Now Indian Motorcycle is Considering Moving Some Production Overseas

In the same week that Indian Motorcycle released a video proudly celebrating building its 100,000th engine at the Osceola, Wisconsin assembly plant, the brand says that it’s considering moving some of its production overseas. Unsurprisingly, Indian Motorcycle cites the same reason that Harley-Davidson does for confirming its shift to more overseas production: New tariffs on American-made motorcycles coming into the E.U.

But it’s not a done deal quite yet. It’s an idea that Indian is kicking around and examining whether it would be the right move for the brand. "The recent EU retaliatory tariffs have required us to expend time, energy and resources to evaluate mitigation plans, including the possibility of moving production of Indian Motorcycles destined for Europe from Iowa to our facility in Poland," said Indian Motorcycle spokeswoman Jess Rogers to the Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal.

Indian Motorcycle is owned by Polaris Industries and Polaris has a factory in Opole, Poland where it makes some of its off-road vehicles. The Poland factory opened in 2014 and has the capacity for up to 500 employees.

"The growing impact of this trade war is increasing the production costs of our vehicles. We continue to examine various options for managing the cost increases from both tariffs and the domestic materials pricing," said Rogers.

Like with Harley-Davidson, if this production shift were to be confirmed, the Indian motorcycles produced in Poland would only be for foreign markets to avoid tariffs on U.S.-built bikes being imported into the E.U. All of the Indian bikes sold here in the U.S. will continue to be built here at home. As of this writing, Indian Motorcycle still does all of its production in the U.S. which is a point of pride for many of its riders and employees.