Open Letter to the Quinn Bros of BMW Toronto: Time to Repair Your Motorcycle Service

Dear Reg & Steve Quinn,

I have an F800GS purchased from BMW Toronto in 2009, and I love the bike.

What I don't love is the impossibility of getting it serviced at your shop. Indeed, the service has gotten so progressively terrible since I drove the bike off your lot in '09 that it has reached the point where I can no longer get any at all. I have called to make appointments for regular maintenance and repairs three times this season alone and never got a call back. I know your service department is overwhelmed, and I don't blame the staff there. But when things have reached this point, I reckon management needs a poke. So here's yours.

Back when I still could get service, I had several very bad repairs done by your techs -- two of which resulted in serious threats to my safety on the road. Of the others, 80% showed clear evidence of sloppy, rushed and incompetent technicians' work. Extremely worrying stuff in all.

Because of these experiences, I took the advice of a friend and switched to Budds' BMW, way the hell out in Oakville for all the service work I don't perform myself. Budds' have their act utterly together -- top service department and techs, combined with a sense that they give a damn and are passionate about their work and bikes. Wonderful, except that they live in Oakville and I live in Toronto. The inconvenience factor is far too high.

So what I'm getting at here is: Why is BMW Toronto's Motorrad service so poor and getting poorer? Why aren't the Quinn Bros fixing it? What has to happen for you to do so?

I am not meaning this as an attack. On the contrary, it's meant as a plea. I want to come to BMW Toronto, spend my hard earned dough there on my beloved. I want to tell all my fellow BMW-owning rider friends that BMW Toronto Motorrad is back, can be trusted, is on its game, finally.

It's worth mentioning that a number of your customers have complained about this lousy service and treatment on forums such as http://F800Riders.org and other venues. The service at your dealership is an inconvenient elephant in the living room of all Toronto BMW motorcycle owners.

I don't know if either one of you rides motorcycles. But you need to know that shoddy repairs on them is a wholly different matter than on a car. When serious things go wrong on a bike due to bad wrenching, people tend to fall off and die. There are only two wheels, an engine and common sense between paradise and hell for all moto riders. Faith in the mechanicals is paramount. BMW Toronto Motorrad does not give this to its customers.

I truly hope you will respond to this letter, and to its urgings. Doing so is both in your interests as entrepreneurs and as reasonable human beings.

Best,

Paul

P.S. Please note that this letter will be posted at www.eatsleepride.com, a Toronto website devoted to all motorcyclists and bikes. The opportunity to rise to the occasion and reply to it on the site -- or not -- is in your hands.