Harley last year ditched its globally iconic logo of orange and white lettering on a black shield. Its new logo is an empty metallic shell – the same shape, but different colors and no words.
lol wtf, their logo was basically the biggest thing they had going for them. It's going to be hilarious to see them rebranding themselves into the ground, since they can't figure out that only boomer hogs buy their hogs
it's been hilarious to watch them fumble over and over again. They keep teasing new bikes that might appeal to people under 65 and look fun to ride, then cancelling them because all the retirees who trailer their bikes to Sturgis got mad about them. Once their base dies out (or stops being able to ride) they've got nowhere to turn.
I don't really keep up with this stuff, but from what I've heard, that's why they had to spin off the LiveWire bikes into their own brand, the boomers flipped out over an ELECTRIC Harley.
Yeah, I agree. It's amazing to me how much opportunity they've wasted. When flat tracker builds saw a resurgence after the cafe racer craze, Harley could have had an absolute lock on that market by selling an xr750 look-alike with a fiberglass tail section, tracker bars, and 18"/19" wheel combo. Literally just slapping some different plastic, bars, and rear wheel onto the Sportster - they would have sold tons of them. The new pan america is the absolute slightest shift towards making a bike that people spending $15k on motorcycles in 2024 might want, a big comfortable softroader tourer, and predictably the harley t-shirt wearers got mad as hell about it and still side eye the bikes when they see them.
Reminds me a little bit of Porsche and their customers raging at any divergence from the air cooled rear engine format, but Porsche wised up, ignored them, and now they sell sedans and SUVs and they sell a lot of them.
Fuckin' hilarious. The company that coasted on it's legacy image for decades but the private equity firms that own them now probably realize that it's primary market of overweight, knuckle dragging, mid-life crisis boomers is dying off and they have to pivot. I mean, just look at those crowd photos of the Sturgis rally.
People don’t even want to be associated with Harley anymore,
That's the effect of your primary boomer market. Nobody wants to associate with those chuds. The brand is damned if they do, damned if they don't. (Even though by the articles own description, they really don't).
A vintage Harley valued at $30,000 just a few years ago is now getting only $4,000.
So those overvalued bikes are now starting to come to earth because of the dying off effect, and the younger generations don't identify with the brand enough to pay those kind of exorbitant prices, but the elder chuds think it's because of woke.
Many folks, chud and otherwise, really don't grasp that when private equity swoops in, your cherished brand is nothing more than intellectual property playthings and the owners don't give a flying fuck about the undeserved loyalty of it's fanbase.
I can't believe that overcharging for an inferior product for multiple decades, to the point where you're charging $100 for a long sleeve cotton shirt, isn't a sustainable business model.
Truly, who could have guessed being able to buy a massively superior alternative for 1/4 of the price isn't a great business strategy.
If you buy a Harley you're paying for the privellage of having to associate with people who think Harleys are cool, so unless you wanna hear a dozen jokes that the punchline is just saying a slur, you can easily save 20 grand.
Their only redeeming quality is it's hard to get them to go fast enough to be deadly and most people tip over at a stoplight rather than tomahawking though the woods for 100 yards when they don't countersteer a gentle curve doing 90 in a 35.
Their only redeeming quality is it's hard to get them to go fast enough to be deadly
I mean, it's a funny sentiment but it's not really true since the Evo motors came out. Also, nobody's not countersteering at speed, even people who claim they don't are all countersteering they just don't understand that it's what they're doing.
I like how American outlaw biker culture is just a bunch of old angry guys who mald on social media over products. The Japanese bikers seem to be a lot scarier cause they were basically the youth wing of the yakuza
Wow so in the embedded video they are interviewing chuds from Sturgis and I guess they have donald trump on the phone answering questions, and like the first guy was like "Yeah how are you gonna lower the rent because my kids can't afford the rent" and obviously trump had no response. Sturgis most ridiculous looking people though like JFC