Harley Davidson, the iconic American motorcycle maker, has been going through a rough patch in recent times, with falling sales attributed to younger buyers shunning its products and going for cars.
But now, in a bid to stay relevant and visible, the brand has launched its most expensive motorcycle ever, which also happens to be its most powerful street bike.
The new Limited Edition CVO Road Glide has a 131-cubic-inch V-twin engine which makes 151 horsepower, which is enough to power most of small cars. Harley is planning to hand-assemble just 131 of the bikes priced at US$ 110,000 each, which is Mercedes S-Class territory. For those who cannot stretch that far, a non-limited CVO Road Glide is available for US$ 46,000. Again, you can buy a good car for that kind of money, but as the Americans say, it’s your money and you do whatever you like with it.
In addition to that power, the Limited Edition bike will have higher priced components that usually are found only in racing bikes, including a stronger aluminum triple tree and swing arm and carbon-fiber bodywork and bags, according to a report from Bloomberg. Most impressively, the motorcycle also has titanium exhaust pipes which alone save 25 Kg. The CVO Road Glide RR weighs 340 Kg, which is heavy by any stretch of the imagination but light for a bike this big.
Harley says the new edition is intended to be the best of the best. “Taking inspiration from the track and onto the street, the Harley-Davidson CVO Road Glide RR is truly the ultimate in performance,” Jochen Zeitz, Harley-Davidson’s chairman, said in a statement. “With this Limited Edition series of motorcycles, we have taken all the lessons from the track and created the pinnacle of street-legal bike performance.”
Targeting younger buyers
Harley has had a rough several years, as fewer Americans like to ride motorcycles, especially the big, heavy and expensive cruiser motorcycles that form the core of Harley’s line-up. The launch of the LiveWire—Harley’s first all-electric motorcycle— six years ago was billed as an effort to attract a new group of younger customers, but the LiveWire was anything but. It was first unveiled as a concept in 2014 and took several years to develop, and once it was unveiled sales were not that spectacular. It also suffered from many technical issues that Harley took some to address. In the meantime, many potential customers had decamped.
LiveWire was then spun off as a sub-brand in 2021 and is doing fairly well. Since then, Harley has tried other bike lines, including the Pan America 1250, the brand’s first adventure bike. But the biggest problem for Harley is that most loyal customers (biker gangs et al) are ageing and do not want to ride such huge bikes again. Harley is thus aiming to attract younger buyers who have the cash and the inclination to buy its expensive bikes. But this Limited Edition may not be the best way to do it since competing brands have appealing bikes at better price points.
