The other day I was riding along, a guy on big 1.2K beemer was riding a couple of cars ahead in some slowish traffic and all of a sudden his bike did a little dance and he went straight over the handlebars and smack down in the road.
I thought he'd hit some oil or something or been clipped by a car coming the other way.
I pulled over along with another biker and we licked him up, then the bike. ONce hed got his breath back all he could say was that the front brake had suddenly locked up on him. "Must be the ABS".

Anyone ever heard of such a thing?

I checked out his calipers and they looked in very good nick. The bike was only about 2 years old.

I've seen one example of ALB working well on a bike when a guy got cut up going down the outside of the traffic and a van turned across the road on him without indicating.

Anyone have any opinions or experiences about/with ALB on bikes. It's got me thinking. Would I really feel safe knowing there's another level of control over my destiny. IMagine if that had happened at 100. Sheesh

 

Never heard of anything like it and, since BMW really know their ****, I'd have to put it down to 'pilot error'. Maybe he just grabbed a big fistfull of front brake at low speed and expected the ALB to save him and it just locked enough to flip him. Nobody's going to get up and say"I'm just a crap rider!", it's much easier to blame the machine.

I hated linked brakes so had them split but ,in my opinion and experience with it in cars, anti-lock brakes can only be a good thing. In the dry and on a straight road a good rider might be able to pull up slightly sooner without ABL, but in the wet or swerving to avoid a lunatic i don't think any of us would have better control than the ALB. Just my thoughts.

 

Actually there's a specific recall on just this problem

Motorcycle Affected
2004 BMW R1200 GS

Summary
ON CERTAIN MOTORCYCLES, UNDER RAPID, REPEATED, AND UNUSUALLY HARSH BRAKING, LOSS OF ABS CAPABILITY COULD TEMPORARILY OCCUR.

Consequence
TEMPORARY LOSS OF ABS BRAKING COULD INCREASE THE RISK OF A CRASH.

Remedy
DEALERS WILL ADD A PHYSICAL RESTRICTION, IN THE FORM OF A BANJO BOLT WITH A FLOW RESTRICTOR TO THE BRAKE LINE, AND ON CERTAIN MODELS DEALERS WILL INSTALL NEW FRONT BRAKE DISCS OF A SLIGHTLY LARGER THICKNESS FREE OF CHARGE. THE RECALL BEGAN ON JUNE 5, 2006, AND WILL BE A PHASED MAILING THROUGH OCTOBER 2006. OWNERS MAY CONTACT BMW AT 1-800-831-1117.

Potential Motorcycles Affected
13200

 

Wow! However, the problem was "loss of ABS capability" so the rider must have just slammed on the front brake alone with no feel at all. Personally, whenever I've felt the back lift, on any bike, I've eased off on the front brake ..

The moral could be: Never trust totally in your gadgets, learn to ride!

 

Yeah I'd agree Dave he pulled too hard being used to the ABS kicking in and when it did not ....over he went !.......... straight away I figured something was not quite right .....
sure enough this recall shows an abs problem relative to the issue.

 

Sprock. I think it's a real worry that a manufacturer of BMWs standard can fu#k up something so important.

The other thing that's worrying about this incident is that it highlights how we (drivers generally) are coming to depend on all the electronic stuff to keep us on the road. If somebody who learned ride or drive a vehicle with ABS, EBD, ESC etc.etc. jumped on or in an older vehicle without it all, they'd have no clue what to do if the back starts to go or they skid.

I'm all for my family driving around in a car with all that stuff in it but, when I teach my kids to drive (already started) I'll be showing them on a quiet dirt road or the front paddock what the go is when you're going sideways etc.

It's almost worth a seperate licence category, just like autos/manuals, because the difference driving these vehicles is so great when things start to go wrong.

It's good the bloke was ok and didn't get run over!

 

dave, recalls happen all the time. No manufacturer has been immune to them. Just a couple that shall not be named *cough* Toyota *cough* have chosen to cover up instead of dealing with it.

Honda has some
Question is what did the owner know about the recall? If he was the original owner he should have received a notification, especially since it was published in a mag. I'm not the original owner of my F4i. But one of the things I did while waiting for the original owner to get the title was check Honda for recall notices.

 

Hmmm, some interesting debate going on here.
I think as witness I should elaborate on the accident.

The rider of the BM was actually about 50 metres down the road from a set of lights which he and all the rest of us had just pulled away from. There was nothing in front of him to have made him need to brake.
He was a big man in his 50's. I would have said from his dress that this wasn't his first bike by any stretch of the imagination. The bikes speed could not have been more than 30 MPH and he was accelerating.
All the cars following had to brake very hard. Us on bikes got to the front, kicked out the side stands and rushed to his aid.

Scene padded out, the questions you've raised need answers.

Did he just slam on the brakes stupid style? Bloody unlikely.
It took him about 3 seconds (or so it seemed to me) to go down from the point I saw the bike start acting erratically. Plenty of time to let go of the brake.

The GS was (I think an 07 model). Hardly any wear on the discs and I did get down and feel them (while the rider was being first aided by the other guy who stopped).

Finally and perhaps more mysteriously, the brakes were not locked on when we picked up the bike and pushed it into the curb. It was still running when we picked the guy up and still in gear too with the back wheel spinning. I wonder if turning the ignition off reset the ALB.

When things happen that fast, especially early in the morning when everyone's still half asleep it's hard to make sense of anything but I've never seen anything like that and I hope I don't again.

Now back to the manufacturers:
Dave, you've got my vote so far. A different license catagory would make people realise the differences that technology has made. There's a much bigger difference between getting into a vehicle with ALB or none than a vehicle with a manual gear box or auto.
However, how do we really know what an ectronically controlled system is going to do in any given circumstance, especially a system that is designed to protect us in a time frame that could be nothing more than the blink of an eye?
The other side of the coin is that almost all motorcycles have a kill switch. The simple function is to be able to kill the engine if it get's out of control. This is probably not going to happen in the blink of an eye comparative to braking and the effect will be a gentlish slow down.
ALB..... kill switch.... they both have an effect on the bike in the face of adversity but theres a huge difference about how much control a rider may or MAY NOT have over either principle.

My feeling is, ride to suit the conditions, learn how you machine will react in as many situations as you can.
I don't want ALB.
Let the force be with you.
And I'm still after a positive argument for ALB......... anyone.......?

 

no arguments from me on this, IMO anti lock does not need to be on a bike, for this very reason, no matter what the conditions are, you must ride within the bikes(and riders) limits, if you were to count on a perticular system to save you, and you get to comphy with "gadget brakes" , if something fails , you will crash. But in this case i still think the rider is to blame, if the antilock system failed , it wood not lock down the brakes.

 

I don't have a whole lot of knowledge on ABS systems. I've replaced some parts (valves, wheel speed sensors, etc), but by NO means am I an expert on them.
I always thought that the default when you got a screwy signal from a wheel speed sensor was for the computer to disable the ABS altogether.... not for it to come on.
I suppose it's possible that something in the programming with a particular model is causing the ABS to come on when it gets a chit signal from a wheel sensor or something?
Possibility? And then when it did, the rider wasn't ready for it and lost control?
Just trying to figure out how it could have happened other than the rider just making a stupid mistake and blaming the bike.