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In the same month as the shocking mic-drop announcement from Indian Motorcycle that the hotly anticipated FTR 1200 is going into production, its chief rival Harley-Davidson has a bombshell of its own: the iconic motorcycle brand will now be making…bicycles.
But H-D won’t be building bikes for the mass-market. Instead, it’s planning a limited production run of just 10 hand-built models which will be replicas of the ones Harley sold a century ago, according to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. From 1917-1922, H-D made pedal-powered bicycles alongside its then-revolutionary motorcycles. The idea is apparently to introduce younger riders to the brand, which is something Harley-Davidson has been seriously struggling with in recent years.
Oh, and Harley-Davidson isn’t really building these bikes. Instead, it’s Heritage Bicycles of Chicago, Illinois that built the first replica and will presumably build the other nine. It’s specifically modeled after a 1917 Model 7-17 Standard, for any pre-war pedal heads out there. The new model is also little bigger than the original bike, because we haven’t gotten any smaller since then. Neat touches include the “H-D” logo stamped into the front sprocket and an olive green frame with hand-applied pinstripes.
These bikes will be available for purchase this summer and will have a price tag of approximately $4,200. What makes them worth $4,200? Great question. Probably the fact that they’re hand-built by a serious bike shop, combined with those two letters on the front, but it’s still hard to imagine paying that kind of money for a bicycle that’s just a replica and probably won’t be ridden very much. If we owned a $4,200 bicycle, it certainly wouldn’t see a lot of action.
If for some reason you want to spend $4,200 on one of these, they can be reserved at the Harley-Davidson Museum in Milwaukee with online ordering coming soon. In classic Harley-Davidson fashion, this newest model is loaded with outdated technology and doesn’t come close to what its competitors offer for a fraction of the price.
