Why Fuel Injection is taking over.
The motorcycle industry was generally slow to change from carburetors to electronic fuel injection.
The carburetor suppliers had a tried and tested product, and there was an entire sub-business focusing on re-jetting, tweaking, adjusting, and repairing carburetors, and everyone was happy with the situation.
Electronic fuel injection was seen as much too complicated and fragile technology, difficult to service and repair, and impossible to adjust when the customer installed a new aftermarket exhaust and air filter. The fact that this technology was commonly used in cars seemed to make little difference…
During the early 80’ies, there was a few attempts by some of the Japanese manufacturers to implement fuel injection on new top end models, but they was never popular with the dealers and mechanics who had no clue on how to work them, so they quietly reverted to carburetors and forgot all about it.
BMW was the first manufacturer to seriously implement electronic fuel injection, and they did so with the K75 and K100 series that was launched in the mid 80’ies. BMW had in-house experience with fuel injection from the car industry and the fuel injection equipment they used in the beginning was very similar to the equipment used in their cars. By todays standards it was not ideal for a high performance engine, but BMW had a good starting point, and slowly the market accepted fuel injection on motorcycles as a possible solution.
Going fast forward 10 years to the mid 90’ies, and we see that some Italian brands are now using fuel injection on their top models. They clearly did not have the same knowledge and experience in-house as BMW, because the programming of the first fuel injections was actually quite horrible.
This was not a problem that was isolated to the Italian brands, because 5 years later when the first fuel injected Japanese motorcycles arrived, we saw the same pattern on those bikes.
By the turn of the century, it was clearly a young industry and the learning curve was steep !
But after year 2000, things moved fast and the motorcycle industry changed over to fuel injection with an incredible speed. They knew very well that the tighter emission standards that was announced for 2006/2007 would kill the carburetor, so they had to start investing time and money in research and development of the fuel injection.
In 2005, all carburetor motorcycles was older developments in their last years of production, all new models was fuel injected, and by 2007, virtually all new bikes was fuel injected.
So 2007 was the year the carburetor passed away after more than a hundred years of more or less faithful service.
| 
