Popularity
There are numerous owners clubs dedicated to the bike. There is an aftermarket of motorcycle accessories for the GS range which includes aluminium luggage, saddles, shock absorbers, screens, lights and GPS mountings.
In 2004 the R1150GS Adventure was made more popular after being used by actors Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman in their journey Long Way Round, which involved riding from London to New York by going east across Europe, central Asia, Alaska, Canada and the USA. They continued their association with the GS when Boorman used an F650RR during his 2006 Dakar Rally attempt, which was documented in the book and TV series Race to Dakar, and again in 2007 when both used the R1200GS Adventure in their journey Long Way Down, in which they rode from John o'Groats at the northern tip of Scotland, to Cape Agulhas in South Africa at the southern tip of the African continent.
Both the R1200GS and the F650GS were featured in the BBC TV series The Hairy Bikers' Cookbook, ridden by chefs Dave Myers and Si King.
Rush drummer and lyricist Neil Peart used an R1100GS for a 14 month, 55,000 miles (89,000 km) self-healing trip, documented in the book Ghost Rider: Travels on the Healing Road, that he made in the late 1990s following the deaths of his only daughter and wife. Peart also used the R1200GS with an 1150GS as a backup on his 2004 motorcycle trip between gigs on Rush's 30th Anniversary tour, a trip he documented in the book Roadshow: Landscape with Drums, A Concert Tour By Motorcycle.
Television food personality Alton Brown and his crew rode R1200GS motorcycles during season 2 of the television program Feasting on Asphalt. They rode BMW R1200RT motorcycles during season 1, but found the GS better suited for the backroads they found themselves on.
On 27 July 2007, the BMW R1200GS and R1200GS Adventure reached a production record of 100,000 units since its launch in 2004, making it the most popular BMW motorcycle. In May 2011, the 2,000,000th motorcycle produced by BMW was a R1200GS.
Read more about this topic: BMW GS
Famous quotes containing the word popularity:
“Here also was made the novelty ‘Chestnut Bell’ which enjoyed unusual popularity during the gay nineties when every dandy jauntily wore one of the tiny bells on the lapel of his coat, and rang it whenever a story-teller offered a ‘chestnut.’”
—Administration for the State of Con, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“There are few cases in which mere popularity should be considered a proper test of merit; but the case of song-writing is, I think, one of the few.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1845)
“The popularity of disaster movies ... expresses a collective perception of a world threatened by irresistible and unforeseen forces which nevertheless are thwarted at the last moment. Their thinly veiled symbolic meaning might be translated thus: We are innocent of wrongdoing. We are attacked by unforeseeable forces come to harm us. We are, thus, innocent even of negligence. Though those forces are insuperable, chance will come to our aid and we shall emerge victorious.”
—David Mamet (b. 1947)