Goodbye Bronx - Or Is It Au Revoir?
No real surprises in Harley-Davidson's Q2 results - the market
is down (for obvious as well as ongoing reasons), Harley
can't sell enough bikes, in Q2 couldn't make any either, and
the Profit & Loss statement makes you want to cry.
There is only one real surprise in newly minted CEO Jochen Zeitz' latest batch of
insights into the upcoming 'Rewind' five-year strategic plan. Apparently, flesh will
be added to the bones at the end of the year, but meanwhile we know enough
to be optimistic, but not enough to be excited.
In practical terms, the headline news is of a 30% reduction in available model
variants - there have been too many Tourers, Softails and Sportsters for years, but
not enough platform diversity.
Leaving aside the Street, there are basically two engine families - Sportster and
M-8 - but rather than outreach, Harley has been the master of introspection in
recent years. It has been locked into a circle dance of Touring and Softail navel
contemplation.
The good news is that Harley will go ahead with the 60-
degree V-twin for the 1,250 cc Pan America Adventure Tourer
for MY2021, but the 975 cc iteration for the Bronx
Streetfighter is, at best, on the back burner for the foreseeable
future. That is the one and only real surprise.
I'm not going to rush to the defence of the Bronx, as unveiled
so far, as a thing of beauty that will have Ducati running
scared, it isn't, and it wouldn't have been.
Neither am I unrealistic about the relative business
opportunities that the two sectors - Streetfighters and
Adventure Tourers - represent for a company such as Harley, especially given the
largely rural and suburban spread of the existing (though soon to be shrunk) dealer
network.
The fact is that Adventure Tourers are selling well and Streetfighters never really
have done - they have always been a niche bike ever since they first appeared in
Germany and the UK in the early 1990s - and there's another clue, they aren't
exactly a contemporary concept.
Then again, as the original rutted cart track, hill climbing bike style of the earliest
years of 'American motorcycling', it could be said that Adventure Tourers aren't
exactly 'Rad' either - but if a company like BMW can sell zillions of them (there's
not exactly a lot of Atacama Desert in Bavaria!), then in a market where more than
50 percent of the land isn't developed at all (no urban development, no agriculture,
no gas stations), then if that isn't a domestic business opportunity for a domestic
made motorcycle that is designed for domestic riding, then what is?
So there is compelling short to medium term business sense to Zeitz' plans (and
goodness knows, the Harley balance sheet is going to need some of that!) and
the more so since, as it happens, downtown is as much their native habitat as offroad
- they're not called Dual Sports for nothing. Anything up to 80 percent of the
miles done on Adventure Tourers are in fact urban and suburban, whereas
Streetfighters are a ticket magnet on the open road, a liability in traffic and need
twisties.
In many ways, Streetfighters are as idiosyncratically European as, in reality,
Adventure Tourers are pure Americana - go anywhere, good at everything muscle.
Adventure
Tourers are Pure
Americana
That said, Streetfighters do have demographics on their side, especially in the
context of Harley and the need to bring new entrants into the tribe.
So far Zeitz has proven to be an interesting paradox. In corporate terms, he is the
ultimate Renaissance 21st century man. Yet, so far, he is also proving that he is
just as capable of being cognizant of legacy and the core customer, as one would
think he would be of 'outreach', and the eternal search for 'fresh fish'.
And, with being a man with an international perspective, one would have thought
he'd have been all over the Bronx. The one thing, hopefully, that he will be all over,
needs to be displacements of the new, modular Revolution Max engine.
Paradoxically, his decision to press ahead with the Pan America, but stall the Bronx,
means Harley is going to be continuing to major on large displacement machines
at a time when middleweights and lightweights are the 'choix du jour'.
Lightweights are generally defined as being in the 200 to 500/550 cc bracket, with
middleweights coming in at around 600/650 cc, up to around 975 cc - which is
where the first iteration of Harley's middleweight, the Bronx, was going to live.
Generally speaking, heavyweights are regarded as starting as
soon as you get into four figures.
If Zeitz' game plan is to husband resources and focus on one
new 'fresh fish' at a time, but has up his sleeve multiple
displacements of Pan America quite quickly, then kudos.
Yamaha, Triumph, Honda and BMW have found that the
future of the Adventure Tourer is as much on highway as off,
especially downtown. They have already been going down the
route of lower displacement Africa Twins, Ténéré, GS and
Tigers, all having initially flooded their dealers' showroom
traffic with big brothers.
Being discretely hidden away and socially distanced in the forests of Eastern
England hasn't stopped our being able to hear the jungle drums or see the smoke
signals, and we have been hearing that the Revolution Max will come in four
exciting new flavors - the 1,250 and the 975 we all know about already, but 750
and 500 cc iterations have also been planned, or at least muted.
Does Zeitz' 'Rewind' involve multiple flavors of Adventure Tourers eventually, and
an improved, lighter weight, more contemporary chassis for the Bronx once the
engines have proved themselves in the Pan America? Such a long-term strategy
would be more practical than the one tried for with 'More Roads' - especially if it
meant that Harley could also renew the Sportster engine platform (overdue) and
dump the Street, even if Australians can't get enough of them!
Finally, we are hearing that Harley's Indian manufacturing and Brazil CKD facilities
will be toast, but that it might be stuck with the China deal.
Robin Bradley
Co-owner/Editor-in-Chief
[email protected]