Harley-Davidson‘s most expensive motorcycle ever is also its most powerful street bike yet.
The new limited-edition CVO Road Glide has a 131-cubic-inch V-twin engine which makes 151 horsepower, which is enough to power most small cars. Harley is planning to hand-assemble just 131 of the bikes. In addition to that power, the bike will have high-price components that usually lend themselves to racing, including a stronger aluminum triple tree and swingarm and carbon-fiber bodywork and bags, according to Bloomberg. Perhaps most impressively, the motorcycle also has titanium exhaust pipes which alone save 50 pounds. In total, the CVO Road Glide RR weighs 750 pounds.
The motorcycle’s $110,000 price is more than double the base CVO Road Glide, which starts at $45,999, but Harley says the new edition is intended to be the best of the best.
“Taking inspiration from the track and onto the street, the Harley-Davidson CVO Road Glide RR is truly the ultimate in performance," Jochen Zeitz, Harley-Davidson’s chairman, said in a statement. “With this limited series of motorcycles, we’ve taken all the lessons from the track and created the pinnacle of street-legal bagger performance."
Harley has had a rough several years, as fewer Americans take to riding motorcycles, especially the big, heavy, expensive motorcycles that are Harley’s bread and butter. The launch of the LiveWire—Harley’s first all-electric motorcycle—in 2019 was billed as an effort to attract a new group of younger customers, but the LiveWire was troubled almost from the get-go. It was first unveiled in 2014 and took years to develop, and once it did launch sales were not spectacular. It also suffered from technology issues.
LiveWire was spun off as a sub-brand in 2021. Since then, Harley has tried other lines of business, including the Pan America 1250, the brand’s first adventure bike, which many thought was an even more important new product than the LiveWire. The fundamental problem for Harley, though, has largely remained the same: Its most loyal customers are aging—even if those are the customers who will be interested in a six-figure motorcycle. Harley still has the runway, for now, to try to serve both the old and the young. Whether they can do that successfully remains to be seen.
From the article by Erik Shilling
