I've owned 2 and I highly recommend 2 cylinder BMW for its superb reliability IMO For solo riding they maybe not everyone's cup of tea, but if you often do 2-up riding as well, then they're among the best bikes available.

1100 models from '97-'99 that have all the teething problems sorted and probably among the most reliable BMWs ever.

My last one '98 R1100GS was 60Kkm before crashed. Current one is 80Kkm, also '98 R1100GS. Not a single problem. And the conditions where I live are third-world - around half of the roads are gravel, all secondary tar roads will vibrate your teeth off, only the very main highways are torelable for any western-world rider.

I ride around half of my mileage in potholed-corrugated gravel roads. And in those particular conditions I've found (in biker-mythological terms: surprisingly) it's the jap bikes that start show their weak spots while my BMW goes on without any trouble or a sign of weakness. At least my jap did, it started to fell apart less than 50Kkm before I quickly sold it. (Did I mentioned it was Suzuki?)

Just some examples from my pictures. You'll get:

Snow:





Highspeed dirt:







The best stability spot is between 120-140kph and engine just sings around calm 4Krpm.


Rocks:



Sand:

Even with massive 41 litres of fuel on board the 1100cc boxer has amazing agility in the sand and can keep up with lightweight singles while it's a superior tourer on hard-surfaced roads by far.




Now with smaller 32 litre tank.




It'll go anywhere where rider tells it to go.


While Suzukis need pushing.

Some other typical roads, mix of all - sand, gravel etc:


In those conditions my jap bikes haven't proven to be exacly reliable, even when not counting the mythical-reliability as they supposed to be very reliable bikes in "common bikers-mythology" Also some of my friends having jap bikes I see surprisingly lot of problems in the conditions we have here if boys take their toys to real harsh conditions offroad.

Bikes maybe last long on the US and western-europe's smooth roads, but here things tend to play out differently.

So from my experiences, I'm not particulary a believer of jap bike's reliability myth. Well it's not bad, it's sufficient, they're made by man afterall thus they can't be perfect like any other bike, but still they're nowhere close to the reliability level as most of bikers are "made to believe" or assume they are.

Just my 2c.

Hope this explains my point of view.

Margus