There may be SOME merit in his comments, but MUCH more myth than fact.
I currently own 2 BMWs and 3 Asian bikes so I can speak with some authority or experience. BMWs have some qualities that are great. Some people have ridden very long trips on them. You do see adds for BMWs with 200k + miles on them, but more often than not you find them with very low miles...IE my buddy just bought a 2008 R1200GSA with 6k miles on it....really? I showed him that his FD had wrench marks on the bolts already....not just on the drain/fill plugs...scary. He is already worried about it. It shifts like a Mack truck, brakes are whizzy feeling, Bike feels heavy and lumbering and he has only put about 1k miles on it in 3 months, which sadly is 4x the amount previous owners put on it.
His reason for riding so little currently is that after having it a month and 1/2 a service engine light came on even though the seller said it had had a dealer service within a few hundred miles of his selling....scary. The dealer is recommending a full service "Starting" at $400....I just had a full 600 mile service done on my Ten with all fluids, filters, lubes, labor....for $182 {including tax} completed in 3 hours. His BMW dealer needs him to make an appointment and he does not have the extra cash after $14,000 for the bike, shipping, taxes and licensing for his for his now 7 year old bike. ::010::
I bought my Ten OTD {tax, title destination charges, licensing, freight, handling, assembly....included} with the YES 5 yr extended warranty for just over that and rode it to his house the next day...he took off on a ride on my bike, gone 15 minutes "around the block" and came back saying "I screwed UP"....it is smoother, equal or better brakes, shifts better, feels lighter. He said he was sick to his stomach. That the Ten is what he THOUGHT his GSA was going to be and that his GSA is worse that he would have thought any Japanese bike would be.
On the parts availability topic, he has some merit. I have an auto parts back round so again I can speak with some experience, parts stores stock what will sell. If I know that ford f150's need water pumps every 20k miles I am going to stock 4 of them on the shelf. If I know they only needed them after 300k miles...I MIGHT stock 1, maybe none if I can get a customer 1 same day.
Parts for bmw bikes are very readily available for a reason.
That said, I burned out a fuel pump on my R1100 at 24k miles {why so soon?} and it was not available for 3 days and then at a cost of $426.
I have a 1965 Yamaha Ym1 305, if you even KNOW WHAT that is you are better than most people, that I have built a café bike out of. I bought all bearing for trans and engine, all seals, pistons, rings, carb rebuild kits, new engine bolt kit, gaskets....every single part other than barrels, heads, cases, and main crank and trans gears and those parts were available, I just did not need them.
Parts for the Ten will likely be available for a very long time to come and even when or if they stop someone will still have NOS or repops.
I would not trade my Ten for 2 new paid for BMWs unless I could flip the BMWs and use that money to buy another Ten and fund a RTW trip... ::022:: ::021::
