The article was wrong in 2010, and it's wrong now.

And, in exactly the same way the authors castigate the chaps-wearing-RUB-dentists that Harley is apparently marketing to, they are transparently pandering to the I'm-wrenching-my-ol'-knucklehead crowd.

Pot, meet kettle.

 

Are they going to lose market share as the core group moves to electric wheel chairs, yes. Are they doomed, no.

Harley will survive. The question is will we recognize them 50 years from now with hybrid, or hydrogen fuel cell engines???

Good thing there will be thousands of used shovels, evos and twinkies floating around.

 

Dumb article. Harley is already ahead of the curve, as shown by Live Wire, the electric bike.

 

Actually the MoCo is late to that party there's several electric bikes on the market and couple of those have been for a few years already. The live wire is a test bed product to gauge market reaction not a production bike.

 

I agree on the live wire being a test bed, but I still think HD will be around for quite a while. Lots of these grey hairs riding HD now were riding rice 30 years ago. No reason to think the same won't happen 30 years from now unless they do something stupid in the mean time.

 

Yeah, I remember all the so called business experts saying the same thing about Apple back a few decades ago and Dunkin' Donuts and Starbucks and Amazon etc. I bet some of the journalists and business experts that foretold the demise of all these companies don't have their careers anymore but all the businesses are still going.

 

Nope, they're still working. Because, luckily for them, six minutes later nobody remembers what they said.

 

The article from '10 was probably intuitive in the writer's eyes at the time considering the financial ruin the country was in and also his misunderstanding of HD in general. I figured it was going to be an article bashing the MoCo for its treatment of its customers (at least from what I see in this Forum) and the lack of long term quality in a lot of the parts the bikes are made of. The CycleWorld article being more recent shows that HD is holding steady in sales and stock prices rising. In spite of competition from Victory and others making Harley clones.
Think how much better those could be if the above mentioned faults were to be rectified.

 

Bingo. I recently read another article about HD in the financial world. Writer misspelled Softail.

Fail.

 

I thought it was Victory, Indian, Honda and Yamaha that were going to bury Harley. They make better bikes, they say so themselves. They have better motors, because that's what they say. Until they build a bike that people actually want to own for years, not just the get your feet wet on the cheap, then get themselves a Harley, They will never beat Harley at this game.,,