I did. I have 2 yr. original followed by 5 years of ESP. I hear people say you are wasting your money on ESP's, but i really don't care. It's a $26,500 bike with a lot of expensive to replace parts. I got the warranty for $1054 which is about 4% of the cost of the bike. Absolutely a no brainer for me.
I am crazy about my CVO, but i have read too many horror stories about things that go wrong with CVO bikes(particularly motor/mechanical related-those seem to be legendary), so i just assume something is going to break and i want the MoCo to eat the cost when it does!
I've had my Breakout for 3 months with 1200 miles, and the paint is already starting to peel from the underside edge of the front fender....hopefully that's where my problems end, but I just like the piece of mind, knowing that the expensive stuff will be taken care of for several years down the road.
Hate to burst the bubble, but the MoCo won't be eating the cost, you and all the rest of the people who paid for the ESP are the ones footing the bill. The ESP repairs don't cost the MoCo, they profit from them. It's a big win for Harley when they can find a way to make stuff last two years until the factory warranty expires (or just screw you out of repairs with the infamous "that's normal" story), then fail shortly after so they can make more money selling all those repair parts to the ESP folks. If you want to make sure the MoCo eats the cost, make sure your stuff breaks in the first two years.
The best way to think of an ESP is to think of it as being very similar to an insurance policy. The insurance company (or ESP company) prices it's products in such a way as to cover all claims and provide a tidy profit. The policy holders are the ones ultimately paying the benefits. It's called shared risk. For every "winner" in the ESP lottery, there are by definition plenty of "losers" who are paying for the winners claims. There is no incentive for the MoCo to improve the long term reliability of their products under this system, so it's not terribly surprising they haven't done much. Lately there have been increasing numbers of reports that the ESP company has been getting much more involved in inspections prior to authorizing repairs, and being chicken chit about the fine print so they can avoid paying for repairs. Just handing over some extra money for an ESP these days is no guarantee of a good outcome. If you run afoul of a chicken chit dealership or ESP rep and you've modified anything you could find yourself on the short end of the stick even though you handed over a pile of extra cash up front.
I look at things differently, and if I go back over all those years I've bought cars and bikes and major appliances without paying for an ESP, I can come up with perhaps two times in all those years when I had a failure that would have been covered. Overall, I am many many thousands of dollars ahead of the game. If you're a person who believes in statistics and probabilities, it's not hard to say no when anyone starts pitching ESP's for most purchases. Just plain common sense will tell you that the only way an ESP can work is for the majority to receive much less in benefits than they paid in premiums. At the end of the day, the ESP company takes in more money than they pay out, or they go out of business. Last time I checked, most ESP companies are doing really well.
Jerry
Author
Topic: Extended Warranty (Read 3474 times)