American Motorcycle Dealer AMD 174 January 2014 | Page 4

We may have won a battle,
but the war isn’t over yet
L

AST month we reported that Easyrider Events were seeing advance
dealer registrations for the upcoming V-Twin Expo in Cincinnati
running ahead of recent years, on a week for week basis.
This comment piece is being written just after the new year and Show Director Jim
Betlach is reporting that the trend has continued in the course of the last five or six
weeks.
With most of the exhibiting and non-exhibiting vendors that we have been in contact
with so far this winter reporting that 2013 was a better year, and eyeing 2014 with a
level of optimism that hasn’t been seen for many years, it
would appear that the bottom of the U-curve that has been
proving to be frustratingly wide has finally been
transitioned.
That is a BS way of saying that while we may still be
several years away from double digit annual parts and
accessory sales growth, we do now finally appear to be
locked into sustainable low-to-mid single digit territory.
That is not to say that the future is guaranteed, nor that
there aren’t potential issues ahead – it isn’t, and there are.
Despite Harley-Davidson’s best attempts to reach a younger audience, most recently
with its new 500cc and 750cc Street models, the demographic time bomb that had
everybody so exercised before the global economy fell off a cliff has not gone away.
It has merely morphed. It has changed its taste, color and smell but the lack of an
explosion is not the same as it being defused.
The last six years have seen massive changes in the nature of the motorcycle industry
and many of those changes won’t become entirely apparent for several years yet.
Principal among them is the issue of a “lost generation” as millions of potential
lifelong riders have skipped the right of passage of their late teens and early twenties
that would have seen them form the kind of initial bond with life on two wheels that
simply cannot be replicated in later years.
Ironically, it may transpire that this problem proves to be less acute in the air-cooled
custom v-twin industry and in the United States than could be the case in the
‘mainstream’ motorcycle market, and especially internationally.
Outside the United States a ‘perfect storm’ of regulatory, training, licensing and
safety issues were already choking off youth rider access before the downturn nailed
the coffin lid shut.
In Europe it is perfectly possible to anticipate that an entire generation has been
lost to the motorcycle lifestyle altogether – the middle aged requirements for economic
urban mobility aside, it is ironic that the custom market may well prove to be the most
likely to have resilience in terms of attracting non-riders later in their life cycles, in much
the same way as has proven to be the case with the weekend warriors of the past 20
years.
The findings of the most recent AMD/Baird quarterly Harley-Davidson dealer survey
(October/November 2013 – as reported elsewhere in this edition of AMD Magazine)

points to initial reaction to Harley’s new Street models as being very positive amongst
the Company’s dealer network, though, for me, it remains to be seen whether or not
the ‘Bar-n-Shield’ showroom environment is the right place for this kind of outreach.
Either way, the way in which the Motor Company has refined its edge with a
fashionably dark lustre can only ever go so far in terms of feeding the market with
longevity.
In Europe, where the custom market has actually proven to be among the most
robust of market sectors, the collapse in total motorcycle
sales from nearly three million units a year as recently as
2007/8 to a little north of one million units for the 2013
calendar year, has got many people reaching for their exit
strategies or banking on chocolate-by-the-checkou B