In the UK some of the latest BMW's have had engines, and in one or two instances the entire bike has been replaced due to ongoing issues they could not fix.
They have also had several recalls for oil pumps with too high a pressure blowing oil out, Engine Management problems, Forks not tightened from the factory, not to mention the stability issues they do not have - but for no reason whatsoever the 2014 model now has a steering damper :
The original bikes were shipped with dodgy electrical switches' so all the indicators would randomly come on / go off at will - BMW shipped bikes knowing these were iffy and waited for customers to have problems before replacing them.
It also seems many bikes have clutch and gearbox problems and BMW are back to their old tricks of changing their minds about oil levels every few minutes in a vain hope of getting the clutch / gearbox to work without swapping out the entire engine.
Not bad for a bike in its first year, and I know the BMW fans will say "oh but they sell so many", even so I doubt in the first 3 months there were more new 2013 GS on the road than there were S10's that were already in their fourth year of production.
Look back to the previous 1200GS when it was first launched in 2004 with FPC / EWS and Final drive problems, I expect very few people who bought one of these got more than a few lamp posts from the dealers before something went wrong, in 2008 they produced the MU version (this was model upgrade) which was supposedly a "fixed" version - I bought a 2 year old one with 6k on the clock and within 12k and 18 months it had needed over £2,000 of repairs (luckily most was under warranty) and the Final Drives and Fuel Pump controllers were still dodgy.
2010 saw the last version, this had a few problems with cam position sensors on early models and fuel gauge senders with many owners reporting several replacements during warranty period, but it seemed the FD issues were pretty much over (only 6 years to sort, well done BMW) and I was tempted by one of the last ones of these in 2012 as after 9 years of production BMW had pretty much got it to the point most Japanese bikes are before they start tooling up the production lines.
Most people with "reliable" BMW's if pressed will give up a whole load of issues, often they do not see this as unreliable as it is almost expected, and in the UK BMW do a lot of "Goodwill" repairs which gives owners a warm fuzzy feeling and makes them loathed to slag BMW off, and I must admit it is quite impressive the level of post warranty support owners in the UK do receive - and one of the reasons for the BMW success.
If a BMW FD explodes a year out of warranty in the UK, with a full dealer service history there is a very good chance BMW will fix it for free, I am pretty sure if the same happened to an S10 Yamaha would tell you to piss off.....
....just look at the couple of people who have had the clocks fail (or trip reset button to be precise) this is the sort of thing BMW would most likely do under goodwill, this keeps the customer happy in the long term, and also ensures owners are more likely to stick with the main dealer servicing.
The problem I had was more of trusting a BMW, I get a good bike trip every 1-2 years and could not chance this being ruined by a BMW foible regardless of if they would fix it for free or not. If I won the lottery and did not have a day job and could ride whenever I liked maybe I would go and test a GS, but for now on limited finds and with limited riding time available to me the Yamaha is a far better proposition.
I assume by the moaning here that BMW US is not quite so generous
