Harley Davidson in front of the crossroads (again)

These days I have read a few articles on the net about the future of harley davidson. It turns out that the North American manufacturer faces a situation that they have created themselves and now overwhelms them and limits the market for their motorcycles. Harley Davidson is considering making bikes more accessible to young riders. Quite a crossroads when they themselves have been the first to insist at the time that their motorcycles had to be exclusive for "lifelong bikers" who end up riding a Harley Davidson as the icing on the cake to their motorcycle career.

But suddenly the world economy has stumbled head-on into a crisis the size of an elephant and it turns out that the bulk of market sales are being taken away by brands that have it. models accessible to the general public. And at the Harley Davidson offices in Milkwaukee all the alarms have gone off. We have to save the American behemoth. Who has ideas?

Attending an interview granted by Matt levatich (chief operating officer of the brand) a Reuters Harley Davidson may be thinking of making motorcycles much cheaper and with more accessible features for a novice driver. The contradiction comes when this same character says that they never plan to manufacture motorcycles outside the USA, with few exceptions. These exceptions are the factory they have in India and Brazil. What happens is that these two factories are only dedicated to assembling motorcycles in order to avoid the difficulties of importing foreign vehicles in both countries. Of course, from there to actually making a motorcycle there is not much distance.

"Smaller, lighter, cheaper" (small, lighter, cheaper) are the three conditions that they have thought that this life-saving motorcycle should have. But how do you make a motorcycle like this when the smallest thing you have in your catalog is a 883 cc vee twin that propels a 260 kg motorcycle and costs around 9,000 euros? Well, if I had the recipe, I wouldn't hesitate to call collect to tell you about it. But throwing a little bibliography I think we can venture where this panacea could go in the form of a best-selling motorcycle.

It was the sixties when Harley Davidson teamed up with a European brand (Italian for more details) with the aim of expanding its catalog at the bottom. In the successive years, several small-displacement models were seen with the Harley Davidson logo, even two-stroke ones were seen. We are talking about Aermacchi-Harley Davidson, which at first were Italian motorcycles whose anagrams were simply changed, then they went through a time when they were called AMF-HD with part of the development carried out on the other side of the Atlantic and at the end of the seventies it returned to Italian hands when the North Americans were experiencing more hardships. In these twenty years (more or less) Harley Davidson came to participate in the World Speed ​​Championship and even took three 250cc world championships and one 350cc with Walter villa at the controls.

Could repeating this strategy be the solution? Well I don't knowBut history has a habit of repeating itself, and if you forget it there are even more possibilities of that repetition. So it may be that in the next few years we will see small-displacement Harley Davidsons to compete in the Asian market, which seems to be the only one that stays alive but does not accept large-displacement motorcycles. Of course, at Harley Davidson they deny everything and assure that they plan to continue with their expansion policy in Asia on their own. Will it be a position facing the gallery? Curious scenario that the current situation of the world economy has in store for us.