Modern Vespa

How many of you have new Vespas, (1-2 years old), and are having electrical issues? My 1 year old GTS is having the electrical harness replaced due to an untraceable short.

my gf's 2005 et2 has some trouble. i'm starting a separate post on the issue.

While I had mine on Vacation in North Carolina My entire instrument panel went out. All the gauges, warning lights and turn signals. The headlight and tail light still worked as well as the brake light. I stayed out for about two days coming on from time to time. Then it just started working again and no problems since. (Knock on wood) I figured it was a moisture thing since my scoot normally does not sleep outside and it got rained on as well as a lot of riding in the rain. What are they charging to replace the harness??

It's going to be covered under the factory warranty since the scoot is less than 2 years old. I'm worried about next time in a year if this happens again, I'm sure the bill will be around $500 - 1000. Not a great thought for the future. I'm seriously thinking about selling my baby when it gets back. I can't afford $1000 a year on new wiring harnesses. That's a ridiculous expense if Vespa's have weak harnesses.

I have no electrical problems, knock on wood, but I am curious what some of your issues were. Also when they extract the old harness out, please look the harness over good, I mean really good. Look for any frayed wires or a rub point somewhere. Note where the rub point was so you can report back to us on where and what was done.

Spot

I've swapped posts with a few people who've had electrical trouble, generally wiring shorts:
GTS 250 Cooling Fan Stays on
Now, as luck would have it, I'VE got one too: the water temp bargraph is intermittant. Sometimes shows the flashing boxes on either end, indicating a short or open to the sensor. The wiring design (materials, routing, mounting, etc) doesn't seem quite robust enough.

John,

Some of these electrical issues sound like problems with shorts in the actual wiring/wiring harness - others involving the instrument panel sound like they might be related to connections of the wiring to the circuit board. What do you think?

out of 300 bikes sold we have repaired 4 electrical issues.
3 minor and 1 pretty good one. I feel thats pretty darn low!!
Electrical issues become very common with the label "made in china".

I think that's exactly right. A couple of people had wiring shorts, just in the cooling fan wiring, that I've seen; one in the taillight wiring, one with the gas level indication. And here we've got an instrument cluster that went south after getting wet. In my case, I think I've ruled out the sensor end of the wiring so now I'll need to remove the headset cover and have a look at the connection on the cluster.

The nasty thing about these problems is that shorts/opens are so fiendishly hard to find - tracing wires in mounted harnesses is absolutely no fun. Very often it turns out that the shop just gives up finding the fault and replaces the whole harness, which in a lot of cases is a cure worse than the desease.

VespaBurlington, I'm sure you're right about the your problem rate being low; maybe it is that anybody who has a problem comes right here to MV to report. I've come across quite a few electrical problems in the course of brousing the forum. Anyway, I'm happy to see a dealer here amongst us.

BTW; I drew up my own wiring diagram of the GTS because the diagram in the shop manual is so illegible. The file is too big to upload to the forum; if anybody's interested, I'd be glad to e-mail it to 'em.

I'm interested. Is it a PDF or what?

Mine is also about 18 months old and in the shop right now for a new harness, same untraceable grounding issue causing the engine light to light up. Bad thing is the dealer is having a hard time getting hold of a harness!

I tried to save it as a .pdf, but couldn't get the formatting to come out right. I have it in .jpg (low res) and .emf (enhanced metafile - high res, Internet Explorer will open it).

Exactly the fix GTSBERG is in. Been waiting for weeks - assume they come from Italy.

Here are the threads about wiring problems I've seen so far:
GTS 250 Cooling Fan Stays on
GTV blowing fuses
GTS Fan relay location?

We should declare this thread THE home for GTS wiring problems.

John,

Please email the files you have and I will see about getting them posted up properly here.


Thanks. I'm sure others are interested in what you put together.

Tom

Thanks John, Got the files. Please post up a new thread in General. Then I can modify that (files are already set to go up) and have it moved into the tech area.

Files are up:

[topic16635]

Super!