Sales of
electric motorcycles are just a tiny slice of a market that totals about
370,000 road-legal motorcycles a year in the United States, but
Harley-Davidson, the proudly American maker of rumbling, brawny heavyweights,
is hinting that it would like to change that.
On June 24, the
Milwaukee-based company will introduce its Project LiveWire Experience, a
traveling event that will offer licensed riders a chance to try an electric
Harley. The program, for which some 30 prototype electric motorcycles were
built, heads from New York to Chicago and will then work its way along Route 66
to Santa Monica, Calif., stopping at dealerships and other locations along the
way. Details on scheduling and sites are available at project.harley-davidson.com.
Harley-Davidson
is certainly not the obvious candidate to lead the movement toward a
whisper-quiet, electron-motivated future. The 111-year-old company has thrived
by selling a line consisting mainly of retro-style bikes that recall models
from a half-century ago.
In recent years,
though, the downturn and the inevitable aging of its boomer customers made it
clear that survival would depend on more diverse market appeal. The company
recently introduced two smaller, more modern models, the Street 500 and Street
750, designed to appeal to younger customers around the world.
The LiveWire
Project is the next major effort, and one that could put Harley ahead of its
global competitors in the race to make a commercially successful electric
machine. American companies like Zero and Brammo have introduced innovative and
attractive bikes, but the high price of lithium-ion batteries and the small
number of brand dealerships has limited growth.
Harley-Davidson
says it has no plans at this time to produce and sell the LiveWire to the
public. Still, it has clearly made a significant investment in bringing the
prototypes up to the expected levels of style, performance and finish necessary
before letting the public try them (and then splashing their impressions all
over the Internet).
The goal, Harley
said, was to create a machine with the personality and desirability that
existing electric motorcycles lack.
“It’s ultimately
a challenge about whether riding an electric motorcycle can be an emotional
experience or only a rational one,” Mark-Hans Richer, Harley-Davidson’s senior
vice president and chief marketing officer, said.
“To be a true
Harley, it has to have character,” Mr. Richer said. “It has to be cool. It has
to make you feel something important about yourself.”
Mr. Richer added
that a static display of the bike was not sufficient. “We didn’t want this
sitting on a turntable somewhere, with an attractive model standing around
handing out brochures,” he said.
The LiveWire was
designed and developed in Harley-Davidson’s Wauwatosa, Wis., product
development center and hand-built in the center’s basement.
Harley is not
disclosing the range, power, acceleration or top speed of the experimental
LiveWire machines.
“We’re not
getting into spec wars at this time,” Mr. Richer said. “The point is how you
feel riding it.”
As it happens,
the character of an electric bike aligns well with the expectations of Harley
customers, who are used to engines that cruise happily at low r.p.m.
“An electric
motor creates a lot of low-end torque,” Mr. Richer said. “We find people very
pleasantly surprised by that.”
The
demonstration bikes will be charged using 240-volt Level 2 chargers, taking
about 3.5 hours to fully replenish the battery pack, according to Jeff Richlen,
chief engineer of product development.
While he would
not reveal the capacity of the lithium-ion battery pack, the charging time and
the motorcycle’s overall weight of 460 pounds suggest a pack of 12 to 14
kilowatt-hours — a little less than a Chevrolet Volt.
The silent
operation of electric motorcycles is an attraction to many customers, but in
this respect, as in so many other areas, Harley-Davidson has gone its own way.
The electric motor, which can be seen as a machined-aluminum cylinder under the
bike, is positioned fore-and-aft. The gears it uses to send power to a
single-speed transmission are intentionally designed to make a distinctive
sound. The final drive to the wheel is by a belt, typical of gasoline Harleys.
“It sounds like
a turbine when you are on the bike,” Mr. Richlen said. “And from the side, as
it goes past, it sounds like a jet.”
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