I think it is because of their wanting desperately to use German or European suppliers if at all possible. On their Motorcycles, the "K" series had an extremely unreliable instrument cluster for years after introduction. By extremely, I mean more than 50% were failing within 2-3 years, many within a month or two. They managed to gradually improve the reliability after about 6 years, but on the next new product line "the oilheads" they finally went to a Japanese supplier.

My 1987 K75S motorcycle (which I still have) has gone through six new instrument clusters over about 100,000 miles (I don't know the mileage for sure with so many cluster changes), and BMW only paid for the first two, and half of the price for the next two. Conversely, my 1994 BMW R1100GS has Japanese instruments, 72,000 miles, and the original instruments are still working.


P.S. The "final" Rube Goldberg solution they came up with was to put a couple of nickle-sized vents on the back of the cluster, with Gore-tex membranes,,, apparently they could not stop moisture from collecting in the cluster, so they used Gore-tex to allow it to evaporate when the cluster got hot in the Sun.