Harley’s Last Ditch Effort to Make A Motorcycle

Harley Davidson is really putting on a marketing push for the “Adventure Pan America 2021” (although it was originally called the “Pan America 2020,” Thanks Donny). Harley’s marketeers have been talking about this bike as long as they talked about the Livewire before it actually “arrived.” And, like their electric bike, Pan America sightings are a lot like flying saucer reports. Some folks in the media have been allowed to see and even ride the prototypes over the last year, but they haven’t come up with any interesting specifications for the mythical ADV Harley: like weight, ground clearance, suspension travel, or even fuel capacity. All reports on the bike indicate it has a low seat height: which means it also has a low ground clearance, which hardly means the Pan American is a serious off-pavement vehicle.

Concept-wise, the new bike is nearly all non-USA-all-the-time with Brembo (Italy) front brakes styled specifically for HD, Harley branded tires by Michelin (France), Showa (Hitachi, Japan) forks, lots of Japanese and Chinese EFI, ABS, and EIS electronics, and a new liquid-cooled 1250cc “Revolution Max” engine that actually produces 21st Century power (143bhp and 90lb-ft of torque). Pointing out the many made-somewhere-not-America parts isn’t news to anyone these days. Pretty much, the only things most US companies are able to make are 1950’s technology bits, like bike frames and, hopefully, the gas tanks.

There isn’t much about this “news” that changes my mind about HD or it’s products, except that picture in their ad. At first, I thought, “Damn, HD finally hooked up with Aerostich to sell some good motorcycle gear?” A little research and I learned that is not the case. Aerostich is American-made in Minnesota, a few miles down the road from HD and Milwaukee, WI. Harley’s marketing folks decided to keep up the foreign sourcing of their crap by going to made-in-Pakistan and Holland-owned brand, RevIt. So, what little respect I had for HD’s made-in-the-USA self-delusion went out the door forever.

If you don’t see the similarities between HD’s promotional photo and my 2006 Aerostich Darien jacket and pants (at right), you’re just not trying. Everything about the HD ADV riding gear is ripped straight from the Aerostich drawing board. Everything, except the high quality materials, the real-rider design details, and the American-made quality that Aerostich has always provided.

The picture of me and my Darien suit has some context that might explain my frustration with HD and their lazy, cheap-ass marketing goobers. Moments before that picture was taken, I was sailing down the Canadian Yukon’s infamous Dempster Highway—bucking a 50-70mph side-wind, skating across a recently poured gravel road—when that wind got a grip on my luggage and flipped the bike backwards, dumping me in the gravel at 50+-mph. One second, I was “havin’ fun” (as my wife would say) and, the next, I was on my back sliding toward the edge of the highway and a permafrost swamp. Lucky for me, I was wearing real Aerostich gear (and several layers of insulation and clothing, since it was barely above freezing that day). The Darien’s well-placed TF6 armor and “Mil-spec 500 Denier Cordura®” kept my skin in place and most of my bones intact. (I broke a small bone in my right hand and re-cracked some ribs.) My Shoei helmet was trashed, with a small hole ground into the back of the helmet by that vicious, pointy Dempster gravel.

I still have that suit, probably a dozen or more cleanings later. I have a second Darien Hi-Viz jacket that I bought about ten years ago. I admit that I’m an Aerostich homer. I have owned and advocated for Aerostich gear and the Darien or Roadcrafter riding suits since the mid-1980s when I moved to Southern California and began a couple decades of spending almost all of my commuting and travel time on a motorcycle. Since my first Roadcrafter, I’ve seen dozens of Aerostich imitators and, through experiments by friends and acquaintances, watched people try to save a few up-front-bucks on made-in-China or Pakistan or where ever riding jackets and pants result in disappointment and/or injury. Some things just can’t be made well and cheaply.

Somehow, Harley and the motorcycle press are calling the Pan America a “middleweight bike.” I have to ask, in what world is a 1250cc hippobike “middleweight?” I guess, in this world. [Which means, I’m no longer obese. Yea Me! I might even be lightweight in this brave new, screwball world.] The Pan American’s weight and marginal off-pavement capabilities aside, Harley is taking a hard road in trying to catch up with and attract a motorcycle community that the Company has alienated with both its products and its gangbanger marketing tactics for decades. My guess would be “too little, too late,” but in copying and under-cutting the design of an actual American company that is near-and-dear to many of ADV and long distance motorcyclists with slightly cheaper made-in-Pakistan gear, Harley is making a statement (intended or not) that it is still either their way or no way and it won’t be hard to simply ignore the Pan America and the Company for a lot of people who have been in this market since the 80s or before. Harley is just another US company that can’t make a good decision even when it is staring them in the face from their own backyard.

Was It Worth It?

All Rights Reserved © 2013 Thomas W. Day

[As the copyright notice above indicates, I wrote this one in 2013 when I first began to consider the fact that the end of my motorcycling life was approaching. I had just retired from my teaching gig at a music college and my wife and I were planning a retirement vacation trip that might have resulted in our selling off everything except what would have fit into a small camper and going on the road until we could no longer do that. That did not pan out well at all. ;-) I intended for this to be the last entry to my Geezer with A Grudge blog and the odds are good if you're reading this one, I'm dead or incapacitated by age, injury, or both. At the least, I will have sold off my last motorcycle and ended that part of my life. So, this is it. Thanks for reading my thoughts and stories and I wish you all have at least as much fun and luck as I did on two wheels.]

Recently, I spent a fine summer afternoon hanging out with a couple of young friends. One of them is an occasional motorcyclist and the other is not. During a bit of that discussion, we touched on crashes and near-crashes and the odds that getting into serious trouble on a motorcycle are pretty high. Nick, the non-rider, asked, "So, is it worth it? If you are that likely to crash and get hurt, why do it?"

Risk-taking has a bad rap these days, and some of that is for good reason. Bankers, investment brokers, real estate speculators, and the rest of the Vegas gamblers who play with the public's money as if it were a child's toy are a waste of air. They reminded us that hanging out on the edge of sanity is something less than sane. We didn't learn that lesson well enough to accurately apply discipline where it is needed, but we did become more conservative/timid/terrified-of-the-future. That move has been a highlight of failed empires since humans started writing down the steps taken before the barbarians stormed the walls and we all went back to banging the rocks together to make music.

Combine our general decline in courage and intelligence with a brand new phenomena my wife likes to call "old parents" and we're raising a generation of kids who think buying an Android-based smartphone instead of a safe-but-expensive iPhone is risk-taking. These fearful near-geriatric "helicopter parents" are responsible for the collection of pseudo-psychological maladies used to excuse bad manners, poor work ethic, and an education system too terrified to fail even the worst slackers or, even, outright idiots. These low-flying hovering parents think a skinned knee is cause for both medical intervention and systemic overhaul of every playground, school activity, and television program within the 1/4-block territor their child is allowed to free-range. It's also true that the average age of the American parent is increasing and there are some biological reasons why that might not be good news, especially for over-35 men and women. The Genetic Literacy Library summarizes this problem, "As more children are born to older parents, increasing numbers of babies are at higher risk for a range of health problems, many with a genetic basis and possibly resulting from epigenetic changes—functional changes that are generated in the DNA as a product of longevity and environmental interactions." So, we're a nation of declining health and growing conservatism. In other words, we're afraid of everything other than sending other peoples' kids to war. Ideally, other people we don't know. Shades of China, Greece, Rome, Denmark, Spain, England, and every other Empire Gone Bad.

The first part of taking physical risk is physical activity and even the fattest of us knows that physical activity is crucial to good health. The advantages of taking on physical risk is less well known. Freud, that famous couch-potato, sex-deviant, thought that any sort of adventure was evidence of an "innate human death drive." His years of smoking cigars eventually led to cancer of the mouth followed by a successful plea to his own kid for assisted suicide, so his death-drive-drivel was probably just self-diagnosis. More rational psychological studies have found that nature has built in significant biological rewards for risk taking. Endorphins and adrenaline crank out chemicals that give athletes and daredevils a "high" similar to sexual activity. Our hearts speed up and become more efficient, our minds focus, our respiratory system kicks into high gear, and the bio-chemical response to peak moments of excitement can't be matched any other way. Afterwards, we relax and more fully appreciate our everyday life.

Of course, some people get nothing but terror out of almost any kind of risk and they have no way to empathize with any of this. To them, taking physical risks is just crazy and inconceivable. Couple that with all of the characteristics of old parents and it's easy to understand how we "progress' to a conservative state deluded into believing that creating an economically inequitable, unsustainable, always-on-the-edge-of-disaster economy is a rational substitute for actually showing some courage occasionally. This produces stress and stress does not provide the same positive effects as physical risk. They might feel similar to those unused to a physical life, but they aren't.

In the film, Moto 4: The Movie, desert racer Kurt Caselli says, " Do one thing every day that scares you, live your life on the edge. It makes you feel good . . . and alive" Watch him race across the desert, full of life, riding and living on the edge, doing what most of his generation thinks they are doing when they play video games and you will immediately know why we do this crazy thing. In the same movie, WORCS champ Taylor Robert said, "For me, it's my escape to life." For some humans, there is no other way to get this far sideways and getting sideways is absolutely necessary.

My least favorite thing about getting old is the growing fear of getting injured and not being able to recover. It makes me appreciate how the rest of the world spent their whole lives in terror of getting hurt, afraid of taking real chances, worrying about every little thing so they do no big things their entire lives. Life kills us all. Sooner or later, you will be nothing but a memory, if you're lucky. Would you rather be John Glenn, the Marine combat aviator and test pilot who was the first American to orbit the planet or John Glenn, the man who slipped on a bathroom rug and might have spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair or worse from that incident? I know from experience that some pretty boring activities (like working on my house or yard) can result in some awful injuries. So, "I'd rather be shot out of a cannon than squeezed out of a tube." With all of that in mind and a lifetime of injuries from bicycling, contact sports, household chores, motorcycle racing and adventure touring, I can easily say, it was absolutely worth it and still is. Thanks for asking.