Europeans ready to ride American
Harley shows way to sell US vehicles abroad
Willi Breuckmann could have gone for the BMW motorcycle — it made sense for him to stick with a ride made in his own country, Germany.
Instead, he chose a HarleyDavidson. The Road King.
“It comes down to a feeling”, what the Germans call “ein Gefuhl”, said Breuckmann, who lives in Dortmund.
The Road King is a big bike, starting around ¤24,000 ($42,000), and perfect for autobahn cruising.
“The BMW is also very comfortable,” he says. “But it was a dream of mine to get a Harley.”
While President Donald Trump rails at Europeans for restricting trade and a reluctance to buy Detroit’s cars, the Milwaukee-based motorcycle maker proves every day that consumers across the Atlantic are willing to buy American. One of Harley’s biggest German dealers says it sells 500 bikes a year. The company almost doubled its market share in Germany in the past decade, to 6.4 per cent in 2017 from 3.3 per cent in 2006.
American car companies haven’t been as lucky. With less than 1 per cent market share each, highperformance US brands like Cadillac and Chrysler haven’t been able to chip away at the dominance of BMW or Mercedes.
With US sales falling, the European market has become so important to Harley that the company is willing to invoke Trump’s wrath, announcing a few months ago that it would shift manufacturing abroad to skirt retaliatory tariffs enacted in the President’s trade war. The European Union is imposing a 25 per cent tariff on US motorcycle imports in response to Trump.
Harley’s success in Europe is evidence that American companies can compete and even flourish there, without a trade war — if the products are good enough. The company built a strong network of dealerships and made some adjustments to the products to suit European tastes: slimmer bikes and special options.
Europeans were introduced to Harley-Davidsons right after WWII. American soldiers rode around West Germany on big bikes, says Christian Arnezeder, the managing director for Harley-Davidson in central Europe. A generation later, in 1976, the company invoked the legacy of US troops and opened Harley-Davidson Germany.
The bikes then were “rough rides”, says Georg Kierdorf, the owner of one of Germany’s largest dealerships, in Cologne.
Harley in Europe has replicated the owner-community model that makes its brand so strong at home. Dealerships provide easy access for services, plenty of publicity, and a place to hang out and host rallies.
New bike owners get a free, oneyear membership to the Harley Owners Group, the official companysponsored club. More than 95,000 people attended this year’s 150th Harley-Davidson anniversary meetup in Prague.
“It’s a European community”, says Wolle Rider, president of the H-DC German Harley Riders, an independent club. “We’re all friends.”
Thorsten Knorr, president of the Harley Club Deutschland, recently set off on his Street Glide — a strippeddown version of the original Harley, all black and silver — on a 15-day, 7200km journey through Scandinavia. He and five friends rode as far as North Cape in Norway, the northernmost point in Europe, and cruised through the Arctic Circle.
Some nights they stayed at HarleyDavidson clubs. And when one of the Harleys needed a wheel repair, they found a local dealership.
“People buy into a dream,” says Knorr, 38. “They buy into a philosophy of life of freedom, of nonconformism and of owning something special.”