HAPPY ANNIVERSARY, HARLEY
40 years of Harley-Davidson GmbH
- In 1981, Harley-Davidson was entered into the German commercial register as a GmbH
- The history of the brand in Germany goes back more than 95 years
- Last year, over 11,000 HD motorcycles were newly registered in this country
NEW ISENBURG (04/22/2021) - MTV is on the air in New York, a few hard rockers are getting together in a band called Metallica in California and Roger Moore aka James Bond is on the world's cinema screens “On a Deadly Mission”. The year is 1981, Harley-Davidson frees itself from its previous owner, the conglomerate AMF, in the USA through a spectacular management buyout and is entered in the commercial register in Germany as a GmbH.
The number of new Milwaukee Irons registered each year in the Federal Republic of Germany is still manageable, but that should change quickly because the company is returning to the quality of the years before the AMF era, improving it further and presenting one a few years later with the Evolution brand new engine and lands a new bestseller with the Softail.
40 years of Harley-Davidson GmbH - it's worth taking a look in the rearview mirror, because the history of the US brand actually goes back much further in Germany. Nobody knows exactly how far, but it must have been sometime in the first half of the 1920s when the first wooden boxes loaded with motorcycles from Milwaukee arrived in this country. Word quickly spread in the republic, which was characterized by economic and cultural awakening, that the machines from the land of unlimited opportunity were extremely robust and reliable. Numerous successes in German and European motorsports have contributed to the good reputation of the US brand.
But in the following decade, the Nazis and the Second World War brought an abrupt end to the flourishing imports. It was not until 1956 that the Suck company was allowed to restart in Hamburg as a general importer. In the 1970s, Eysel Motorsport in Langenselbold took over the job and in 1976 the Harley-Davidson Motor Company founded its own factory branch in Groß-Gerau.
Since then, Harley-Davidson has moved several times in the Rhine-Main area before settling in Neu-Isenburg as Harley-Davidson Germany GmbH in 2013. 67 German and nine Austrian authorized dealers are currently supported from here. And they know their job: More than 11,000 Harley-Davidson motorcycles were newly registered in Germany last year. It is therefore not surprising that the Federal Republic is now one of the top three individual markets worldwide for Harley-Davidson. In total, there are now well over a quarter of a million Harleys rolling on German roads, and tests by the relevant specialist media confirm their impeccable quality.
With the Pan America and the new Revolution Max V-Twin, the US manufacturer is opening a new chapter in its history in 2021. It's not just in Germany that Harley-Davidson is looking forward to the coming years and decades.
Text & Image Credits: Copyright Harley-Davidson
