EWS Immobilizer antenna threadfest

[Tigerstar]

Thanks...Spelling not one of my strong points...where the hell is the spell check?

[GB]

Originally Posted by Tigerstar

If carrying an extra is the answer how much and how hard is it to replace?
Thanks for any help!

welcome to the merged threadfest...

Carrying a spare is a good idea.. if you go back a few pages, you'll see how to attach it. You can't replace it yourself.. you just remove the 2 Torx 10 screws covering the front of the harness (carry a Torx 10 driver) and you simply unplug the harness from the bike's dead EWS antenna and plug it into your spare. Insert your spare key into it and start the bike with your other key. Once the bike is started, you can safely unplug the the spare antenna.

I would also recommend that you tell your dealer not to replace the "security" screws holding the antenna in place with other security screws, but to use regular fasteners, in case you have to do it yourself one day down the road.

Does this happen a lot? We don't know the failure rate, but if it happens to you.. your bike won't start and there's no way around it.. unless you carry a spare and test the spare to make sure it's not DOA out of the box, like inmate JPalamar's spare was dead out of the box and found out the hard way.

[Tigerstar]

Mine failed at 286 miles

[NBeener]

Originally Posted by Tigerstar

Thanks...Spelling not one of my strong points...where the hell is the spell check?

Sorry, man. That's part of my standard "signature" line (it appears on every post), and wasn't addressed to you, specifically

[GB]

Originally Posted by Tigerstar

Mine failed at 286 miles

it seems that most reported failures here have been on bikes with fairly low miles, as in under 10K miles.

Here's how inmate JPalamar rigged his spare to his RT:

[jpalamar]

Originally Posted by Gadget Boy

Must have missed something unless poor DTownsend took some heat for providing good info.

Brought bike to dealer today for antenna ring replace and the only information I was able to determine from everyone is that it's just not that big a deal. A few come in with the EWS issue, and they seem to run in cycles, but somehow I just got the impression directly and indirectly that BMW is changing 'part nos' to fix the problem and that's it.

So, now that I have gotten over my initial fury over being broken down (and the spare didn't work either [my bad]), seems we are going to live with this.

[Tigerstar]

So. My new GSA locked me out on Sunday, dealer picked bike up on Wed. They tried to start it and it would not start before they took it. I call service today and they have tried it five times and all five times it starts. I go to get it they go to bring it around to the front and guess what...locked out. So they are going to change the ring ant.
Anybody else get locked out and then get it to start?
If so did you have any more problems with it?
Thanks
Jeff

[dwf]

Originally Posted by Tigerstar

So. My new GSA locked me out on Sunday, dealer picked bike up on Wed. They tried to start it and it would not start before they took it. I call service today and they have tried it five times and all five times it starts. I go to get it they go to bring it around to the front and guess what...locked out. So they are going to change the ring ant.
Anybody else get locked out and then get it to start?
If so did you have any more problems with it?
Thanks
Jeff

I have lost very little sleep over this issue--I now have 17K miles without a problem but this is becoming BS--BMW needs to step up and and at least address the questions. Unfortunately the dealer network as a liason between corporate and the customer is non-existent. The dealer has always been the key and unfortunatly not part of the answer. This has always been the case with BMW. We can go down the list over the years: transmissions; rear drives; surging, etc. I can buy a power washer at Costco for $300 and there is never a question if there is a problem. If we owned a Chevrolet with a wide spread known problem that left us stranded along the road with no answer and the dealer did not provide satisfaction it would not be acceptable (or a BMW car for that matter--which I own). It's all about competition. BMW and the dealers know we want these bikes and that we are not going to buy a Suzuki, etc. (as opposed to the options of Lexus or Mercedes in the car world) so they really don't give a damn.

[Fr8dog]

Got my bike back today! Ring installed was #61357705247...latest and greatest.
So they say!
To spare or not...

[SocalRob]

Originally Posted by dwf

I have lost very little sleep over this issue--I now have 17K miles without a problem but this is becoming BS--BMW needs to step up and and at least address the questions. Unfortunately the dealer network as a liason between corporate and the customer is non-existent. The dealer has always been the key and unfortunatly not part of the answer. This has always been the case with BMW. We can go down the list over the years: transmissions; rear drives; surging, etc. I can buy a power washer at Costco for $300 and there is never a question if there is a problem. If we owned a Chevrolet with a wide spread known problem that left us stranded along the road with no answer and the dealer did not provide satisfaction it would not be acceptable (or a BMW car for that matter--which I own). It's all about competition. BMW and the dealers know we want these bikes and that we are not going to buy a Suzuki, etc. (as opposed to the options of Lexus or Mercedes in the car world) so they really don't give a damn.

Thats a bit harsh. I think they care a little bit at least

Part of the problem here from the consumer perspective is that its hard for us to guage the scope of a problem. Is the antennae ring /EWS failure (or FD for that matter) 1/10 of a percent, 1 percent, or 10 percent? I do get a bit tired when a dealer's stock reply is "everything you read on the internet is wrong" or, with final drives, "in 3 years we have only seen 3 final drive failures", the first of which is unlikely as I don't believe in absolutes too often, and the second of which seems highly unlikely just from knowledge about personal friends who have had failures. So DWF (divorced white female?) I agree, it would be great if BMW was a more open corporation. But they are not, and not likely to be anytime soon.

I also give DaveT from Irv Seaver's the benefit of the doubt, when he says its not worth his limited/valuable time to screw around with BMW corp. If the EWS failure is uncommon (less than 1 percent?) then why indeed should he? Now if 10 percent of his customers are showing up with EWS failures, then I'm pretty sure it would be worth his while to look into it.

I am guessing that it is a pretty uncommon failure, and that the same 20 of us bitch & moan about it. Of course what is even worse is that most of those 20 have never had the failure, we're just WORRIED ABOUT IT.

My GSA has 12K miles on it. I'm just trying to hold off from buying a spare ring until they seem to be truly fixed, or stop dropping in price. I any event, I do plan on buying one before a trip this summer, so I guess I'm just as anal-retentive-geeky as the worst of you FF's

[marchyman]

Has anyone noticed that no-one bitches about final drives any more?

[Poolside]

Originally Posted by marchyman

Has anyone noticed that no-one bitches about final drives any more?

Well sure. After you fix it a couple of times it stays fixed.

[SocalRob]

Originally Posted by Tigerstar

So. My new GSA locked me out on Sunday, dealer picked bike up on Wed. They tried to start it and it would not start before they took it. I call service today and they have tried it five times and all five times it starts. I go to get it they go to bring it around to the front and guess what...locked out. So they are going to change the ring ant.
Anybody else get locked out and then get it to start?
If so did you have any more problems with it?
Thanks
Jeff

Good doG, this post points up, IMO, our (collective Advrider-anal-retentive-geeky-BMW-Owners) problems. Everybody who reads this thread knows that occassionaly a EWS failure will self correct, but it is never to be trusted from then on. Why in hell wouldn't a dealer know that they need to replace the ring, instead of having Jeff come all the way down to the shop to see that they could not get it right the first time out?

I'm guessing that the reason is the internet allows us inmates all to see small populations of predictable failures. Each dealer may only see a very few EWS problems, but on the internet we see them all. I'm thinking that modern vehicles are getting so reliable in their engineering/assembly, that random problems (like how often do we hear of a 1200 engine fragging?) are rare, so that predictable but uncommon/low event failures are being unmasked by the fact that the general noise of random failures common in older (designed) vehicles is gone. Think about it, how often does an inmate post a NEW (to the board) problem? So then we all focus on the few known problems, which really, in the general scheme of things, are pretty unlikely to occur to any one bike.

A dealer may only be servicing a 'fleet" of 500 bikes with antennae rings (IIRC a dealer selling 200 bikes a year is considered a big dealer), but here on Advrider who knows how many antennae ring bikes (1200's) there are represented, maybe 20,000 (thats really the number it would be nice to know, so that we could back in the math to figure the failure rate)? The inmates here may be more aware of statistically low failures than the dealers.

[motoreiter]

Originally Posted by SocalRob

I'm guessing that the reason is the internet allows us inmates all to see small populations of predictable failures. Each dealer may only see a very few EWS problems, but on the internet we see them all....The inmates here may be more aware of statistically low failures than the dealers.

Yeah, but, uh, shouldn't BMW, which presumably has much better data than anyone, give proper instructions to the dealers, rather than not telling them anything?

I don't know what the failure rate is, but whatever it is I think BMW should be much more proactive in giving info to dealers, if not us dumb riders.

[Tigerstar]

No problem It was scary cause it fits me to a T.