[Rick Lee]

Yesterday a bizarre gremlin appeared in my bike's instrument cluster. The odometer suddenly went to 999999 and it's staying there. Both trip meters work, as do the speedo and tacho. My bike has 27,920 miles on her and I only know this because I got my last tank of gas immediately after changing my gear oil and entering the date and mileage in my logbook. So I can add the trip meter reading to that number. Warranty expired in August.

I have read of a few other cases like this, but they were all on bikes still under warranty and so they just replaced the cluster. Out of warranty, that's a $1000 part. I went to the dealer today and their service folks are way cool. They had it on their computer for almost two hours, trying all kinds of stuff, but nothing worked. They were able to save everything onto a memory stick to document to BMW NA and are calling them tomorrow to ask for a workaround and, barring that, a goodwill no-charge repair. But the tech said BMW has been pretty stingy with goodwill repairs recently. And he also said the fact that I DIY eveyrthing and have no service history in dealers' computer systems won't help my case. Though he agreed that nothing I could do to the bike would have caused this. It's purely a factory defect. It really chaps my hide that this is a non-wear item and can be nothing other than a facotry defect.

So now I'm gearing up for a huge fight with BMW NA. Anyone have some success stories to boost my confidence?