I want to put in my two cents worth. I agree that the Spyder is not ready for prime time. Following is a letter I sent to Carlo yesterday. I sent the original on Tuesday. After weeks at the dealer and haaving strabded me 3 times, I too am ready to bail out of this vehicle that can be so much fun to ride, when its running ok. I've yet to receive any kind of confirmation from Carlo. I spoke to somebody at BRP and they want me to take the Spyder to a dealer to have their techs talk to the dealer. I have reservations for Gatlinburg next month, the way this is going I don't think it will happen. Right now I don't trust this lemon to take me more than a few miles. I wish Florida honored the lemon law on motorcycles. I could give you several more pages on all the problems I've had over the past 24 months... Oh I need to change my signature to "NOT A HAPPY OWNER ANYMORE!!!
Carlo:
This is an update to the letter I sent you yesterday 8-9-10. I have explained many more problems I’ve had with these dealers to show you that I can’t thrust any of these mechanics because of my bad experiences.
Hi! My name is Ralph Piñeiro. I’ve had so many problems with my 2008 Spyder that I hope you can help me. The VIN number is 2BXJACA 148V001607. I left you a message a week and a half ago but you never called me back. I need you to take this seriously as I would like to resolve this problem in an amicable way. My phone number is 305-322-xxxx, please call me.
My bike has been running rough for quite some time and no one can fix it. If the state of Florida would cover motorcycles under the lemon law mine would certainly qualify. I purchased a new vehicle so I wouldn’t have to deal with any of these problems, yet this Spyder has turned out into a nightmare. This lemon is totally unreliable, has left me stranded 3 times, and I just don’t thrust it anymore. It used to be fun to ride. Now I feel like I’m taking a gamble every time I get up on it. I need your help: I would like BRP to return my purchase price, some $20,200, or replace this lemon with a new one. After all the times they have tried, fixing it does not appear to be a choice anymore. I believe it’s not repairable, given all I’ve gone through. I’ll try to recap what has been going on just in the past couple of months alone.
I normally take my bike for service it to Barney’s in Brandon (Tampa) where I bought it, but it’s a very long drive over there. The trip to Tampa is usually about 2-1/2 hours (one way) but sometimes it takes as long as 4-1/2 hrs because of traffic. It makes for a very long day.
There is a dealer closer to me, Ridenow of Ocala (about 1 hour away). They do not have a good mechanic. Once after performing maintenance on my Spyder, I got home with no working headlights. They were working fine before the bike went to their dealership. I had to go back to the dealer. They found the large fuse under the seat blown. Of course there were no parts available, so I was told I needed to wait a week or two for fuses to come from Canada. I had to leave the bike at their shop. I went to my local auto parts store during the week and found the fuses in stock. I brought the fuse to them so they could replace it. I picked up the bike and again the fuse blew a few miles from the shop. A week of troubleshooting, and they wanted to charge me for their time and kept blaming the HID lights that Barney’s had installed upon me taking delivery of the unit.
To make a long story short, I had the bike towed to Barney’s who found the problem pretty fast: the mechanic at Ridenow had knocked a wire loose and it was laying on the exhaust causing a short. The so-called mechanic at Ridenow should have easily found it given the fact that he had been working on that area and had been the one that had knocked the wire loose. And they wanted to charge me for their time on top of that. Time without a bike at least two weeks…
In May, I took my Spyder to Deland Motorsports, after Barney’s told me that it would charge me 3-1/2 hours labor to replace my rear tire, plus another 2 hrs to replace the rear bearings. This after charging me almost $500 just to check the valves for the 12,000 mile service (we did everything else at home). The drive to Deland is about 2-1/4 hours, but it’s always a 2-1/4 hr drive. Also the people over there are very nice and always receive you with a warm smile, and are very eager to help. The problem is that it is a tiny dealership. There is hardly any room to turn your car around in the parking lot. And there is only one mechanic, a jack-of-all-trades which is always so busy working on motorcycles, ATV’s, boats, jet skies, etc. that I don’t feel can do a good job due to the huge workload that he has, since he is always scrambling to jump from one vehicle to the next.
I complained about rough driving at a steady speed and the Deland mechanic found corroded wires and burned out connectors on the starter and negative battery terminal. So far so good, right? Not quite, read on.
Deland also replaced my rear tire but could not replace the rear bearings because they were missing a tool. They didn’t have the bearings either; I had gotten those by mail from another dealer. Next weekend I had to go back to have them replaced. When I picked up the bike, the rear wheel sounded like a concrete mixer! Don’t you teach your dealers to have pride in their work? The service manager took my bike out back and told me he’d deliver it to me the next day, which they did. They supposedly re-torqued it the bearings and rode it a few miles to make the noise go away. It bothers me that all the metal to metal noise it was making was fixed by driving it around. It really bothers me since now I have no idea of the condition of that rear wheel. After that the bike appeared to be running ok, for about 3 weeks.
On June 12th we trailered the Spyder to Hickory, NC for our motorcycle club’s International convention. After checking in the hotel we decided to go for a short ride up and down the street. After 6 or 7 minutes I did not think we were going to make it back to the hotel on that bike. It was overheating, running very rough, the idle jumping from about 1,100 to 1,800 RPM’s. Back firing and shaking tremendously. It actually quit at 3 red lights before we barely made it back to the hotel.
We lost Sunday and Monday off our vacation. On Monday morning we trailered the bike to Schronce Motorsports. They were very gracious and immediately started working on it to try to salvage the rest of our vacation. They ended up replacing the thermostat, and, downloading the software “fix to the fix” from last year when you downloaded the software that started all the problems. The mechanic at Schronce told me that the software had never been downloaded, although the service manager at Barney’s had told me last year that this had been done. He downloaded the software and the bike ran Ok the rest of the week and the next two weeks.
On July the 3rd my wife and I went on a ride to Cedar Key, about 45 miles one way from home. I even stopped and took a picture of my odometer after it hit 15,000 miles. On the way back, I stopped on US 19 for a moment and when I started the bike again, it was running on 1 cylinder, very rough, and the “check engine” message kept flashing across the screen. The engine temperature was only 4 bars, but even so I decided to let it cool down before trying to start it. I tried restarting several times without the problem going away. I even tried resetting the computer by removing the large fuses under the seat with no success. Eventually I had to have the lemon towed back home, then on Monday July the 5th I had it towed to Champions Motorsports in Eustis (Leesburg) (about 80 miles one way). I did not want to take it to Barney’s because if they had lied to me about downloading the software upgrade I did not want to do business with them anymore.
Champions found that the ECM was bad and had to order a replacement. This made sense since I couldn’t even reset the computer and it’s hard for me to believe that Barney’s had not downloaded the software upgrade. A bad computer could have dumped the program. You guys did not have this part in Georgia so I had to wait two weeks for the part to arrive from Canada. I rode the bike home on July 17th and I didn’t think I was going to make it all the way. It was missing, sputtering and back firing so bad.
I had it towed back to Champions on July 19th, and they went back to work on it. After two more weeks they told me it was fixed again after clearing some computer error codes. I asked if they had driven it to verify that it was indeed working. “Oh yes, we rode it 20 miles!” So here we go again back to Leesburg to go pick it up on 7/31. I rode the Spyder 7 miles from the shop before it started missing so bad I had to turn around. It quit twice at the red lights. When the service manager rode it from the front of the dealership to the back where the service dept is, it dropped to one cylinder.
They checked it then, and discovered that it was not charging. I must point out right here that there is a direct relationship between my bike’s temperature to how it runs. At three bars the bike runs awesome. At a high four bars or low 5 bars, it misses pretty bad running at a steady throttle (this might be while some people call surging, not sure). If it gets to the high end of 5 bars due to traffic or red lights then it appears to stop charging and the computer runs awful, due to low voltages I suppose. This in turn causes it to get worse and worse. By the way, many people that drive or ride in front of me tell me that my headlights dim, and sometimes one or the other even turn off when I’m riding. I have complained about this to all the dealers I’ve taken my bike to.
I was told by the Champions’ service manager on Tuesday, August 3rd that he had obtained the Ok from BRP and had ordered the stator which they had in Georgia so it was possible that I could get my bike back by the weekend. On Saturday he told me it was fixed and running “like a dream”. When I got there he told me that they HAD NOT replaced the stator, that they had found a bad (leaky spark plug wire) and cleaned the connector between the stator and the voltage regulator, and it appeared to be charging ok. I reminded him how the bike charged fine when it was cool and that the problem would certainly come back when the bike was under load (riding around, not in the shop’s controlled environment).
Why would they get the stator from you under warranty and then turn around and not replace it? Beats me, check the charges that they submit to you, I don’t trust this dealer anymore. Obviously their mechanic doesn’t know what he is doing. I’m sure they can change oil and replace tires and simple tasks like that, but as far as “troubleshooting” and fixing stuff, they are clueless unless the computer spits out some codes to tell them what to do next. I say this because the service manager kept referring to computer errors or the lack thereof… I told him not rely so much on the computer and do some real troubleshooting. Again I believe they are incapable of doing this.
I don’t know where I go from here. I rode the bike home on Saturday and it’s still sputtering and missing at a steady throttle. It hasn’t gotten really hot yet because Saturday was a cloudy rainy day. This bike is not fixed and obviously can’t be fixed. I want my money back or a new bike. I won’t even mention the lack of use from all the problems. Motorcycle rental rates run around $100 a day, so there alone you owe me about $10,000, since I estimate my bike has been at the shop around 100 days with problems plus my expenses going back and forth to these dealers all of which are very far from my house, plus my time, and all the aggravation. If I was to add it all up, you’d owe me several Spyders… This bike is unreliable and can’t be trusted. IT WILL leave me stranded again in the near future, at the most inconvenient time. I expect your call ASAP.
Bill
