People Buy Harleys Because They Can't Get a "New" Affordable Vintage Car

From Road & Track

"The Net interprets censorship as damage, and routes around it." That's what Internet pioneer John Gilmore said more than twenty years ago. It wasn't as true then as we all wanted it to be, and it is even less true now, but somehow the quote came to my mind yesterday as I followed a very old air-cooled car down the road in a very new air-cooled motorcycle.

The road was US 191, rolling through the Grand Tetons National Park in Wyoming. The motorcycle was the 2017 Indian Chieftain. On Saturday afternoon, my wife and I had left Portland on the bike with the goal of making it to Sturgis by Monday night, a goal that I met by all of seventy-eight minutes. She has childhood friends in Jackson, WY so we'd stayed there Sunday night and headed out through the park the following morning.

The Chieftain is what they call a "bagger" and it's a deliberate anachronism; a one-hundred-and-eleven-cubic-inch air-cooled V-Twin, batwing fairing mounted to the handlebars in the Fifties style, and an aesthetic that harks back to the same decade. It has soft-touch start like a modern car and it has a touchscreen navigation system, but the core idea of the thing wouldn't have raised any eyebrows during the Eisenhower administration. It's a competitor to the Harley-Davidson touring bikes, of which we have seen literally hundreds during the past three days.

The Harley "Street Glide Special," which like my Chieftain is a "bagger,' is a perennial candidate for the title of best-selling motorcycle in the United States. It's hugely expensive; the retail price of $23,199 is about twice as much as that of the Japanese superbikes that crush the quarter-mile in under ten seconds, get 50mpg on a commute, and last forever without regular maintenance. Yet it can do none of those things. It is basically an updated version of a bike from fifty or sixty years ago. Think of it as a 1957 Bel Air with fuel injection and a Bluetooth-enabled stereo. Some years, Harley can't build enough to meet demand.

As I traveled to Sturgis, I met and spoke with dozens of people who own and ride bikes like the Chieftain and the Street Glide. All of them have made deliberate choices to own these vintage-style machines. It's not an accident. For them, the style and the experience is the entire point. They could buy a modern bike, like a Yamaha FJR1300 or BMW GT-R12000XXGT (I made that one up) but they choose not to. They'd rather have the old bikes.

Some of them even ride Harley-Davidson trikes. The trikes are, in my opinion, nasty pieces of business, since they don't steer or handle even as well as the Harley-Davidson motorcycles, which themselves steer and handle at about the level of a 1978 Firebird. But they have the look and the sound that the owners want. They are popular with older owners who doubt their ability to hold a 900-pound bike up on a gravel road or at a fuel pump where the ground is slick with diesel.

The car I was following through the Tetons was an old Volkswagen Type 1, known to all and sundry in this county as the Beetle. It was a Sixties model as far as I could tell, but I suspect that some of my readers will be able to pinpoint the exact year from the photo. The Type 1 is about as old a design as the full-size Harley-Davidson, and it enjoyed nearly forty years of popularity in the global marketplace, but it's now out of production everywhere, even in Mexico. You can't get a new one in the United States and it's been impossible to get one from a main dealer here since the Rabbit arrived in 1975.

Yet people clearly still want to own and drive Beetles, as was proven to me by the fellow ahead of me on the road. This is where John Gilmore's idea of "routing around censorship" comes into play. I suspect that there are hundreds of thousands of Americans who love the idea of traveling around this great country in a vintage-style automobile, something like a Beetle or a Bel Air. But they aren't mechanics and they don't have a lot of spare time on their hands to learn to fix a vintage car.

Given the chance to buy something like a brand-new Bel Air from a dealer, they'd do it. But the current crop of restored beauties from Icon and Singer are prohibitively expensive for the everyman. And the United States has implemented a massive set of regulations over the past fifty years that make something like a brand-new Bel Air absolutely impossible to buy. We are told that this is for the sake of safety. Which I believe.

But here's the problem. Denied the chance to buy a new Beetle or Bel Air, these people route around that censorship by purchasing a brand-new vintage-style Harley-Davidson motorcycle. Which, of course, is not nearly as safe as a brand-new Bel Air would be. And then they go traveling around the country on a 900-pound anachronism that can't keep up with a base Honda Civic on a mountain road.

So what I'd like to propose is this: We create a legislative category for "willful anachronisms." Vehicles sold as such would have to comply with a reduced set of safety and emissions regulations, something like the regulations currently imposed on motorcycles. If you bought a willful anacrhonism, you would have to sign a document acknowledging that you are assuming a much higher risk of death than you would with a standard car. Maybe there would be an additional fee to cover the environmental impact of an air-cooled Beetle engine or old-school Jaguar straight-six.

In short, these would be four-wheeled motorcycles from a legislative perspective. Leisure vehicles, not everyday drivers. Something you'd use to cruise the National Parks or take to the drive-thru on Saturday night. I don't know how many people would give up their Harleys or their Indians for a brand-new '57 Chevrolet. Maybe not too many. But it would be their choice to do so. It would be a very American thing for our government to do. And as I was reminded yesterday, riding past those mountains in a line of people who were free to travel as they liked and associate as they chose, America is still a big, bold, and beautiful place to be.

Born in Brooklyn but banished to Ohio, Jack Baruth has won races on four different kinds of bicycles and in seven different kinds of cars. Everything he writes should probably come with a trigger warning. His column, Avoidable Contact, runs twice a week.