Further. Faster. | New From Harley-Davidson in 2022
We are kickstands up on the dawn of a new day amidst the fog of uncertainty. What is truly meaningful has become vividly clear. Freedom found on the open road. Moments of solitude found on roads less traveled. Bonds forged from steel and the turn of a wrench.
We'll stop at nothing in pursuit of it. Memories that last a lifetime. And moments that take our breath away.
There's no limit to how far we'll go, or where our adventures will take us. For it's in the pursuit that we find freedom. And through the journey we come alive.
No matter from where we've come or where we've been, we are united in our pursuit. United, we ride. Good morning, welcome to the Harley-Davidson Museum in Milwaukee and welcome to the first model launch of 2022. As you all know at Harley-Davidson, we stand for the timeless pursuit of adventure and freedom for the soul. And today our mission has never felt more relevant.
Last year, my team and I took advantage of every chance we could to get out and ride. Around the world we found people from all walks of life united by an enthusiasm for adventure and the unique sense of freedom that comes with riding on and off the open road. In these unprecedented times, we were inspired by you, our passionate community. It is your passion that fuels Harley-Davidson and pushes us to continue leading our industry through innovation and evolution, while staying true to who we are and what we believe in. Before we look at what 2022 has in store, I'd like to take a brief look back to some of last year's highlights. 2021 was truly a landmark year for innovation at the Motor Company.
In launching the all new Revolution Max powertrain, we're introducing an entirely new model family. With Pan America and the revolutionary new take on the Sportster, with the introduction of the Sportster S. The Pan America quickly became the number one selling adventure touring bike in North America, and it's immediately established itself as a top contender in this category all around the world. The instant excitement and positivity we saw from the media and riders alike is a true testament to Harley-Davidson's commitment to innovation and excellence. The stories coming back from our Pan America customers seeking out adventure amongst the roads less traveled are truly remarkable, from our home in Milwaukee, all the way to the Himalayas and beyond.
We are proud of the awards that the Pan America has won in 2021, including both Motorcycle of the Year and Best Adventure Motorcycle from Motorcycle.com, and best adventure bike from Cycle World to name but a few. But it doesn't stop there. The Pan America is ready to continue its winning streak into 2022, with a new selection of colorways, accessories, and updates for the category defining award winning Pan America. And we can't wait to see where you'll all go this year.
With the introduction of the Sportster S we put the sport back into Sportster with this entirely new model that sets the stage for the future of the Sportster family. The distinctive styling, intoxicating power of the Rev Max engine and the technology innovations throughout have been celebrated by media and motorcycle fans around the world. I can tell you that we're just getting started with the next generation of Sportster, and I look forward to sharing more with you soon. We also launched the first of our Icons collection, the Electra Glide Revival, which was met with rave reviews. A modern interpretation of a Harley-Davidson classic, this motorcycle celebrates the timeless design Harley-Davidson fans have known and loved throughout our history. At Sturgis, we also introduced the Arctic Blast Street Glide Special.
Limited to just 500 units, this is a stunning example of the kind of craftsmanship and attention to detail one can only expect from Harley-Davidson by both paying respect to our heritage while also looking to the future. 2021 was certainly an exciting year of innovation for our motorcycle products, but we are also proud to have launched H-D1 Marketplace on Harley-Davidson.com The online home to shop for pre-owned Harley-Davidsons. Since launching H-D1 Marketplace it has been an instant success, carrying the largest inventory of certified pre-owned, and used Harley-Davidson motorcycles in the United States.
And lastly, one of my personal highlights of the year was watching Kyle Wyman win the King of the Baggers series. Another example of Harley- Davidson leading the industry and dominating in Grand American Touring, and leading the way with performance baggers. Touring is at the very core of our business and of our heritage. We do it better than anyone else, and today we're excited to showcase that innovation and excellence that makes Harley-Davidson the best and most desirable motorcycle brand in the world. So now let's focus on what we have to look forward to in the year ahead. The momentum continues, and today we are excited to share the latest in our Cruiser and Touring segments, along with the '22 CVO lineup and some exciting additions to our apparel and accessory offerings.
Let's begin with a celebration of the King of the Baggers Championship winning season. Nobody gets that number one unless they earn it. -Is it about that Harley-Davidson horsepower, Side by side, they're going to turn number one.
-and it represents a national champion and we have a national champion again, at Harley-Davidson running the Screamin' Eagle Road Glide . And that is Kyle Wyman. -Harley-Davidson's Screamin' Eagle Team must have found something from qualifying to now.
-Sliding that Harley-Davidson sideways. -Oh my goodness! -They are just pushing those things past the absolute limit. -On the Harley-Davidson Road Glide. If that looks familiar to you, it's a heavily modified Harley-Davidson deep in this factory program.
-King of the Baggers started about a year and a half ago. -Run through Moto America, which is the Premiere motorcycle racing organization in the United States. -Taking your production touring models that you see on the streets every day and seeing what we can really get out of them on the racetrack.
-Seeing a bagger go around the corner like that, and seeing what the Wyman brothers are doing, now that's inspiring. That's cool, you know, and that gets you fired up about not just the brand, but what you can do in your garage and with your bike. -The fact that we're doing this as a factory effort, we're bringing it in-house at Harley-Davidson to develop a race bike is really exciting because it gives you a lot of different opportunities. It allows you to really tie back the experience back to what production bikes can have. -We got into lightweighting, we got into raising suspension and lean angle. Started uncovering everything that we could do to truly make a performance bagger race bike.
After hours, weekends, a lot, a lot of hours, blood, sweat and tears. -Here in Michelin Raceway Road Atlanta. Our first race of the season, -You know, we went into that with a lot of testing that we'd done leading up to it, but it was on a very short, compressed time schedule. -Kyle Wyman starting to spin up the rear of that Dunlop. -The win was so visible and so right there in front of us.
-Testing and racing are two different things. There's a whole nother level. We weren't sure what was going to happen and we fell short. Now we know where we need to be for the next race. The next race was Road America. -We had one final Test session.
Kyle gets off the bike. He smiles at the team, says this is a proper race bike. -The speed that these guys are going around this track is pretty impressive for the units that they're on.
-Kyle Wyman that last time by 20:77, I think that's the fastest lap we have seen all weekend. -Kyle Wyman takes victory here at Road America. -Just the highest of the high. Then Kyle's Superbike race, he had a simple low side fall and broke his elbow. -This is it, third and final race. It's the end of the season.
-We wanted to win, but he needed to finish in the top six to clinch the championships. -Everyone had poured their heart and soul into their work. Everyone on this team is a motor company employee and we wanted to do this to show what we know we have, which is the best motorcycle in the world in the Harley-Davidson Road Glide.
-Heroic efforts hashtag hurting for certain. -There's no doubt. I mean, he's going out there to to win this championship, when otherwise he would not, should not, be out there.
-He was here to win. Broken elbow or not. Titanium plate and six screws holding it together three weeks after surgery. Nothing was going to get in his way. -The checkered flag awaits and Kyle Wyman will win the race here and be your national champion. -What a way to do it.
Harley-Davidson's history of racing is, goes back over 100 years, it's crossed all sorts of disciplines everywhere. And this is just yet another where Harley decides, Hey, we're going to go do this, and when we decide we're going to do it, we're going to win. -The launch of the Street Glide and Road Glide ST models, is that first step for us into that performance leading Grand American Touring product line. Designed for weight, designed for power, designed for performance. Let's get rid of the two-up seat. Let's make it fast and more nimble.
Have better lean angle. -There's a big appetite for people who just want to take their bike, make it cool, make it different, and then just go rip on it. They're not just riding out on the street with their baggers, they're making them a performance machine. They're raising them up. They're giving them more power. It's this cool new sort of evolution that creates a new form factor for the bagger, which is really exciting. We're bringing the 117 powertrain with a heavy breather and how it's tuned with the exhaust makes it just an exceptional performance bagger.
For the first time, you have that CVO level powertrain available in a non CVO product. It's Milwaukee-Eight 117. So it's, you know, everything that the Milwaukee-Eight is known and loved for plus you get the biggest version of that from the factory. -If you take a look at the font that's used with the drop H on the tank, on our ST models, that is a direct lineage back to our race bikes of the late nineteen teens and twenties. That logo also you might recognize from our '77 Low Rider It's another one of those cases where you have something that's new and fresh, but yet familiar and almost subliminal.
-Attitude is an important part of the ST models as well, and that's why you see the more subdued colorways. Low Rider S was a key piece of that DNA, and that's why you see bronze wheels and bronze accents on the powertrain. -Performance baggers really need to be able to do it all. From the racetrack to the sweeping canyons and everywhere in between.
The ST models are truly a blank canvas for performance parts and amplifying the ride. What we're offering is a performance bagger trim kit. I also think of it kind of as an a la carte listing of products that really take a performance bagger to the next level. So you think, alright it comes with a 117 from the factory, I want more. Add a 131 Stage IV Kit.
Then tagging on a high flow exhaust system that were designed in parallel with one another, and then saying, alright, that's a ton of power to the ground, right? How do you harness it? That's where the Ohlins suspension comes in. -The Ohlins shocks that we run, that is the product that we took basically directly out of the catalog, essentially before it was released and put it on a race bike. So a big upgrade for the performance of the bike and also they just look cool.
-Prior to this, if you wanted to make a performance touring motorcycle, you had to buy one of our standard bikes and do quite a bit of change to get it to sort of be a good baseline to start making performance bagger out of With the Road Glide ST and Street Glide ST, we now provide something right out of the box that just gives you a shortcut to your performance bagger dreams. -You know, you can make anything look good on paper and you can pretty much sketch anything you want, but can you produce it in 3-D? That's a different story. -Color, graphics, finishes, there's things that we're doing on these bikes that we haven't done on previous model years. -The motorcycle continues to have this really cool relationship with the rider because it's continuing to evolve and reveal itself and really speak to that premium nature of CVO. -Custom Vehicle Operations is what CVO stands for.
It started in '99. The idea was to provide the highest level of factory customization to our customers that could possibly be achieved. That's been sort of the mantra of CVO all of these years, and it continues to be.
-Paint and graphics and the tech and the audio and the features, CVO accentuates all of those things. The magic there is putting all of that together in one big package -For CVO, we always try to up the game a little bit to give that customer something special. -Really wide variety of paint and graphics options for CVO for '22. I think everybody can find something that is going to speak to them. They're all very unique and different from one another.
-Our first kind of primary goal with Model Year 22 CVO was to interject some more color as well as custom paint techniques that you know our customers come to love. -We really tried to make an impact with some bright, bold colors and contrast. So those schemes are two-tone, and they reflect some of those really bold saturated colors with pearl effects. -CVO is where we get the greatest opportunity to play and experiment.
So we often work closely with Gunslinger -Gunslingers is a company that's been in our CVO arsenal and family for a long time now, and they're inspiring us to push the limits, so we try to do the same thing with them. -Gunslinger can go in there with a person with a brush by hand and really pinstripe in some sharp curves. That hand applied technique allows for very intricate two-tones, three-tones, airbrush drop shadows and really translates into a truly custom look. -We took the time to consider every part down to the little tiny details and really make something that has a custom feel for the rider. -These powertrains and accent colors are actually matched to the paint job more than we've ever done before.
-Scorched chrome, in particular, is such a great looking finish with that deep black, shiny look that just really works well with the blue steel paint. -Flames have been kind of coming back. We haven't done them in a while. -We wanted to do a ghost flame with our Fade technology, which is exclusive to Harley-Davidson. We do it in-house.
It's testament to the skills of our manufacturing facilities. It's a paint mask technique that allows the fade to go through the flame, remove the mask and achieve the look. -From some angles you won't even notice the flames, but other angles, they're loud and proud and right in your face, which is really cool.
-The CVO lineup this year features the Road Glide Limited. We brought it back for those customers that loved that fixed fairing and comfortable ride, and we just add to it with cosmetics down to the Alcantara that we put into the seat. It just stands apart.
-We always try to have the ultimate suite of technology on the motorcycles as well, whether it's heated seats, heated grips, audio, huge piece of it. -We've added on the Rockford Stage I audio system on to the Limited and the Tri Glide this year. The Harley-Davidson audio kind of ecosystem now, it steps light years above kind of where we were in the past. The partnership with Rockford Fosgate has truly allowed us to amplify it up eight notches.
-Every part of the motorcycle is thought about and we try to have a little surprise or a little bit of detail that speaks to the rider and speaks to where the CVO is positioned in our portfolio, which is at the top. It has to be the best of everything. -We're just super excited about these two models.
Low Rider S and now our new Low Rider family member, the Low Rider ST. We saw the reasons why Low Rider S was so popular. It gave you all of the great character and experience and emotional connection to our big twin powertrain, but in a package that was a little bit lighter, a little bit more nimble. -We had a couple of years of production under our belt, so it was easy to see the tweaks that could be made to make that bike, which is already an incredible machine and just take it to the next level.
-First look from far away you know it's a Low Rider S, just the stance, just a presence of it. We retain the black and bronze that's sort of like a trademark and that gray is really hot in like custom cars hot rod scene right now, it's just a perfect secondary color. -The bike performs exactly how it looks. That raw, unbridled feel to it.
We bump the 114 up to a 117. It's really big news for Low Rider S fans. The power train is putting out 125 foot lbs. of torque. So it's a noticeable kick in the pants. We've got the heavy breather intake along with a new exhaust system. -Low Rider S gets the 117, which is really cool, and that's the biggest motor that we have out of the box.
We've also played with location of the instrumentation and the suspension. We brought the bike up off the ground a little bit more to give it a little more lean angle. We've also taken the instrumentation and moved it from the console in the fuel tank and put it up into the rider's eye sight.
And that's something that we've heard directly from riders that they wish they could have a little less movement in the neck and eyes to actually read the gauges, of the motorcycle. If you think about the quintessential piece of DNA for a modern Harley-Davidson, its Low Rider S. So what's going to be the natural progression? The Low Rider ST we are super excited about what this is going to bring. This gets to that customer that may not need the full grand American touring, but is really looking for that performance package and some of the protection that the fairing brings. -There was a fundamental shift that we saw happening a few years back.
What folks were doing is they were leaning into performance and really it was taking root in Southern California. -We were seeing a lot of customers modify their bikes by increasing the displacement, tweaking the suspension, going through the expense of putting saddlebags on the bikes, adding aftermarket fixed fairings. They're either restoring FXRTs, or FXRs and putting that fairing on there, or they were taking the fairing at a swap meet and trying to figure out how to get it on their, Dyna. A lot of the shows that we pay attention to around the world, we start to see just a couple of bikes that were like this. They'd be in a sea of 100 bikes that were kind of executed in the old manner. You would see two or three bikes that were done in this new way.
And that's how we spot a trend. And that's where you have to go in and say, is there something here? Is this an anomaly or is this something that's going to catch on? -We headed into the project with a pure emotion of what we want it to look like. Just like any other Harley, there is always respect to the history, you know, being able to trace back the family tree. We have so much respect to FXR and FXRT Willie G. and design team came up with that iconic look. When I sketch this bike, you know, this fairing in particular, I believe the bike deserves it's own new identity, something more modern.
-This is a purpose built fairing. The styling team really took their time to massage it to get it to the spot where you see it today. You've got side ducts straddling the headlight, which is a direct throwback to the eighties FXRT and through CFD simulation, the aerodynamic package that you've got on this vehicle is really dynamite. -Low Rider S is a little more relaxed cruiser.
This one I wanted riders to be in charge of the bike sitting on top of the bike rather than sitting in the bike. -This is a true, lightweight, bagger. It's got the performance punch, you know, that 125 foot lbs. of torque and also comfortable on the long haul. The bike comes standard with cruise control.
-We wanted the tall suspension in the rear and that was a 56 mm shock. We did shift the saddle bags vertically two inches on a motorcycle compared to the Sport Glide. And you can remove the saddle bag in seconds. -For Low Rider ST, we have a suite of parts and accessories products, and this audio system for Low Rider ST it integrates seamlessly and it's going to be loud. Customers are going to want to hear this thing with a full face helmet on, because that's how they ride. So we have something that's waterproof.
It's going to withstand the elements. It's truly the perfect package for audio and performance customers. -I still remember the excitement the first time we saw the bike, which was the mirror image of my sketch. -When we stepped back and looked at the finished product, every single person that I saw walk by that bike stopped in their tracks and had that wow moment. Like that's, that's special.
-I think to some customers, this is going to be their version of touring. It's a new personality. It's a slightly new way to tour.
If you live somewhere where you want to do some canyon carving or just some cruising, you know, some performance riding and a couple of times a year, you want to throw on some gear and head to Daytona or head to Sturgis, or head to Faaker See Low Rider ST is just a great choice. It's the perfect combination of performance and touring. -I absolutely love designing riding gear. I approach my product design with a lot of curiosity, a lot of wide eyes. I'm overturning every stone.
The world is your oyster. The process for materialization, it goes through many, many hands, we have the feel it we have to stretch it. We have to get a sample of it stitched up so we can see what it looks like and understand how it actually functions. For season 22 its an on and off the bike aesthetic we're approaching look a little bit more casual, but still have all the riding feature and functions to protect our riders. One of our new processes is partnering with the bike team on graphic or style of jacket that would fit that rider. For instance, our ST model bikes we designed the jackets to have that heritage aesthetic.
So drawing back on the features of a traditional biker jacket but making it a little bit modern and also making it look a little bit West Coast vibe. So the jacket itself compliments the bike style. It's so important for us to look at things from a very abstract way and then pull those parts and see how they can come together to create something beautiful and seamless for that customer. My hope is that when they try on that jacket, they feel they were part of the process in that design that, that jacket was made for them. -Riding is what it's all about. You know, 2022 is going to be a very, very exciting year.
The king of the baggers, which will be incredible for Daytona bike week. We're going to be watching them on the high banks down in Daytona and throughout the rest of the season and cheer that team on, cheer the riders on. I love walking down Main St. in Daytona and Sturgis or doing the loop at Faaker See around the lake.
There's so many opportunities to throw your leg over your Harley-Davidson and enjoy the ride. Right around the corner is a major celebration of 120 years of this fantastic brand. The heritage goes all the way back to 1903 when my relatives and Bill Harley rolled the first bike out of the shed.
It's just become bigger and bigger and bigger. We're going to be kicking off The Road to Harley-Davidson Homecoming Challenge. The ride challenge will run from April first through the end of September, and we will be selecting 120 riders from the challenge for an all expenses paid trip to celebrate with us at 120th Anniversary. Harley-Davidson homecoming event in Milwaukee in the summer of 2023. I can't wait to meet that group of riders. What a celebration it's going to be.
-Harley-Davidson has a rich and storied history tied to racing and performance from board track to flat track, top fuel drag racing and now bagger racing. We've been there and we've stood at the top of the podium. The bikes we shared with you today are directly connected to that lineage. And there's much more to come.
In the coming months we'll share the next chapter of the Sportster story. And there are a few more surprises in store for 2022. It's going to be an exciting year full of incredible adventures. We hope you'll join us at one of the many events we'll be participating in throughout the coming year. And don't forget to mark your calendars for the 120th anniversary homecoming celebration in Milwaukee coming in 2023. This one's going to be special and you won't want to miss it.
Thank you for joining us on this journey, and we look forward to seeing you again soon. -This is just the beginning of '22. Our product range for this upcoming year is going to continue to reveal itself. In all of our segments performance has become very relevant. Certainly Sportster S and Pan America totally embody that with the Rev Max architecture.
In the cruiser segment, it's the Low Rider S, Low Rider ST, in touring it's the Street Glide and Road Glide STs, and then we've got some other things up our sleeve in future product we're really excited about, that's going to take this idea even further. We're at the tip of the iceberg of what we can do in terms of performance and the products.
2022-01-28 00:17
