"Go home Harley, you're drunk"

[Checkswrecks]

The ADV Harley is a concept at this point. As mentioned, Indian is working on an ADV bike, so Harley is testing the waters. Watch them put a rock susceptible belt on an ADV bike.


Not so with the Lightning E-Bike. They started building prototypes and refining in a focused ways several years ago. Their technology on those is now pretty firm and while we don't have any numbers or details, it is a real functional motorcycle that ought to hit the market before too long. There are plenty of light little E-bikes but this one will be the first cruiser. It'll be interesting to see how it sells after the initial and expensive splash.


I totally agree that Harley ought to split off a new brand, ala Yamaha with Star, Honda with Acura, etc. Buell was the right idea, but Eric just went way too far on what HE believed right, rather than than doing real market research. The other fatal flaw was his business and money management. To me, Indian is a great study in what Harley could have done business-wise when they overly trusted the judgement of one guy.

 

[twinrider]

The ADV Harley is a concept at this point.

It's been in development for some time and they are testing prototypes.

This video has a lot of detail.

https://youtu.be/KUyFOimh9_0

 

[tallpaul]

Re: "Go home Harley, you're drunk"

The bike looks better on the YouTube video but the fairing looks awful. Now the naked bike they flashed past looks very nice!

 

[Sierra1]

Looks quite a bit like the Yamaha FZs. Depending on price and performance, it could do well. Just not with me.

 

[magic]

Anyone else remember this? 1986, HD takes 4th place in Baja 1000. I don't think it was a factory sponsored bike, but very interesting reading. I remember the cover of Cycle World magazine with the picture of the bike, the headlines read "Harley Davidson kicks asteroids in Baja!" https://www.cycleworld.com/how-harley-davidson-sportster-finished-fourth-in-1986-baja-1000-from-archives
Also, I don't know why a belt drive ADV bike wouldn't work...if the final drive was enclosed.

 

[GearheadGrrrl]

Actually Buell was making money, largely because the Buells were designed with minimum parts count and for easy assembly vs. the Sportsters that just sort of happened and were parts and labor intensive to build. In their heyday around 2005 or so just 40 people were able to assemble over 10,000 Buells a year.

 

[twinrider]

MoCo wouldn't have shut Buell down if it was making money.

 

[GearheadGrrrl]

Harley had a new CEO come in with no motorcycle experience. I suspect he wanted to look like he was amputating something to look good,and Buell was handy...

 

[Scubatech]

What I find inexplicable is the fact that the boys at The Motor Company kept the Buell fiasco going long for as long as they did, it had to be a monumental disaster financially, not to mention the brain damage. Everything has a beginning and an end, Harley needs to face it's mortality and age gracefully.

I had a 2005 Thunderbolt, snap red with all the billet stuff you could get. I did some carb work, exhaust and air filter. That bike actually ran pretty good. I've never owned a bike that got so much attention when parked at a Cafe. The problem was a 600 CC Honda could wax me in a drag race. I could do well from a high gear roll on up to a 100 MPH but that was it. The paint shaker engine caused the bag mounts to break & handlebar mounts. The shock leaked. A couple years later I got a ZX11 Ninja and solved all those issues. That was a ripping" Ass machine!!

 

[Andylaser]

Looks like that one fell out of the ugly tree and hit all the branches on the way down. ???

 

[RonH]

The V-twin engine should have been scrapped by 1940 in my opinion. I'm not wowed by the looks of the bike, but it still looks much better than what they sell and have sold for the last 65yrs or so. At least the legs aren't stretched out 4ft out front which is a good thing going for it.

 

[GearheadGrrrl]

Yup, they'd signed a long term contract with Bombardier to supply engines and had to pay a several million dollar penalty to get out of the contract.

 

[Checkswrecks]

It's hard to remember that when they did this was when the economy was tanking as Bush left office and Obama was coming in. Banks were failing, the future of bike sales looked bleak, Harley had already lost a LOT of money on the Buell name, Eric never had business sense in continuously wanting to expand into other product lines before working out the kinks in what he had, and the only way forward was to borrow to build a new Buell factory instead of boutique low-volume production. Of course, with the above issues, they couldn't borrow for factory construction, either. Harley had also sunk too much money when they bone-headedly bought Agusta, so there went the working reserve.


Put it in that light and their need to cut Buell made a lot more sense.

 

[GearheadGrrrl]

You're right on the economy, bike sales were tanking. But being a new bike designed for ease of assembly unlike the legacy Sportster, the Buells were cheaper to build than Sportsters and more profitable. As for needing a new factory, the Buell plant in East Troy had no problem efficiently keeping up with the demand, needing only 40 people to crank out 10k bikes a year. The only way Buell lost money was on paper, with Harley overcharging Buell for engines which made the lower priced Buell Blast look unprofitable. And before you further bash Buell and Erok's good name, keep in mind that the first Buells used Yamaha engines and that Erik's new company, EBR, is rumored to have done some consulting on some current Yamaha bikes...

 

[hogmolly]

The V-twin engine should have been scrapped by 1940 in my opinion. I'm not wowed by the looks of the bike, but it still looks much better than what they sell and have sold for the last 65yrs or so. At least the legs aren't stretched out 4ft out front which is a good thing going for it.

I quite like V-twins. A 90 degree V-twin (Zuki, Ducati, others) has the same basic feel as a 270 degree parallel twin (Yammy, Honda, others). A 60-75 degree V-twin has more of a torque pulse but will be less smooth (Harley, KTM). V's can keep with engine width down but tend to make the motor taller when you add induction.

Harley should have used big parallel headlights and not a mini-shark nose. That's my biggest critique at this stage. If it has a belt that's a problem for gravel roads.

 

[WJBertrand]

Interesting...I'd read that it cost the MoCo a considerable fortune to shut down Buell , as opposed to selling it off.

Harley is drunk and someone changed the locks, no going home now.

Yeah the way they did that was mean spirited. After dumping him out on the street, Harley kept the rights to the Buell name/trademark and would not let Eric use it at all. Hence his rebound company was called EBC. Like Harley was going to do anything with that name, just seemed mean to me.

 

[magic]

Probably a good thing that they didn't buy Ducati last year.

 

[dannyv]

Harley has hired some bright new young millennial engineers. They are damn serious about changing.

 

[Wallkeeper]

The reality? Harley's market is dying....literally. For the last couple of decades Harley has been harvesting the war babies and early boomers with the big, high buck, high margin Cruisers. Well, the war babies and early boomers are a shrinking population and they have a lot of nice used rides hitting the market and driving down the market for the big Cruisers. In the mean time the Foreign makers have been bringing new riders along with lower cost mid size bikes and they have little "mystique" over the Harley brand. They missed a huge opportunity with Buell and are late in addressing the current reality. In the meantime, Scott Wine over at Polaris dropped the Victory label instead of rebranding it.

I am not impressed with the Strategic planning at either company.

 

[tallpaul]

For ages it has been bugging me that the fairing on the new Harley adventure bike looked kind of familiar. Then yesterday I realised where I'd seen that odd angular design before...