I was driving into northern Maryland, and passed a HUGE billboard that said
HARLEY DAVIDSON
BATTLEFIELD
So I’m wondering… do they joust?*
*It turns out that the town where the dealership was located was named Battlefield. Apparently the site of a Civil War battle. Not nearly as amusing.
What my post above is lacking is a disclaimer that not all HD riders are HD snobs.
But the ones who are, are absolutely insufferable.
And what gets me the most is the HD riders’ attitude that they are outliers, and fiercely individual and independent. Yet then they all try to conform to the same HD “look” by sporting HD do rags, leathers, fringes, studs, and the like.
Individual my butt!
I look at it the other way; many organ donors are accidents where brain trauma such as a motorcycle accident was involved. Please don’t make me dig up a cite, but it has something to do with a generally quick response to the accident, and the organs aren’t actually deprived from oxygen for very long. Since part of the Harley culture is wearing full leathers, those not wearing a brain bucket may actually be doing the rest of us a favor.
I thought that was understood when stereotyping most any group. Especially a subgroup to a class that a majority of responders to this thread probably belong to (motorcycle riders/enthusiasts).
I hope you’re smart enough not go around all bikers into that catergory. 
Ew if my dad wore a do-rag and fringes, I’d disown him.
The funny thing is, when I lived in Milwaukee most of the engineers I knew that worked for Harley Davidson preferred Nortons, Triumphs, Ducatis, BMWs, et cetera. (I interviewed at H-D for a position as a structural/thermal analyst and found myself looking over the shoulder at my potential boss at a wall-filling Ducati 996 poster.) They might own a Harley Davidson or two because of the discount, and they’ll certainly pull them out of the test pool to commute when the weather is good or to have an extra bike for a weekend ride, but except for the VRSC or old classic knuckleheads and panheads, I found that there isn’t actually a lot of enthusiasm for the bikes by the people who engineer them.
Harley Davidson isn’t in the business of building motorcycles; they’re in the business of marketing a lifestyle. If they could do this without all the bother of producing actual machines, they’d do it in a heartbeat.
Stranger
That’s what I’m saying (kind of) - if motorcycle riders aren’t going to wear helmets so they stand a chance of surviving a crash, the least they could do is be young, healthy guys so other people can use their organs. The Harley riders I’ve seen are neither young nor particularly healthy looking, and very few of them wear helmets. It’s just thumbing their noses at organ harvesting teams, you know?
My she was hurt because it meant a missed opportunity for some time without the insufferable dicks.
Do Harleys come with earplugs? They all sound (at idle) like they are ready to explode! :smack:
I own a Harley.
It’s a 2006 Softail Night Train. It was $17,900.00 off the floor, and I further customized it with a completely new front end (all the way up to and including the controls) and a new exhaust system. I also added flush-mounted caps and a chrome tank console. It cost me an extra five grand. I love it.
My best friend got a Suzuki C90, about the same size as my own right about the same time and paid somewhere just below nine thousand when all was said and done. It is a bad ass bike.
I think that many of the posters here are actually referring to a minority of riders with the attitude that HD owners seem to have for all other motorcycle owners. There is a perception, largely created by the HD ‘lifestyle’, and those that heard this and heard that from a someone else that Harley bikes are better, and I certainly agree that the AMF years were a terrible time to own a Harley, but I never come across these people on the road. Most Harley riders I know that make silly remarks admit even to themselves that owning a Harley is not exactly financially sensible. Our bikes aren’t faster, or more reliable, or prettier, or anything else for that matter, and those metric bikes are incredibly reliable, but we make whatever jokes we make (those that I know) in obvious jest, because we realize that our argument is easy to poke holes into. It’s just a way of breaking the ice, because the argument is silly and we know it. Our bikes are not better. I made a comment to my friend the first time we rode together about getting a real bike, and his response was, “yeah, you got a real bike alright. Real fucking expensive.” We both laughed, because he knew I was just poking him and at the end of it all, we just wanted to fucking ride man. we just wanted to ride.
I wave at everyone. I salute everyone. I don’t care what you’re mounted on. We once rode 45 strong down to Fernandina Beach and picked up a guy on a scooter along the way and surrounded him, consumed him into our pack and basically took him with us. He became one of us for the hour long journey and we treated him that way. That’s what it’s all about.
I can tell you that the attitude that Harley owners don’t wave/salute to owners of other bikes is at least 90% myth. Most of the time when you are giving the salute to someone it’s when they are coming at you in the opposite lane of traffic. Unless they are riding a bike that is obviously not a cruiser, it is almost impossible to tell whether the bike is a Harley or not until it’s too late to even wave in the first place. And I salute everyone, no matter what they ride. I am snobbish as a motorcycle owner, not of any particular brand. I am snobbish in that we are all on two wheels and putting our lives on the line to enjoy our hobby because those of the four-wheel persuasion often appear as if they are actively attempting to kill us.
Current Harley Davidson Motorcycles are pretty much just as reliable as any other bike, and that’s a compliment to Harley because Honda, Suzuki, etc. was the incredibly high standard we had to rise to after the AMF years and it’s a testament to the company that they were able to rise to that level of quality. It’s also a tremendous compliment to those bikes as well.
As far as I am concerned the only real difference between Harley and every other bike out there is that trademark sound that is due to the firing order of the engine being different enough to give it that ‘pop pop rest, pop pop rest’ sound. Quality standards and aesthetics for the current line of bikes are basically the same in the cruiser line across the board.
No truer words were ever spoken. The seat on my Softail is so uncomfortable that I got the impression that it was damned intentional. Meanwhile my bud’s C90 is like a cloud for your ass. I can’t ride for more than an hour without having to stand up at a stop light or take some kind of a break for a minute or two. And he makes fun of me for not having a leather enough ass to ride a Harley. It’s all jokes, man.
Look, Harley owners are no more assholish than anyone else out there. We just want to ride. We may create some short-lived illusion that our bikes have a great and illustrious history or that trademark sound is the difference between a good motorcycle and a great one, but at the end of the day we know it’s all bullshit and we (most of us) just want to ride.
If someone is acting like a douche perched on a Harley, chances are he’s a douche pretty much when he isn’t on a bike at all.
I just want to ride, and I’ll ride with any motorized two-wheeled contraption you bring to keep from going it alone.
Heh. My boyfriend is a way bigger snob than that - he drives a Ural, which is technology that wasn’t new in 1939.
It, uh, isn’t working at the moment.
Man, if it could keep up, I’d totally be there.
I think Buell makes some pretty sweet bikes. A buddy of mine is a gearhead for cars and motorcycles and he owns one and loves it.
I am too afraid of stupid people on the road to ride a street bike. I’ve happily dirt-biked though, and would love to do so again.
Of course, I forgot to “quote message in reply” - that was in response to
Just in case you didn’t know, Buell is a wholly owned subsidary of Harley Davidson. I agree that they do make some pretty sweet bikes though.
As for the continuing Harley discussion, besides the much (and properly) maligned AMF era, these things will last forever. There are more than just a few bikes made in the 40’s still on the road today that will stay on the road until the bike gets wrecked.
What you said. I’ll be dreaming of the Ducati 916… forever. 
Yeah, but if you are riding a bike no one has even heard of, or one that requires the equivalent of a PhD in motorcycle maintenance including the mastery of Slavic languages to make a 50 mile trip, then you’ve earned the right to consider yourself a little above the fray…especially if he has the sidecar. (It still doesn’t make it more palatable to be a dick about it, but some people just need to prove a point.) Buying a $20k bike and half again as much in accessories and clothing isn’t especially impressive, though.
Stranger
It does have the sidecar.
Which means that he totally can’t afford a trailer for it.
It’s sweet how people wave at you all the time when it’s running, though. He’s got me so trained - the minute anybody sees it in my garage “It’s not a BMW.” comes out of my mouth.
