Clipped from another site. The service bill quoted by the dealer after seven years and 35K usage is worth more then the bike. Though much of what's listed could be replaced for much less by almost any enthusiast with a wrench, please note the comments on the electronic suspension, then go out to your garage and kiss your manual adjusters and telescopic forks: :-) My bike is in its 9th year and has 30K on it and is going strong, but, I don't ride in winter either. I think part of the owner's issue is he bought into the BMW reliability mythology about rider and bike and abused his bike thinking it would take the punishment and last like a "normal" fair weather bike while he showed his mettle. I know I have a "delicate" bike, and treat it that way with lavish owner service and avoiding harsh weather when I can, i.e I don't ride when there's salt and grit and ice on the road anymore. But I feel for the guy. Good thing Ducati suspesnions aren't that complicated....oh wait.... I mean good things our *ST'*s suspension isn't "state of the art" and that I am not, an "early adopter" LOL... :-)
"It's a real shame, I loved my K1200GT SE, so much that I dreaded replacing it, once BM had dropped the K1300GT from the range.
That's loved... past tense.
I no longer own it, I just had it hauled off for scrap value at 7 years old and 35,500 miles from brand new because it was beyond economic repair... I got £2,200 back from the smoking wreckage, and I the guys who are going to part it out seemed quite happy as well, since thanks to BMW spares prices, they should do really quite well out of it themselves! Built in obsolescence perhaps? Or just Total Cost of BMW Motorcycle Ownership?
Basically, I was working away from home on the south coast of the UK [I'm an IT geek] and I put the bike in to the BMW main dealer, Chandlers, in Shoreham for the 36,000 mile service and asked them to investigate why the handling seemed to have gone off a little (understatement) and to put the bike through its MoT [i.e. annual roadworthiness inspection] for me.
And then I got a bit of a sickening shock; this is the quote they sent me.
- snip -
Hi Ken,
Here is a breakdown of the required service items on the bike, please note the comments in the brackets because they may make your decisions easier (or harder!). Please let me know if there is anything else that you require me to break down any further. This estimate includes labour, parts and VAT, and includes the fact that we can carry certain work out at a cheaper cost to yourself if we carry it out during your 36k service.
36k Service - £525
Brakes all round, pads and discs - £559
Rear strut - £1600
Throttle bodies - £515
Radiator - £515
Front strut - £885
Front telelever ball joints (NB these can sometimes seize in place in the wheel carrier, a new wheel carrier (£698 inc VAT) may be required depending on findings.) - £405
Rear suspension Mount - £129
Front wheel bearings - £89
This totals £5222, including parts, labour and VAT, for the complete repair of the bike. Peter in our Sales Dept has valued the bike at £4750 on completion of the identified repairs. With this in mind, Kellie my service manager has said that we will be able to contribute a discount across the estimate of 12.5%, reducing the estimate to £4600.
- snip -
It has been ridden through winter, which is apparently what killed the bearings and linkages, but neither of my 70,000 mile old Honda VFRs ever used to complain about that, and they lived outdoors!
So my bike suddenly went from being worth £5,000 odd for private sale to being worth about minus £200 (if you price in the 'wheel carrier')!
Obviously, there's main dealer tax in there - I didn't mind paying main dealer labour rates for a service and a bit of minor fettling, and they did give me a K1200S to play with while they had mine, hence the £6,000 repair quote _after_ a goodwill discount, but that's not really the crux of it. There are a couple of cheeky items in the quote that could be queried (they suggest selling me a £515 new radiator because the old one is bunged up with road debris and the like, when perhaps washing the crap out of the old one might have seemed a less lazy approach, although at main dealer labour rates maybe a new rad was the cheaper option, while at 35,000 miles I don't expect a throttle body to be 'wearing out' because it shouldn't be made of Dairylea; I think if a butterfly isn't fully closing every time I shut the throttle, it's not fit for purpose, and that should be BMW's problem not mine). If I took the bike round the corner to a bloke under the railway arches, I perhaps I could get EBC brake discs and pads fitted all round and generic bearing factor wheel bearings instead of the £89 original equipment ones in the quote and save another couple of hundred quid.
But the elephants in the room are the ridiculously priced suspension parts that you can't buy pattern alternatives for; the snazzy ESA shocks (or 'struts' in BMW speak), the linkages, the ball joints, the 'wheel carrier'; shocks wear out, after all, anything over 20,000 miles and they are on borrowed time. The stock ESA rear shock on my BMW is priced at £1500, and the stock shock is not rebuildable. I could replace it with a WSB spec (and fully rebuildable) non-ESA Ohlins shock for the same money, or a non-ESA (and also fully rebuildable) Hagon damper for a more reasonable £400, but if I want the Electronic Suspension Adjustment to work, I need to buy the obscenely priced BMW part, which looks more or less like a cheaper nastier version of the Hagon shock but with a motor attached to it to adjust the preload.
The suspension bits alone cost £3,000 or so, meaning even a bloke squatting under the railway arches working for beer money is going to need to charge over £4,000 to fix the bike with new parts, plus whatever a major service costs, and I'll still need to give the BMW dealer money to program the bike to work with the new shocks. When I phoned round the specialist breakers looking for second hand ESA shocks, really my final option for a way of getting the bike back on the road before I ended up dragging it home in a trailer and parting it out myself, there were none to be had, but one of the breakers, Motorworks in Yorkshire, offered to buy the bike as is for £2,200, including collecting it from near Brighton, to break and sell on as parts to all the other people in the same situation I'm in. There's clearly a lot of profit in breaking BMW K1200GTs for spares!
A £5,000 bike that needs over £4,000 of work doing but is worth £2,200 as scrap is only going to one place. It would seem that the ESA BMW K1200's are effectively life expired and fit only for the knackers yard by about 36,000 miles and 7 years; I assume the R1200RTs, 1200GSA's, K13's and K16's will all be as well!
So that's why I won't be buying another BMW. I've owned three, two of them have cost me an absolute fortune, and one of them I got rid of when I did because I was scared it was about to cost me an absolute fortune. Only the first one of the three was actually not a great motorcycle to ride (in fact it was terrible), and ironically that was the bike that would probably have been reliable forever and a decade...
Perhaps BMW might explain why anybody else should buy one of their machines in the light of the above?"
That's loved... past tense.
I no longer own it, I just had it hauled off for scrap value at 7 years old and 35,500 miles from brand new because it was beyond economic repair... I got £2,200 back from the smoking wreckage, and I the guys who are going to part it out seemed quite happy as well, since thanks to BMW spares prices, they should do really quite well out of it themselves! Built in obsolescence perhaps? Or just Total Cost of BMW Motorcycle Ownership?
Basically, I was working away from home on the south coast of the UK [I'm an IT geek] and I put the bike in to the BMW main dealer, Chandlers, in Shoreham for the 36,000 mile service and asked them to investigate why the handling seemed to have gone off a little (understatement) and to put the bike through its MoT [i.e. annual roadworthiness inspection] for me.
And then I got a bit of a sickening shock; this is the quote they sent me.
- snip -
Hi Ken,
Here is a breakdown of the required service items on the bike, please note the comments in the brackets because they may make your decisions easier (or harder!). Please let me know if there is anything else that you require me to break down any further. This estimate includes labour, parts and VAT, and includes the fact that we can carry certain work out at a cheaper cost to yourself if we carry it out during your 36k service.
36k Service - £525
Brakes all round, pads and discs - £559
Rear strut - £1600
Throttle bodies - £515
Radiator - £515
Front strut - £885
Front telelever ball joints (NB these can sometimes seize in place in the wheel carrier, a new wheel carrier (£698 inc VAT) may be required depending on findings.) - £405
Rear suspension Mount - £129
Front wheel bearings - £89
This totals £5222, including parts, labour and VAT, for the complete repair of the bike. Peter in our Sales Dept has valued the bike at £4750 on completion of the identified repairs. With this in mind, Kellie my service manager has said that we will be able to contribute a discount across the estimate of 12.5%, reducing the estimate to £4600.
- snip -
It has been ridden through winter, which is apparently what killed the bearings and linkages, but neither of my 70,000 mile old Honda VFRs ever used to complain about that, and they lived outdoors!
So my bike suddenly went from being worth £5,000 odd for private sale to being worth about minus £200 (if you price in the 'wheel carrier')!
Obviously, there's main dealer tax in there - I didn't mind paying main dealer labour rates for a service and a bit of minor fettling, and they did give me a K1200S to play with while they had mine, hence the £6,000 repair quote _after_ a goodwill discount, but that's not really the crux of it. There are a couple of cheeky items in the quote that could be queried (they suggest selling me a £515 new radiator because the old one is bunged up with road debris and the like, when perhaps washing the crap out of the old one might have seemed a less lazy approach, although at main dealer labour rates maybe a new rad was the cheaper option, while at 35,000 miles I don't expect a throttle body to be 'wearing out' because it shouldn't be made of Dairylea; I think if a butterfly isn't fully closing every time I shut the throttle, it's not fit for purpose, and that should be BMW's problem not mine). If I took the bike round the corner to a bloke under the railway arches, I perhaps I could get EBC brake discs and pads fitted all round and generic bearing factor wheel bearings instead of the £89 original equipment ones in the quote and save another couple of hundred quid.
But the elephants in the room are the ridiculously priced suspension parts that you can't buy pattern alternatives for; the snazzy ESA shocks (or 'struts' in BMW speak), the linkages, the ball joints, the 'wheel carrier'; shocks wear out, after all, anything over 20,000 miles and they are on borrowed time. The stock ESA rear shock on my BMW is priced at £1500, and the stock shock is not rebuildable. I could replace it with a WSB spec (and fully rebuildable) non-ESA Ohlins shock for the same money, or a non-ESA (and also fully rebuildable) Hagon damper for a more reasonable £400, but if I want the Electronic Suspension Adjustment to work, I need to buy the obscenely priced BMW part, which looks more or less like a cheaper nastier version of the Hagon shock but with a motor attached to it to adjust the preload.
The suspension bits alone cost £3,000 or so, meaning even a bloke squatting under the railway arches working for beer money is going to need to charge over £4,000 to fix the bike with new parts, plus whatever a major service costs, and I'll still need to give the BMW dealer money to program the bike to work with the new shocks. When I phoned round the specialist breakers looking for second hand ESA shocks, really my final option for a way of getting the bike back on the road before I ended up dragging it home in a trailer and parting it out myself, there were none to be had, but one of the breakers, Motorworks in Yorkshire, offered to buy the bike as is for £2,200, including collecting it from near Brighton, to break and sell on as parts to all the other people in the same situation I'm in. There's clearly a lot of profit in breaking BMW K1200GTs for spares!
A £5,000 bike that needs over £4,000 of work doing but is worth £2,200 as scrap is only going to one place. It would seem that the ESA BMW K1200's are effectively life expired and fit only for the knackers yard by about 36,000 miles and 7 years; I assume the R1200RTs, 1200GSA's, K13's and K16's will all be as well!
So that's why I won't be buying another BMW. I've owned three, two of them have cost me an absolute fortune, and one of them I got rid of when I did because I was scared it was about to cost me an absolute fortune. Only the first one of the three was actually not a great motorcycle to ride (in fact it was terrible), and ironically that was the bike that would probably have been reliable forever and a decade...
Perhaps BMW might explain why anybody else should buy one of their machines in the light of the above?"
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