I liked the telelever, may have been a rip-off but I thought it worked pretty well on the road, sure it won't ever win a GP, but for most riders on the roads it does a fine job, I am not knowledgeable or experienced in off-road so can't make any comments about that, but if Yamaha had a Telelever system for the Tenere I would have still bought one.
I owned a TL1000S and it was a bit slappy without the damper, fine on smooth tarmac and maybe Suzuki just did too much on-track development, plus the bean counters will always downgrade the design engineers spec, just like using cheap rivetts on the Titanic, saved a few quid up front and possibly doomed the ship and hundreds of souls, but never mind lets see what we can save on the next project ::010:: Most suspension is pretty shite, OE shocks are always very cheaply made and often badly sprung / damped and I suspect this is mainly down the process of putting out to tender, whereby the cheapest supplier wins.
BMW seem to be terrible at pre-production testing (or at least over the past 15 years or so) the 1200GS was a disaster in the first few years with loads of weak areas both mechanical and electrical, the '04 - 07 models had so many issues and re-calls, even a revamp in 2008 had not fixed some of the problems and a few persisted into the last of the air cooled models in the 9th production year. K1200's were also awful machines with the 1300 inheriting a number of weaknesses that would not be acceptable from a Japanese machine.
I would not want to comment on what happened to Kevin Ash, although if there is a serious flaw it needs sorting. What is apparent is a number of Journo's on the launch found a stability problem on a route BMW proposed, makes you wonder how much testing they had done :question: Or was all the testing done on pre-production machines with well made one-off components and the production models with the "only-the-cheapest-money-can-buy" components behaved quite differently.
The bike will sell because it is a BMW and half the folks who have owned 1,2,3,3,5,6 GS' in the past will already have their deposits down, Ewan Mc Charley will be dragged out of bed to escort a BMW repair truck along some dusty road, the magazines will all run shootout tests and BMW will time a huge advertising campaign with double page ads in the editions of these magazines with the shootouts, and just by sheer chance the BMW will win the shootout, and BMW will follow up with more double page ads in the next issue of the magazine bragging about their win, which of course has nothing to do with the fact they spent the most on advertising, and porbably is also not connected to the publishing companies senior executives all having high end BMW cars, and they probably paid full price for them anyway.
At the end of the day they are selling shed loads of bikes at premium prices and charging huge amounts for servicing at a time of austerity, whilst cheaper, more reliable better built machines are selling very badly, much as I am for better engineering, testing and reliability, BMW have proved that does not make for a sucesful business, and we (the consumers) are really to blame for lapping up BS and believing all the marketing bollox. Well not "US" as we are obviously the inteligent ones who see through it, but the "average" punter is a bloody idiot :exclaim:
