American cruiser icons to battle for battery supremacy
Victory looking to beat Harley-Davidson to market with Victory Charger fully electric motorcycle
While Harley-Davidson has been promoting it’s ‘Project Livewire’ motorcycle experience with public test rides scheduled at various locations around the world this year, H-D are on the record that this is an exercise to gain feedback from their customers before any final decisions about whether to bring an electric motorcycle to market – and when – will be made at a later date.
MCNews.com.au will ride Project Livewire next month and report back our own findings at a later date. Hopefully at that event we can also gain some more insight as to when H-D might indeed bring such a motorcycle to market.
Fellow North American manufacturer Polaris, custodians of the Indian and Victory brands, look on track to perhaps beat Harley to market with a battery powered streetbike cruiser with the name ‘Victory Charger’ recently patented in America.
This comes hot on the heels of Polaris swallowing up Orgeon based specialist electric motorcycle manufacturer Brammo last month.
Indications are that Polaris aims to quickly marry Brammo technology to the Victory brand with the resultant offspring due on the retail market later this year.
Victory never really managed to make any dent in Harley-Davidson’s sales of traditional motorcycles, Polaris instead refocussing their efforts on the Indian Motorcycle brand where they are successfully levering the long history and lineage behind Indian to forge new ground into Harley territory. It will be interesting to see if Polaris can use the Victory brand to one-up Harley in the electric motorcycle market. Watch this space…
