Twist on shipping a Bike to Europe
 

So a friend of mine had suggested that we would order Motorcycles in the next year or so. We want to get some upgraded Adventure bikes. But as the twist we thought we would have the new bikes delivered to a European Dealer and assembled for pickup there. The intent was to only have to ship the bike to Canada and not receive a new bike only to turn around and ship it back to Europe. We want to ride around Europe once we pick up our bikes. Has anyone done this before? I know this has been done because it is actually written in one of Neil Peart's books. He did this with one of his BMW motorcycles while on tour in Europe. But then he has probably a lot more pull with BMW then I would.

This used to be common, at least for Americans; people flew to Europe, bought cars or bikes there, toured around, and returned home with their new vehicles. It's rare these days because specs on European vehicles (of all sorts) are different from what is legal in the US, and the bureaucratic processes for importing unapproved vehicles so expensive, that hardly anyone wants to bother.

Besides, cars and bikes are generally cheaper in the US anyway, although who knows how this will change with the current upheavals in international trade. How this relates to you as a Canadian I don't really know....but I bet the economics and bureaucratic considerations are pretty similar.

The other key piece is that it's nice to spend some time getting to know the idiosyncrasies of your chosen bike, fitting needed travel accessories, and working through any warranteed defects before leaving home. For the thousand dollars or so it'll cost to ship your bike to Europe, that's not a bad deal. The Air Canada program is one obvious possibility; I'd also check into Stefan Knopf's shipping and storage offerings if you can be flexible about time and place.

Someone else will know better than I which manufacturers still offer North American spec bikes for sale in Europe. If you happen to be extremely wealthy and one of the best rock and roll drummers of all time, well, that's probably going to smooth the way to some extent!

Hope that's helpful.

Mark

Mark has it right on this, with the addition of the following:

1. What you got when you picked up your bike in Europe was a CANADA or USA spec bike, produced and held just for you, and sold BY YOUR LOCAL DEALER to you.
2. With the huge increase in numbers of bikes made and sold by BMW, they cancelled this program years ago. I BELIEVE but am not certain that some of the reason for cancelling was also due to tightening restrictions on shipping bikes in, and in Canada for instance the extremely tight regulations on importing a bike into the country, even one made for Canada. If it didn't come in to the OEM distributor they don't like it.
3. Currently to my knowledge there are NO European delivery packages available. As Mark says, there are advantages to not wasting your vacation time messing about setting up a bike and dealing with a 1000km first serve etc.

Hope that helps clarify it!