There are lots of motorcycle books floating around the office. After the last post with the Hunter Thompson quote I flipped back through the book and found an interesting section to share.
“Even now any man with the sense to pour piss out of a boot should take all the money he might spend on a new motorcycle and instead buy Honda stock – or any one of about thirty others, including Harley-Davidson, which despite a stone-age concept of management and technology is still the only American manufacturer of motorcycles.
The story of Harley-Davidson and the domestic motorcycle market is one of the gloomiest chapters in the history of American free enterprise. At the end of World War II there were very few of them imports. During the 1950s, while H-D was consolidating its monopoly, bike sales doubled and then tripled. Harley had a gold mine on its hands – until 1962-63, when the import blitz began. By 1964 registrations had jumped to nearly 1,000,000 and light weight Hondas were selling as fast as the Japanese freighters could bring them over the ocean. The H-D brain trust was still pondering this oriental duplicity when they were zapped on the opposite flank by Birmingham Small Arms, Ltd., of England. BSA (which also makes Triumph) decided to challenge Harley on its own turf and in its own class, despite the price-boosting handicap of a huge protective tariff. By 1965, with registrations up 50 percent over the previous year, the H-D monopoly was sorely beset on two fronts. The only buyers they could count on were cops and outlaws, while the Japanese were mopping up in the low-price field and BSA was giving them hell on the race track. By 1966, with the bike boom still growing, Harley was down to less than 10 percent of the domestic market and fighting to hold even that.
With all its machinery and thinking geared to 1,200-cubic-inch [pretty sure he meant cubic centimeter] engines, the company has little hope of competing on the light and middle weight markets until at least 1970 . . . but they still have plenty of muscle in the heavyweight class, and in 1966 Harleys were winning as many big races as BSAs or Triumphs. This hazy equality has not been maintained, however, in the market place. Most H-D racers are custom-built originals, made to order for some of the best riders in America and with much larger engines than their British competitors. Harley has yet to come up with a production model that can compete with Japanese or European imports – on the street, the track or in the dirt – in terms of weight, price, handling ability or engine size.
There is surely some powerful lesson in the failure of Harley-Davidson to keep pace with a market they once controlled entirely. It is impossible to conceive of a similar situation in the automobile market. What if Ford, for instance, had been the only American manufacturer of autos at the end of World War II? Could they have lost more than 90 percent of the market by 1965? A monopoly with a strong protective tariff should be in a commanding position even on the Yo-Yo market. How would the Yo-Yo king feel if he were stripped, in less than a decade, of all his customers except Hell’s Angels and cops?”
Forty-five years have passed since Hunter Thompson wrote that page in Hells Angels. It’s now easy to look back on the history of Harley-Davidson and see that they simply couldn’t deal with the onslaught of competitors on the track. However, they did not follow the myriad of other marques that continue to come back from the dead only to return to the grave a few years later. H-D found another way around and it certainly wasn’t win-on-sunday-sell-on-monday. They don’t go toe to toe with Honda and Ducati on the track or in the dirt anymore. The Fuzz have gone the way of BMW in many places and the outlaws. . . well, I guess there are still some outlaws somewhere. Harley has something else keeping the company alive. It’s that Harley lifestyle. No foreign or domestic company can take a chip out of H-D in that regard. Nobody else can be the American classic.
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