It is with a heavy heart that I must report that Harley Davidson is woke now. 
Harley last year ditched its globally iconic logo of orange and white lettering on a black shield. Its new logo is an empty metallic shell – the same shape, but different colors and no words.
lol wtf, their logo was basically the biggest thing they had going for them. It's going to be hilarious to see them rebranding themselves into the ground, since they can't figure out that only boomer hogs buy their hogs
it's been hilarious to watch them fumble over and over again. They keep teasing new bikes that might appeal to people under 65 and look fun to ride, then cancelling them because all the retirees who trailer their bikes to Sturgis got mad about them. Once their base dies out (or stops being able to ride) they've got nowhere to turn.
I don't really keep up with this stuff, but from what I've heard, that's why they had to spin off the LiveWire bikes into their own brand, the boomers flipped out over an
ELECTRIC Harley.Yeah that's absolutely it. Bike no make potato sound, WOKE!!
edit: it's sad since the Livewire seems like a very good electric motorcycle, if exorbitantly expensive.
Favorite example of how fucking stupid bikers are
"My bike has to be loud enough to make everybody within a mile of me look at me... for safety" - guy who took of his helmet as soon as he crossed the border into a state that doesn't require you to wear one
Once their base dies out (or stops being able to ride) they've got nowhere to turn.
Good thing their product kills them off at an above average rate.
Their target market mostly just trailers their bikes to events anyway, they're not doing much actual riding.
This cycle has been going since the 1980s! Every time Harley tries to break out with something that's actually decent they have to cancel it because their own "fan base" won't accept anything that doesn't look like it's still operating on 1940s technology. Most recently Harley released an electric motorcycle (the Live Wire) but they actually managed to sell more of them after they took the HD branding off.
Holy shit that new logo looks incredibly lazy. It's really bad, folks. I don't even like Harleys but I'm mad about it
Lmao they could charge $100 for a t shirt if it had that logo on it and the titans of industry decided to change that logo.
Overpriced TBI machine has gone woke because it respects black people.
If Harley is smart, they'll lean super hard into this.
I'm serious. The kinds of people who are mad about this hang around HD's neck like a one ton albatross. The reason fewer young people are riding is precisely because we don't want to be associated with the stereotypical Harley rider, and even Millennials like me who got into motorcycles anyway will buy literally anything but a Harley because of the association.
Harley changing its image would be a painful process, but it's absolutely necessary if they don't want to continue the slow fade out that they've been doing the past few decades. Of course I don't think they'll do it - these accusations are totally baseless, Harley isn't trying to reinvent itself it's just trying to figure out how to squeeze its aging fanbase harder and harder, a strategy that looks better quarter to quarter but will only cause the cliff they eventually fall off to be higher.
Also, Harleys are ridiculously overpriced and two to three generations behind everyone else.
Yeah, I agree. It's amazing to me how much opportunity they've wasted. When flat tracker builds saw a resurgence after the cafe racer craze, Harley could have had an absolute lock on that market by selling an xr750 look-alike with a fiberglass tail section, tracker bars, and 18"/19" wheel combo. Literally just slapping some different plastic, bars, and rear wheel onto the Sportster - they would have sold tons of them. The new pan america is the absolute slightest shift towards making a bike that people spending $15k on motorcycles in 2024 might want, a big comfortable softroader tourer, and predictably the harley t-shirt wearers got mad as hell about it and still side eye the bikes when they see them.
Reminds me a little bit of Porsche and their customers raging at any divergence from the air cooled rear engine format, but Porsche wised up, ignored them, and now they sell sedans and SUVs and they sell a lot of them.
I like how American outlaw biker culture is just a bunch of old angry guys who mald on social media over products. The Japanese bikers seem to be a lot scarier cause they were basically the youth wing of the yakuza
Easy Rider is a shitty movie and the boomer motorcycle will die with them.
Rip or whatever, losers
Fuckin' hilarious. The company that coasted on it's legacy image for decades but the private equity firms that own them now probably realize that it's primary market of overweight, knuckle dragging, mid-life crisis boomers is dying off and they have to pivot. I mean, just look at those crowd photos of the Sturgis rally.
People don’t even want to be associated with Harley anymore,
That's the effect of your primary boomer market. Nobody wants to associate with those chuds. The brand is damned if they do, damned if they don't. (Even though by the articles own description, they really don't).
A vintage Harley valued at $30,000 just a few years ago is now getting only $4,000.
So those overvalued bikes are now starting to come to earth because of the dying off effect, and the younger generations don't identify with the brand enough to pay those kind of exorbitant prices, but the elder chuds think it's because of woke.
Many folks, chud and otherwise, really don't grasp that when private equity swoops in, your cherished brand is nothing more than intellectual property playthings and the owners don't give a flying fuck about the undeserved loyalty of it's fanbase.
I can't believe that overcharging for an inferior product for multiple decades, to the point where you're charging $100 for a long sleeve cotton shirt, isn't a sustainable business model.
Truly, who could have guessed being able to buy a massively superior alternative for 1/4 of the price isn't a great business strategy.
If you buy a Harley you're paying for the privellage of having to associate with people who think Harleys are cool, so unless you wanna hear a dozen jokes that the punchline is just saying a slur, you can easily save 20 grand.
Their only redeeming quality is it's hard to get them to go fast enough to be deadly and most people tip over at a stoplight rather than tomahawking though the woods for 100 yards when they don't countersteer a gentle curve doing 90 in a 35.
Their only redeeming quality is it's hard to get them to go fast enough to be deadly
I mean, it's a funny sentiment but it's not really true since the Evo motors came out. Also, nobody's not countersteering at speed, even people who claim they don't are all countersteering they just don't understand that it's what they're doing.
All the ones I come across are doing 40 in a 55 because they're spread out over half a mile in a shitty formation to prove they're super tough because if you don't sufficiently venerate them they'll fight you 20 v 1 and half of them are cops.
club riders are going slow on purpose, to be assholes
The Evo was a pretty big deal that harley shirt wearers predictably hated (they don't just leak all the time) but they're reliable and still damn near as simple as the older ones that can't stop seeping oil everywhere.
My overwhelming impression is if you buy a Harley period your intention is to be an asshole.
That's been my experience with pretty much every biker that's on anything other than a touring bike riding by themselves on a dirt road.
But then again I have a massively negative opinion of bikes in general. Literally today a 19 year old at the restaurant my girlfriend works at is dead within 6 months of buying a sports bike. Last weekend was the annual music festival to raise money for a fund set up to support another person in town who paralyzed themselves and died early from crashing a Harley. More than once a month I get passed on a blind double yellow in a 35 before watching the asshole pull into his yard with a "look twice save a life" sign in his yard. For two weeks every summer you can't go out to bars or restaurants or even enjoy being outside within 1/4 mile of a road because it's "Americade" and there's 2 dozen douchebags trying to fight any local who doesn't tell them how cool they look in their shiny new vest and red lining their engines for 18 hours a day.
Sounds like you live somewhere that draws biker tourists, it must be pretty awful.
I didn't see any concrete action HD took to be labeled as "woke" in that article. Is this literally just vibes?
Anyway couldn't have happened to a better company. Wait a couple of years and get a discount road king if you're into that sort of thing.
Some nobody ("robby starbuck" lol) claims they're doing DEI with absolutely no evidence, and also they changed the H-D logo
Basically imaginary wokeness
I think there's a little more to it which is that HD is clearly dying and has been on life support for a while and the chuds want to blame something and someone for it. The truth is just that they're not bringing to market the kinds of bikes most riders want - big expensive touring bikes have their market but a new rider will never buy one, you gotta bring them on board with something relatively cheap and simple and in that category HD hasn't been competitive since the 1950s.
I think a lot of GIs brought back Harleys given by the army from WW2. So they were basically free.
They've been double the price of comparable bikes since back when I still rode which was almost 20 years ago.
Aka "i went into a Harley dealership and there was a Mexican working there" (Todd just got back from a week long beach vacation)
Wow so in the embedded video they are interviewing chuds from Sturgis and I guess they have donald trump on the phone answering questions, and like the first guy was like "Yeah how are you gonna lower the rent because my kids can't afford the rent" and obviously trump had no response. Sturgis most ridiculous looking people though like JFC
Lmao I clicked on the link for "Woke Wishlist" and it just directed me to this picture that says "WOKE" on it https://www.foxnews.com/category/topic/woke
Wokin' that Hog! 