How many on the road???

[captaine]

I was just wondering... How many 1200LTs are on the road today, including all years. Does anyone know how to get this information?

[jzeiler]

In just a few days there will be about 350 on the road at the same time headed for CCR!

I don't know if anyone has ever come up with the production run total for LTs. It would be interesting to know. They are world wide but I'll bet most are in the US.

[Ted]

Found this for 2008:

Factoid: BMW Motorcycle Production in 2008

April 22, 2009 - The BMW Group today reported that 101,964 motorcycles were produced in the Berlin plant in 2008, ranking 8 for total output of the 24 BMW manufacturing facilities located in 13 countries. 2,000 BMW associates are employed at the plant (51 motorcycles per employee).

The Husqvarna Motorcycles S.r.l. manufacturing plant in Cassinetta di Biandronno, Italy produced 14,232 motorcycles with 268 employees (53 per employee).

Just for comparison, the #1 ranked plant for total number of vehicles produced was the BMW Munich plant, which produces the BMW 3 Series Sedan, Touring and engines. That plant has 8,000 employees and 2008 production was 202,992 automobiles and 131,254 engines.
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Just some rough math - there are 15 models currently on BMW's website, so 101,964 / 15 = 6,797.6. This average is probably high for the LT, so maybe 3,500 - 4,000 worldwide per year, with maybe 1,500 - 2,000 coming into the US. Bike has been available for 10 years so 15,000 - 20,000 total US population.

Total guess with virtually no research so don't flame me!

[Ted]

I was just wondering... How many 1200LTs are on the road today, including all years. Does anyone know how to get this information?

One more thought on this, in 2002 BMW representatives told some members of this group that there were approximately 270 failures to date (all may not have been true FD failures). This is where the famed "4%" number originated, which at the time was really 3.6%.

270 is 3.6% of 7,500. In 2002, this would have included model years 1999, 2000, 2001, and 2002, or an average of 1,875 LT's per year.

Don't know if the 270 was for US, North America, or worldwide - maybe someone who was in attendance when these numbers were given could chime in.

[Randy]

One more thought on this, in 2002 BMW representatives told some members of this group that there were approximately 270 failures to date (all may not have been true FD failures). This is where the famed "4%" number originated, which at the time was really 3.6%.

270 is 3.6% of 7,500. In 2002, this would have included model years 1999, 2000, 2001, and 2002, or an average of 1,875 LT's per year.

Don't know if the 270 was for US, North America, or worldwide - maybe someone who was in attendance when these numbers were given could chime in.To add a little more clarity to this, what Tom told us was that at the time he did the query (late July - early August 2002), BMW of North America had delivered just over 7600 motorcycles. He did a query of total warranty service reports related to the rear drive. He said these claims could include failures of the rear drive bearings, rear drive seal and even some complaints of noise that were actually due to rear tire cupping or feathering. He was unable to limit his query to actual rear drive bearing failures. It was from that number of claims (278 IIRC) that the roughly 4% number came from.

Just after CCR in 2002, Tom told me that they had shipped a total of just over 200 total replacement rear drive assemblies as of the end of August. That would equal approximately 2.5% of delivered K1200LTs in North America. That also doesn't account for how many dealers ordered a replacement drive for stock. At that time they were advising dealers to replace entire drives, but we know some dealers were rebuilding them. So it remains nearly impossible to get a real rate of failure on early LTs.

But it does say that over 7600 LTs were delivered as of the end of July 2002. I think sales continued to be strong through 2005 with 2005 being one of the strongest years for LT sales. I *think* someone at Motorrad told me there were approximately 17,000 LTs delivered as of the end of 2005. I honestly do not recall if that was through the end of 2005 or the 2005 model year. A reasonable guess of total LT sales in the US would likely be between 19,000 and 21,000 since 1999.

[Ted]

Randy -

Thanks for providing more info to narrow down the guesstimate!