By any honest accountig, BMW Motorad is “the GS company”- Despite all their marketing efforts for the latest luxury tourer or superbike or whatever segment chaser, the GSes are usually BMW’s best sellers. But as always, BMW tries to convince us that we need something on two wheels forcused on other roads or streets.

One of the benefits of the better rallies is the odd seminar put on by a former corporate insider, in this case Laurence Kuykendall at the current BMW Riders Association Rally. With at least one current BMW employee monitoring, Laurence was nice enough to inform us of BMW’s recent and future “bike in the city” marketing efforts. Suffice to say, BMW has put on their narrowest blinders and is aiming their marketing cannons at urban markets, because everyone seems to be moving to the magacities. And thanks to those blinkers, BMW can’t see that a lot of those folks ain’t movin’ to the metro by choice, and sure as hell can’t afford a new BMW. Heck, if BMW wanted that market, they should have bought up some bus and light rail manufacturers!

More telling was the response by BMW’s rep present to airhead interogation after Laurence’s presentation, when he tried to defend BMW’s policy of concentrating dealers in those megacities, far from those GS’s stomping grounds. Now when your customers keep buying GSes despite your persuasions otherwise and ride them all over the countryside and world, it would make sense to save all the multimillion dollar costs of those persuasions and just give the GS riders what they want. That means truly capable dual sport bikes and a dealer network that is everywhere to assure rapid repairs instead of thousand dollar flatbed “tows” back to the megacity dealers.

But I suppose when you make one of the world’s least reliable motrocycles, best to keep your customers slurping $5 coffees within a stone’s tow of the dealers…