Story of Yamaha incompetence

[OlDirtyBrian]

This is going to be sort of long but i need to rant. I have been a very loyal Yamaha customer for the past five years. Until recently i have been impressed with the quality of the products they build and servie they offer. That all changed three months ago. My current ride is an '04 R1. After only 4000 miles the bike ate its crankshaft. It was covered under warranty so it should have been no big deal. Well after being at the dealership for over six weeks the repair still wasn't completed.
A couple days later i moved out to California. Since it had taken such a ridiculously long time to fix Yamaha agreed to ship the bike cross country to meet me. Well that was over a month ago now and it is still sitting at the dealership in North Carolina. They claim the they haven't been able to locate a crate, and until that happens the bike cant be shipped. Am i the only one that thinks that the second largest motorcycle manufacturer in the world should be able to locate a crate within 30 days without a problem. I've been on the phone with the customer service people daily now for the past week and a half. For some reason they just can't manage to pull their heads out of their asses and complete a simple shipment.
Basically the whole process has cost me over $1200 in wasted bike payments and wasted insurance. Not to mention three months of stress and dealing with morons. When it finally does show i i'm going to sell the piece of crap and never buy another Yamaha product as long as i live. Tell all your friends don't buy Yamaha.

[hooter31]

tellthe morons at the dealership the next R1 they uncrate to put your bike in it...it's not rocket science,you would think they could have figured it out

[tzracer]

A fully assembled bike will not fit into the crate used for shipping a bike.

There is at least one company (ISTR a moving company but cannot recall the name) that will provide a pallet for shipping, no crate needed. Strap the bike to the pallet, give them a call and they pick it up.

[Clay]

The bikes come from the factory 99% assembled.  I don't know how much they differ, but Hondas only had to have the front wheel put on, clip-ons and windscreen...that was it.  SOoooo, they can put the bike in a stinkin' crate without an issue.  

What probably has happened is that they uncrated their bikes and the guy who builds the bikes broke down the crate right away (part of his usual routine).  The manager never told him to keep the crate because it wasn't important enough to stay on his mind.   ::)

[Jeff]

The only thing that my RR needed to have put onto it was the windscreen and mirrors...  They should be able to use a factory crate with no problems.

[tzracer]

I have shipped bikes via common carrier. US, Canada, Japan, and several European countries.

I would never use a crate that a bike is delivered to a dealer in to ship my bike.

Make sure your crates are marked "do not top stack", even then a multi-ton generator might still get put on top of your bike (it was not pretty).

At Buell we started out using the crates that HDs were delivered in, what a nightmare. Something like 30% had damage. We then had our own crates made. They were wood crates, I could stack them 5 high with no problem. We still had several bikes/crates destoyed in shipment via common carrier.

If it were my bike, I would arrange my own shipping or go get it myself.

http://www.brunolake.com/moto.htm

[Woofentino Pugrossi]

R1's come in a metal frame crate that folds down for shipping back to Yamaha. Bars are folded in and teh mirrors are off while crated. But yet they try to charge $450 for "set-up"?

[251am]

  Hey Brian, Have you called Yamaha North America yet? Sounds like the dealership obviously sucks. However, I believe they pay for all the work done on your machine up front, then corporate reimburses the dealership. I know, that's no excuse for stalling but when a business man has to wait 2 months to get paid for work done on your bike, they'll keep the bike and wait for the corporate check. Call Yamaha NA and be respectful. I know that's not what you wanna hear, but it has worked for me in the past with questionable stealerships. Good luck.  

[Shady]

Sounds like a problem indeed, but one with the dealership service department rather than Yamaha.    

[Decreasing_Dave]

A fully assembled bike will not fit into the crate used for shipping a bike.

There is at least one company (ISTR a moving company but cannot recall the name) that will provide a pallet for shipping, no crate needed. Strap the bike to the pallet, give them a call and they pick it up.

The bike are fully assembled.  Windscreen, mirrors and battery are all that need to be connected upon arrival.  The crates are not shipped back to Yamaha, they are disposed of.  Honda wants their crates back (cheap bast*rds).

//www.jcmotors.com ships and offers crates for $59.00 (I think).  These crates are re-usable.  They can arrange shipping from either end.  No, I don't work for them, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night.  ;D

Good Luck.
Dave

[Clay]

but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night.  ;D

Oh, can you help me solve this quantum physics problem I've been struggling with?  Something about strings and alternate dimensions.  :P

[tzracer]

Oh, can you help me solve this quantum physics problem I've been struggling with? æSomething about strings and alternate dimensions. æ:P

Oh come on, quantum mechanics ain't all that hard, just time consuming. Much easier if you use Dirac notation.

Not sure if I would call string theory a quantum mechanics problem, it is really in the field of cosmology (all the people I have known who worked with string theory were cosmologists - one was a student of Steven Hawking) - quantum gravity.

Here is a short tease :

What is string theory?

String theory is at this moment the most promising candidate theory for a unified description of the fundamental particles and forces in nature including gravity. As a theory of quantum gravity string theory is at present our best hope to give concretely computable answers to fundamental questions such as the underlying symmetries of nature, the quantum behaviour of black holes, the existence and breaking of supersymmetry, and the quantum treatment of singularities. It might also shed light upon larger issues such as the nature of quantum mechanics and space and time. In string theory all the forces and particles emerge in an elegant geometrical way, realizing Einstein's dream of building everything from the geometry of space-time.

String theory is based on the (deceptively simple) premise that at Planckian scales, where the quantum effects of gravity are strong, particles are actually one-dimensional extended objects. Just as a particle that moves through spacetime sweeps out a curve (the worldline), a
string will sweep out a surface (the world-sheet).

In contrast with particle theories, string theory is highly constrained in the choice of interactions, supersymmetries and gauge groups. In fact, all the usual particles emerge as excitations of the string and the interactions are simply given by the geometric splitting and joining of these strings.

In this way the usual Feynman diagrams of quantum field theory are generalized by arbitrary Riemann surfaces.

Much recent interest has been focused on D-branes. A D-brane is a submanifold of space-time with the property that strings can end or begin on it.