If you were to actually read the article you would see that Aprilia already traced the problem back to a manufacturing defect in the rods.

Yep, you are correct. In my haste, I took "a bum piece" to mean a single piece on one machine that blew up 5 bikes. :-(

BTW, if the following link doesn't make you want to cry with jealousy, I don't know what will. The sound is perfection IMO

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFwS_CQHjqk&feature=related

While Aprilia says they found the problem fairly quick it's still majorly bad news for them to have such a public mechanical problem. Anything with moving parts from Italy is automatically suspect for a lot people and this sure doesn't help.

That said, I'm thinking about picking one of these up anyway...

MMsports54 - 04 December 2009 02:19 PM

While Aprilia says they found the problem fairly quick it's still majorly bad news for them to have such a public mechanical problem. Anything with moving parts from Italy is automatically suspect for a lot people and this sure doesn't help.

That said, I'm thinking about picking one of these up anyway...

That's the thing. People buy Italian bikes knowing full well of their spotty mechanical history. They have a moment like this, and people simply shrug their shoulders (myself included), and still ponder a purchase of one.

Now if this happened to a Japanese or German bike, there'd be more curiousity paid, because their bikes are historically more mechanically reliable.

“The launch bikes were pre-production machines with just 300km on the clock. Aprilia found the problem very quickly and traced it to a manufacturing fault with a batch of con rod."

So, I guess when the testriders tested the bikes none of this happened right? And when they ran the engines for a couple of days on a testbench nothing happened either?

Than this is the worst quality control ever, pre-production or not.

In European press this will be talked about and this is not good for their reputation. And sales.

Azrifel - 04 December 2009 05:12 PM

In European press this will be talked about and this is not good for their reputation. And sales.

Maybe the lower sales will drop the price to something a little more affordable for me

MCN -

Phil Read of Piaggio was at the launch and said: “These are the first 30 pre-production models.

"On all of them, we’ve found a crack in the forged conrod. The machined big end hole is slightly off-centre, so one side of the rod is thinner than the other and that’s where the crack has occurred.

"We’ve contacted the supplier and are meeting with them now. It won’t cause any major delays in production.”

Big ends machined off centre? Meeting with supplier? I'm glad I'm not a fly on the wall in that conversation! Not only will the "operatic performance" be extremely loud, I suspect the heat will scorch the paint. A company does tend to lose face when some fool botches the machining process and a room full of journalists are denied a three-day track session.