Harley-Davidson Dealerships Are Shutting Down Across America
jalopnik.com
jalopnik.com
The clothing lines are a giveaway as to who their market is.
I divide riders into Harley enthusiasts and everybody else. People who like motorcycles generally have wide tastes or at least can appreciate all kinds of bikes. Harley riders wobble to a stop outside a bar and pretend to be hard men.
I think the most telling thing was that when I priced my bike out, average mileage for that bike at that age was ~6500 miles. Which made my 52,000 miles a liability.
Also, single pin crank engines are essentially obsolete but that is the distinctive sound of Harleys. So they can't change the motor without losing customers, but also that engine is a dead-end for use in most any other application too. Double pin cranks are superior in basically every way with better performance, better efficiency, and less vibration.
Harley Davidson also didn't modernise its brand. Also a lot of the image of Harley Davidson is attached to the heyday of motorcycle gangs, old movies between the 50s-80s e.g. "Easy Rider", "Electra Glide in Blue" and Music from that era.
HD would probably do good with a line of generator products if they still wanted to do business, and work with alternate fuels.
> To be fair, revenues and unit sales have enjoyed a nice bounce since the pits of the financial crisis. But Harley will never get its old mojo back for one critical reason that is completely outside of its control: demographics.
> Down the road from my house in Dallas, there is greasy drive-in burger joint called Keller’s … a place I’ve been known to frequent a little more often than my doctor might recommend. On any given weekend, you might see a dozen or more bikers parked in the lot, showing off their chrome-laden Harleys. And nearly all of them are over the age of 45. Most are over 50.
> This isn’t a coincidence. Harley-Davidson is a brand whose sales depend disproportionately -- almost exclusively, in fact -- on middle-aged Caucasian males. Riders younger than 40 generally lack the time, interest or the bankroll to buy a Harley. But by the time they get into their 60s or older, the noise and joint pain have begun to make riding lose its allure. You might still ride in your 60s, but you’re doing it less frequently and you probably aren’t buying a new bike.
> The sweet spot is the mid-40s to early 50s. And with the Baby Boomers -- the largest and wealthiest generation in history -- now largely aged out of this key demographic bracket, Harley has a serious problem. Generation X -- my generation -- is not nearly large enough to pick up the slack, and Generation Y (aka “the Millennials” or “Echo Boomers”) are decades away from being in the demographic sweet spot for Harley, and this assumes they take to riding like their dads did. The number of American men aged 40-49 is set to decline through the early 2020s and won’t reach its old 2010 peak until 2035.
> CNN Money reported on this as far back as 2010, and demographic strategist Harry Dent -- my old boss -- has used Harley as a case study for decades.
[1] Blame Harley-Davidson's Downfall On Baby Boomer Demographics - https://www.forbes.com/sites/moneybuilder/2013/11/13/harley-... - November 13th, 2013
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveWire_(motorcycle)
(for context, ~2M people 55+ die every year in the US, and ~4M Boomers retire; by 2031, the US population over the age of 65 will be ~75M, almost double what it was in 2008)
the engine design is well suited to drive a dynamo and power a home during outage.
this would mean continued operation of engine plants, and retooling assembly plants to build backup generation devices.
alternatively, sell generation ready versions of the engine to OEM generator builders.
The American motorcycle industry is facing significant headwinds, and HD is simply not positioned for success.
The American Motorcycle Market Decline: What the 9.2% Drop Reveals About Consumer Sentiment - https://www.csm-research.com/the-american-motorcycle-market-... - October 5th, 2025
https://www.gminsights.com/industry-analysis/north-america-h...
https://www.globalgrowthinsights.com/market-reports/resident...
Any time they try to introduce something new their customers lose their minds as if it is an act of betrayal. It also may be true that their new products are half hearted attempts at innovation and rarely any good. They mostly live off of brand name.
The correct move 30 years ago would have been to create a different performance brand and poured R&D money into that, but they were too busy with their fat margins to worry about that.
From a citation in another one of my comments:
> More troubling still is the industry’s struggle to attract younger generations. The percentage of motorcycle owners under eighteen has collapsed from eight percent in 1990 to just two percent today. Among the crucial eighteen to twenty-four age group, ownership has plummeted from sixteen percent to six percent over the same period. These figures suggest a fundamental breakdown in the traditional pathway into motorcycle ownership, where young people developed their passion for riding and carried it throughout their lives. Multiple barriers prevent younger Americans from entering the motorcycle market. The initial cost represents a significant hurdle for a generation burdened with student loan debt and facing challenges in achieving the same economic milestones their parents reached at similar ages. Insurance costs for young riders can equal or exceed the cost of the motorcycle itself, particularly for performance-oriented models. Many states have implemented graduated licensing systems that make it more difficult for young people to obtain motorcycle endorsements. Perhaps most significantly, the cultural transmission of motorcycle enthusiasm has been disrupted, as fewer parents and mentors ride motorcycles themselves or feel comfortable introducing young people to what is perceived as an increasingly dangerous activity.
They sort of did that when they bought Buell. I don't know that they put a whole lot of R&D into it, though.
So, the suggestion is to pit HD against Honda in a segment that expects reliability? One doesn't buy a HD because it can be sure to start when a hurricane is coming.
HD engine as is requires torquedown intervals due to the harmonics, but is easier to service than Honda was.
I haven't plugged today's number into my analysis, but the 2024 numbers showed some countries hit much more disproportionately than others. All of the stores in Russia have been closed (for mostly obvious reasons). Almost all of the stores in Central America and the Caribbean have also closed (for not-obvious reasons). In the US I'd say the number looks somewhere between 5 and 10%, but again, that doesn't take into account the last 18 months.