Soup reader Paul with the Kawi' asks "Say, Kevin, Harley’s LiveWire division has sold only a few thousand electric motorcycles since 2020, yet has incurred a staggering half billion dollar cumulative financial loss in 6 years. In 2025, the most recent full reporting year, only 653 LiveWire units were sold, while losing $75 million. Why does Harley allow the financial bleeding to continue, while the buying public is clearly not interested in what LiveWire offers?

The cause of these high losses is only in small part assignable to the LiveWire battery-bike program.

What has happened is that the generation willing to spend $25-35,000 dollars on a Big Twin Harley is ageing out and being replaced by people no longer interested in heavy touring or cruiser motorcycles, and likely unable to afford them as well. If they care about motorcycles at all, it is for cute, inexpensive "city bikes".

Another part of the loss comes from the loss of disposable income by the US middle class. During the golden age of people working on production lines you would see a man or woman maneuvering a counter-balanced 150-pound spot welder to join auto body panels together with the hundreds of spot-welds required. Today, as for a number of years past, it is industrial robots that are precisely positioning those spot welders and assembling parts in factories. Parts are made on automatic transfer lines on which there are no human employees. Each computer-controlled machine tool on the line performs the milling, drilling or lathe operations programmed for it. Then the parts are moved on to the next machine, and so on until finished parts result'.

Those machines have no children, no mortgage, never need to sleep, and incur no medical expenses. They have become necessary to make manufacturing work at competitive price. Old-time shops with a machinist at each machine can hardly be found today.
Politicians may promise to bring jobs back to America, implying that the factories and machine tools still exist in world-competitive form and that all we have to do is power up the plants and blow the whistle to bring workers back to the work they know so well.

What's wrong with this picture? First, as soon as a plant was shut down, a used machine tool exporter was backing in to load up the desirable items for shipment to Southeast Asia start-ups. The plant might be re-purposed or, as with the Bendix tool & die plant in my town, just abandoned and its employee parking-lot made into a land-fill. The people who lost their jobs had to seek and find other work. They have not been watching TV all these years, listening for the factory whistle that will summon them back to their old reality

And even if that were the case, the production processes and tooling of 30 years ago, imagined to be waiting in those plants, could not earn a profit today because their production costs are no longer competitive. In many cases, the suppliers that supported those industries no longer exist.

I spoke to the lead engineer on the LiveWire project. I asked him "Who is your customer?" He replied in a fashion that suggested he had memorized it. He told me America is now an urban nation, and that prosperous city-dwellers want style and quality. They are also concerned about climate change. They will want an electric Harley.

Sadly, it was a fairy-tale.

The irony is that LiveWire is actually an excellent machine of its type, and is the fastest-accelerating production bike the Motor Company has ever produced. But it has near-zero appeal for traditional H-D buyers. Why did Product Planning not consider what the name, Harley-Davidson, means to those who ride them?  For them, Harley-Davidson stands for the powerful traditional America that won WW II with rumbling machines like the M4 tank and P-47 Thunderbolt aircraft, and which offered jobs for all. 

They want their world back.