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BMW will always offer good things to those who wait...but you have to wait until BMW thinks something is a "good thing" and produces it at the right time. there's nothing wrong with that.
a couple of things about making motorcycles that most of us forget:
first: a dollar invested in making a motorcycle has a much smaller return than a dollar invested in making a car. i don't have numbers anymore but at one time Honda was making way more profit per dollar spent on cars than bikes. I'm surprised they bother banging out bikes at all, if it wasn't for history and heritage. they're probably worried that Soichiro will come back to haunt them again if they stop.
(sidebar: mr. honda always assured the car industry that he'd never make a pick-up truck or a convertible. after he was gone one of honda's biggest failures was the Del Sol, a permanently leaking semi-convertible. we don't even want to talk about the pick-up truck.)
second: for bmw specifically, there's that GS thing. if YOU had a pile of raw materials and felt it prudent and financially safe to increase production of something that's really popular, what would you make? Gerade-Strasse comes to mind...the german term for on/off road. GS for short.
in this country, nobody really needs (or fully utilizes) a motorcycle. for us, they're toys. given the whole economy and where a bike is on the discretionary income scenario, all the manufacturers have been moving slowly and carefully. just like the rest of us.
creating new bikes requires a few years of advance planning and many of the products that came down the pipeline (up until the past 18 months or so) were committed to and put into that pipeline before the economic endo was confirmed.
you just don't rip a new bike out of your butt in a year's time. A "new" bike is a 5 to 7 year project. rubbing out a re-model is at least a 2 year deal.
as the Doc mentioned, all the manufacturers are sitting on some really cool stuff. in many cases, they've slowed down the flow of the pipeline to make sure they survive. ('cept KTM, the energy-drink sponsored South Park of bike-dom).
it's possible that what you're seeing in the BMW line, and the others, is the result of things that happened a while back. if you compare what's been coming out recently, against offerings of just a few years gone by, i think you'll probably notice we're in somewhat of a flat spot.
don't expect the "flat spot" to surge forward suddenly either.
it looks like this particular industry rebound won't be fast or be backed by massive torque. we're in sort of a heavy BNG (bold new graphics) phase.
the timing is tricky, because if there's a rebound, you don't want to get caught with a year's worth of stacked up BNG in your supply chain.
on the bright side, i'm seeing hints that small manufacturing is gaining back ground, particularly the SMs who make the tools for the guys who make the big stuff.
that's always been a good sign that the industry is getting back up, knocking the dirt off their shoulders and working their way up to speed again.
another good thing: sometimes these manufacturers just can't stand to have their cool technology sitting on the "developed and ready to go" shelves, so they occasionally gush a bunch of it out due to lack of self-control.
i'm hoping the 2014 and '15 line-ups will be that way.
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