On a recent tour of the 10-year-old Harley-Davidson Museum in downtown Milwaukee, Wisconsin, I was reminded of the Motor Company’s legacy with displays of bicycles, lightweight motorcycles, and advanced projects dating back nearly 115 years. This was just a few hours after H-D announced several concept models to address the burgeoning need of electrified transportation, including its LiveWire for 2019, a whippy-fun street tracker, two bicycles, and an electrified and modern update on the old H-D Topper scooter. The release of new models is planned through 2022, and it’s clear the company is banking their future existence on this new lineup.





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February 18, 2018
The Current: Harley-Davidson – ‘E-Bike in 18 Months’
Harley-Davidson announced an investment…
Suffice it to say as H-D’s sales rapidly fall into the abyss world wide accelerated by their blatant corporate cronyism …. the ‘ E’ is about to become the largest single failure in H-D’s storied history of failures since their misguided foray into the world of sport bikes and ADVs with Eric Buell
Add to that the fact that H-D is about to attempt a re-etnry into the very closed world of ADVs dominated by BMW , KTM and to a much lesser extent Honda e .. along with yet another misguided foray into small displacement bikes in the futile attempt to increase sales in a rapidly diminishing motorcycle market ..
… all bets are we are witnessing the demise of H-D as a viable entity about to fall into the relegation bin of iconic brands who’s day came to an end
Any takers ?
No.
I think it is safe to say that HD just does not “get” E. They will not make the jump to E thinking and will insist that their new electric lineup ape the culture of the big twin, trying to retain the base that will strongly reject anything that is not Old HD. Instead of using the Silent Grey Fellow and boardtrackers as an inspiration they will insist on overweight chunky V-Twin lookalikes. They didn’t make a successful transition to a lighter smaller dimension motorcyle numerous times, Aermacchi, MV, Buell, the dealerships and customers could not associate anything other than the badass, dress like a pirate culture with HD. They may survive, but not at $20K price points. I suspect they will shrivel to a small 3rd gen outfit with the “real HD name” making a few hundred bikes a year and become a Harvard Case study of what might have been.