I am well aware of the HD issues in the 80's and earlier. Whose fault was it that the bikes were primitive designs w/ all the problems that comes with it.
They upscaled the designs - reworked the engines - gave them decent brakes, etc. And now they sell the heck out of them.
Don't forget the Japs were dumping bikes on this market for well below cost to manufacture.
When my 1990 was made - HD made about 30k big twin motorcycles. Look how many they put out now. I think I saw it was about 400k of them.
I'd like to read up on that. Do you have a source?
"Don't forget the Japs were dumping bikes on this market for well below cost to manufacture"
Yeah, for about two years in the early/mid 80s, after a recession caused the bike market to collapse, and also the value of the Yen to collapse. They were "dumping" unsold stock for whatever they could get for it. Nevermind that they hardly even built anything directly competitive with Harley at that time. Certainly to claim that the Japanese were trying to drive H-D out of business with this tactic is ridiculous, because H-D was no threat to anyone at the time.