this procedure is now in the area of 10 ~ 14 hours!!! Starting with the 1998 R1200C ‘Cruiser’ model and the1999 R1100S, BMW began equipping the new
Oilhead R1150 models with the same hydraulic actuated clutch design that the K1200 models used. We started seeing failures of the clutch hub / transmission input splines on a wide-spread basis within a couple of years most notably on the K1200LT, R1200C and later with many of the R1150 models. There is no warning to precede this failure and it has affected all models of BMWs except, of course, the single cylinder F650 models which use a wet clutch and were not designed by BMW anyway. BMW has flat out denied that there is a problem and the dealer mantra is to place the blame for this failure on the rider!!! I had one customer who had suffered this failure call a local BMW dealership asking if BMW would warranty his failure as the bike only had 22,000 miles. The shop representative actually laughed as he said “No”. When my customer asked how common this problem was, the rep checked the dealerships service records and stated that they had done seven repairs of this type in the past ten months. Now multiply that times the 150+/- dealers in the United States and you can get a general idea of how large this problem is!
This failure is very expensive to repair and is caused by a serious design flaw. When BMW introduced the hydraulic clutch design someone in the design team miscalculated and inadvertently moved the clutch disc 8mm further forward towards the
engine and off the transmission splines. This results in the splines of the clutch disc not utilizing the full amount of splines available in the splined portion of the clutch hub. The splines can strip off leaving you stuck on the roadside and ending your journey instantly.
:he
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