General Question on Dealing with BMW as a company

[Grumpy Goat]

Hi -

This question may be addressed in other threads so if it is kindly direct me to them.

I would like for those US owners who've also owned a number of other brands over the years to share their opinions about dealing w/BMW Motorrad as a company - compared to manufacturers of other makes (Japanese, for instance, with whom I have a fair amount of experience), are they responsive? Are repair parts hard to get and expensive? Experience with reliability? Those types of issues - not necessarily the quality of the dealer you work with (an interesting topic - but dealers, even within a brand, vary in quality). I'm more interested in the company itself.

Welcome to the Forum Community, kw278. Hope to see good contributions from you in the future also. Your initial post is an interesting one, which has not been addressed thus far in this Forum Community so no need to direct you elsewhere.

There are many members here who have been loyal BMW members for decades, and who would be in a far better position than I to comment on dealing with BMW NA. I have only had BMW motorcycles since late 2015 when I got my RS. In that time I have never had to deal with BMW NA but have dealt with 2 dealerships thus far and one the case of one, my experience has been excellent when it came to after sales service. The other (current) one has also been good, although one service experience regarding the servicing of my front forks took way too long and made me wonder if they knew what they were doing. Other smaller jobs they handled just fine.

Availability of parts is probably no worse than any other manufacturer - they always have commonly stocked parts on hand and occasionally they may have to get a part from "the warehouse" and, less frequently, "from Germany". in no case was the delay unreasonable. Yes, most parts can be [relatively] expensive, but its a premium brand so that is par for the course.

Reliability is harder to address. There are some who do no maintenance on their bikes and no monitoring of conditions (the "just ride it" folks) and then complain if / when it breaks, blaming the machine. These are the reports I ignore, and maybe these are the data points that result in poorer rankings.

When it comes to reliability given reasonable maintenance and monitoring, conventional opinion is that the Japanese makes are at the top, and I don't think that anyone can dispute that. Depending on the report, BMW motorcycles would be various positions in the bottom half when it comes to reliability. However, if you consider average length of time BMWs run vs reliability, the odds would swing back in BMWs favour. I think that on average, BMW owners tend to keep their bikes longer and put more miles on them than any other maker. Why would they do that if the bikes were unreliable? Best to join fora like this to hear from actual owners and to gauge whether the reliability level is acceptable or not. To merely listen to ratings is not looking at the whole picture.

Also owners of BMWs often work on the bikes themselves and many [here] have an encyclopedic knowledge of various systems on their bikes which they put to good use working on the bikes. I hope to tap into that on this forum, as opposed to reading about the latest farkle to put on a garage queen.

Personally I have had good reliability from my RS. The S1000R has been good so far but too early to tell, as I only put about 2k miles on it so far. The RS has 54k miles (?) and so far has only had a weeping left fork seal which was fixed by the better of my two dealers. And this includes having been repaired after an accident in 2016 that cost $7500 worth of damage.

From what I have seen there is no chronic issue with the water cooled RS, although we are keeping our collective eyes on spline and u-joint failure in the driveshaft. That potential issue is common across all current shaft-driven models which have a one-piece non-serviceable driveshaft.

So you have come to the right place to get answers to your query.