Yesterday, I road to work with a range of 280 miles. I had last filled up 380 miles ago and my bike has a range of roughly 440 in the most ideal conditions (straight line, no luggage, skinny German rider). I knew I was low on fuel but the bike got me to work no issue.
I left work at 4PM, hopped on my bike and it wouldn’t start.
When a fuel-injected bike doesn’t start, there are a few things you can do:
- Check the battery (moot since it was just replaced and computer screen and headlight were bright enough to not give me a reason for pause). Additionally, the battery icon wasn’t on
- Is your kick-stand up? If the bike is in gear and kick stand is down, it won’t start
- Is the emergency cut-off switch engaged?
- If kick stand is down, you should be in neutral
- Not really going to work but worth a try, if you give it gas when train to start, any luck?
I then peered into the fuel tank while Fuelly.com loaded on my iPhone and I observed no fuel in the tank and an observation that I had driven 414 miles since my last fuel-up and I was without a doubt out of gas.
Luckily, I called the Roadside Assistance that’s a part of my BMW MOA membership and a local place had gas for me within 15 minutes. It was 87 Octane and the bike needs 91+ so I asked him to just add half a gallon so I could get to the local gas station. Here’s a video of the ordeal.
Here’s the thing. The fuel-strip in my GS is 1 month old. I replaced it at Frank’s Motorcycles last month, under-warranty. BMW knows of the fuel-strip issue and they warranty it for 12 years after my bike’s warranty is null. The guy at Frank’s was very vocal about the issue and he said he’d refuse the service if I came back asking for another replacement.
On the way home, after I put a whopping 9.8 gallons of fuel in my bike, the fuel-level indicator never read as full. It remained at empty the whole way home.
I’ll have the fuel-strip replaced again on August 17th when I go in for my 12K mile maintenance at Max BMW but this is a serious problem.
BMW is aware of the issue, owners are aware and yet BMW just keeps replacing plastic fuel-strips at a 2-3 hour labor for these shops and won’t give us a permanent solution like a floating fuel gauge or fuel strip that isn’t plagued by damage caused by Ethanol in our gasoline.
As a car-person, I should have known better than to run out of gas. Using the trip-counter method would have saved me. The thing is, my MPG is terrible on the highway so the 350 mile rule really doesn’t work, it’s more like 300 on interstate and 400 on back-roads. I’ll need to adjust based on the kind of driving I’m doing.
However, because I don’t want the added stress, I’ve decided to order a Peg Packer (2-gallon) and install it on the bike. I’ll likely end up getting 2 of these when I take on my goal of riding the TAT next year.