Considering how H-D riders like to dress up as pirates, maybe H-D should start expanding their audience by targeting the cosplay crowd. Pokemon 1200 Sportster anyone?

The big problem with that proposition, is that the demographic who’s been HD’s target until now are precisely the people who made it so young people can’t afford luxury, even if they want it - at least not in enough numbers to float a motorcycle brand. Nobody under say...50 aspires to ride a Harley - most people…

I believe the problem is cultural - we only reward short term thinking in NA.

The V-Rod absolutely was a step in the right direction (so was the Buell 1125r and the Livewire could have been another) but instead of building on that they killed it because it wasn’t selling well enough. The short sightedness at Harley is quite impressive actually. The V-Rod is one of the few cruisers I would…

If only Harley had a sub-brand that would be interesting to the youths...Maybe one that sells sport bikes, and stuff that isn’t just wannabe choppers for the middle manager who needs something loud enough to make him feel better about his ED, but whose wife won’t let him spend enough money to buy a Vette, or build a…

They need to revamp their image and start catering to a younger crowd. I think Harley is too old school for that ICQ/MySpace era.

If you’re a Real American (TM), you live in the heartland, drive a Dodge truck and your incipient diabetes goes untreated ‘cos you don’t have health insurance - but you’re free, dang it!!

People always say that but in reality mileage travelled in the US isn’t unusually high.

I know right? Americans complain about gas prices, yet we have meatheads that insist on driving bigass pickup trucks, so they can run to the grocery store to buy food in mass quantities, so they can stuff their fat faces, which would justify needing bigass trucks to drive their big asses around.

Note that expensive fuel encourages population density, too. (Of course there’s a lot of other factors, too - the US has unique racial tensions that contributed to the explosion of the megasuburbs.)

European fuel prices are part of why they have good public transit.

General stupidity.

My mom is a certified car nut. She rode a Yamaha 350 in college.

Yeah, they’re owned by PSA now, but Opel is still a German company... just like they were a German company when GM owned them.

If Opel is French now, they were American when Wurm was collaborating with them.

I was going to make a quip about Chrysler minivans — an American brand, manufactured in Canada, owned by an Italian parent company — but I checked my facts first, and now I’m even more thoroughly confused.

This mandate is sloppy and minimally effective. If we have needed backup cameras so badly for the past decade, then why not make a safety recall out of it, too? Let’s be honest- do modern cars have “sufficient” rearward/blindspot visibility, or do they not?

Backup cameras are another American idiocy: I’ve been backing up my car very well and for more than 40 years so far, thank you..., and only ONCE I touched a plastic separation in the Company’s parking lot and only because it was raining hard and I was enraged with an idiot colleague. Americans can stick their backup…

Wait, isn’t youngtimer a well known and accepted term in American car culture? Or have I been hanging around 1990s Mercedes forums too much?