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Japanese Bikes Are the Most Reliable, Which Is the Worst?

There are countless reasons for deciding to buy a motorcycle, and frankly, pretty much all of them make sense in a way or another. From people getting on the bike to save off the petrol bill or reach their work place faster and more easily thanks to a bike’s capability to streak through traffic to the plain old “freedom” clichés, everything goes.
Not all bikes are tough over the years 1 photo
Some guys simply feel like they just need to get on two wheels at either young ages or getting a trike once they’re retired, while others seem to rekindle their passion for riding. While bikes will always be bikes and as long as they’ve got two wheels and an engine, everything is all of a sudden alright, reliability and operational costs tend to be a problem.

The Consumer Reports National Research Center (CRNRC) has carried out a very serious study aimed at determining which motorcycle brands are the most reliable, and some of the results are intriguing, both in a god and a bad way. The research spanned across four years, from 2009 through 2012 and targeted new motorcycles.

Subscribing riders have provided information on all kinds of problems they had and repairs that were necessary to get their bikes up and running again. Readers provided 4,424 responses and accounted for around 4,680 motorcycles bought new in the aforementioned period of time. Despite the fact that from a sociological point of view, the number of responses may seem satisfactory, the results of the research are only offering the big picture on this affair, with no pretenses of being “surgically accurate.”

One bike to rule them all

Cutting to the chase, Yamaha was the most reliable bike across these 4 years, with other Japanese machines being very close to it, and a long way ahead of the other brands.
Unfortunately, the responses have not covered too big a list of motorcycle manufacturers, and some of you might be disappointed not finding your favorite brand in this study.
Still, you should consider that Consumer Reports hasn’t got the resources corporations often use to run such researches, more than often bending what was supposed to be a neutral study into brand-favorable disguised advertisement.
In fact, with all the good will of the subscribers, relevant and sufficient data was only provided for 5 brands: BMW, Harley-Davidson, Honda, Kawasaki and Yamaha. Info on other machines has, of course, been posted but was too scarce to provide any usable conclusions. Still, among the other motorcycle brands, Suzuki and Triumph customers were the most active.

The numbers which will follow are strictly based on the feedback provided by the customers and must be treated as such. At the same time, please keep in mind that they are sourced from the real world and must not be argued with things like “none of my buddies owning the X brand bikes has had a problem in the last 4 years, therefore this study is flawed”. Such positions are simply immature and have no place in this.

Reliability in numbers

Before any discussion on the reliability ranking is started, one thing must be also mentioned, as it has a crucial role in all these calculations. The CRNRC research shows that about 20% of the total number of motorcycles experienced at least one major problem along the 4 years taken into account.

Since major defects are probably the key element in judging the reliability of a motorcycle, it is only natural that these problems weighted the most when it came to ranking.
Only about one tenth of the Yamaha bikes, whom the research found to be the most reliable machines, have experienced major defects. With an 11% mark (smaller values being better and bigger ones being worse), Yamaha and, with it, Japanese bikes sit in a comfortable leading position in this chart.

Kawasaki and Honda occupy the second and the third positions, with 13- and 14-percent failure rates, respectively. Now comes the sad part, with Harley-Davidson beings the 4th most reliable bikes, followed by a surprising BMW for the 5th place. Even sadder than this is seeing almost a quarter of the total H-D respondents experiencing at least one major failure for a new bike in 4 years, with almost one third of the Bavarian machines doing the same.

The Consumer Reports National Research Center states that any difference smaller than 4% is considered almost meaningless, and its role is a purely statistic one, helping to structure the final rankings. In real-life conditions, such (or smaller) differences are not perceived as a separator to distinguish between the reliability of two or more motorcycle brands.

Information on Suzuki and Triumph has also been received, and if we were to judge in a strictly mathematical manner based on the brute numbers, the Hamamatsu bikes tend to stick with their Japanese siblings, while the Hinckleys are to be grouped with “the rest”, thus being less reliable.

Now, I guess the big surprise in this chapter is BMW. With almost one third of the NEW bikes bought between 2009 and 2012 having experienced at least one major reliability issue, are we still able to talk about the traditional “built like a tank” Beemers? Guess not, according to this research. Likewise, the “traditional reliability” of the Milwaukee machines seems to be less appealing in the real life than it is in the ads. And before BMW and MoCo fan boys jump in showing their teeth, I’d ask them to stay cool, since there is some good news for them later on.

It looks like the Japanese bike-making technology delivers better results, and the balance remains the same even if we were to group all three most reliable brands and weigh them against H-D and BMW combined. Numbers say it, not me.

What’s going down?

According to the Consumer Reports National Research Center, 27% of the touring bikes experienced problems, followed by dual-sport (on and off-road) bikes, out of which 23% broke down. Only 19 percent of the sport-touring motorcycles had serious problems, while 16% of the cruisers needed major repairs. With insufficient data on high-performance bikes, the CRNRC says that the trend would see them in the same class as cruisers.

Breaking down these numbers just a bit, an interesting fact seems to emerge – bikes that travel more and those ridden in tough environments tend to fail more than the rest, and we already knew that. So, this shows a consistent relationship between the number of traveled miles and the occurrence of issues, with demanding conditions also having a negative impact on reliability.
The provided data is insufficient for such an early call, but sociology says that measuring the percent of bikes in a certain category for each manufacturer and correlating it with the overall score of the maker should also be consistent. In simpler terms, the overall reliability of a manufacturer is directly proportional with the number of at-risk bikes in its line-up.

It’s not up to me to define the classes of bikes Harley, but figures show that the average between the most reliable and the least reliable of their bikes is almost consistent with the 24% overall score. And this is not exactly good for them. With BMW, separating the bikes in certain pre-defined classes is even harder, and without more detailed info on the problems-per-bike, it’s hard to sort out through which ones are the worst.

Finally, the Consumer Reports National Research Center study says that accessories, such as lights, instruments, switches, and radios have caused the most troubles, followed by brakes with 20%, electrical systems 16% and fuel systems with 15%. 7 percent of all bikes reported clutch problems, with cylinder head or valvetrain, the crankcase, crankshaft, or pistons and transmission repairs causing only 3% of all the fuss.

Most of the repairs have been under the $200 (€145) mark, and fixing them only took days, so it looks like overall, things were not exactly a horror story.

Good news for BMW and Harley-Davidson

I told you that there is also a good side of life for the losers of this ad-hoc chart, BMW and Harley-Davidson: customers still say they are very satisfied with the bikes. Small wonder, the Harley riders are the most attached to their machines, as 75% of them admitted they would buy an H-D again, if they had to do it all one more time.

The same goes for 74 percent of the BMW customers and 72% of the Honda guys. In the lower section of this chart… the most reliable bikes are under-performing: only 62% Yamaha customers and 60% of the Kawasaki guys would stick to their actual bike manufacturer.

So, we might say that reliability is not exactly a big issue as long as the bike comes with all its magic mojo, and many of the customers are willing to forget such problems and favor their own riding satisfaction.

That is, in case they’re not really traveling far from the city or civilization, and are always carrying a well-laden credit card, some fellow rider adds smiling, as I put an end to this story and invite you to share your opinions on this matter.
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