Making Harley Great Again!

Could this convention-breaking Harley-Davidson be the best Harley Davidson motorcycle to lay rubber on tarmac? We try out Harley-Davidson’s first-ever adventure bike to find out

- Dipayan Dutta

If you ever find the thought of stepping outside your comfort zone daunting, spare a thought for Harley-Davidson. After doing more or less the same thing for almost a century, and bringing themselves to the brink of extinction. They chose to reinvent themselves, fundamentally. Which is no small task for any manufacturer, let alone one of the most well-known names on two wheels, a brand where loyalists have been known to tattoo the company logo onto themselves for posterity. Somehow even calling it a paradigm shift seems reductive, but then again look what was born of it. The Harley-Davidson Pan America 1250, the antithesis of 100 years of Harley-Davidson cruisers, and the first step into a new generation.

The Pan America, even in this bland silver, is all shock and awe from the moment you lay eyes on it. I wouldn’t call it beautiful, but its burly truckstop aura is magnetic. What I think is really cool is how the top part of the Pan America Special still has a lot of cues that are distinctly “HarleyDavidson” albeit with a “90s Robocop” approach to “futuristic”. Especially that massive front end with the bar-LED style headlamps set in a massive front fairing. Even the long tank that tapers off towards the seat looks like it would have been more at home on a cruiser than on a 1250cc adventure bike. In comparison everything on the sub-frame is minimal, in fact, there’s no bodywork beyond the rear sub-frame with only the exposed frame visible. It’s a sharp contrast to the front-end of the motorcycle but it adds to the butch value of the Pan America. I love the fact that Harley has been able to find their own style for their first adventure tourer instead of ripping off what the Europeans and Japanese have accepted as the norm.