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Harley Dealers Prepare for the LiveWire

LiveWire 2018
Image from Harley-Davidson

Need to Have the Right Training and Equipment

The Harley-Davidson LiveWire will be making its way to customers and that means the dealers that want to sell it must be ready. First off, that means dealers will be adding charging stations. Second, it means that each dealer that wants to sell the LiveWire will have to have at least one person on staff that has been trained to sell the bike. According to electrek, both of these things have already begun.

Both additions to dealerships will help make the sales of the LiveWire go smoothly. Harley-Davidson is betting big on electric motorcycles, and it needs its dealers to really sell people on the idea. Having a knowledgable and tech-savvy salesperson on the ground at the dealership will help eliminate any false information about the bike. It will also allow Harley to filter possible buyers towards the LiveWire that might be on the fence.

It’s not just those two things that dealerships will need to think about, though. They’ll also have to be able to service the LiveWire should anyone need service. Granted, many parts of the motorcycle that will need maintenance—tires, brakes, belts, etc.—won’t require super special tools.

Those things aren’t different, but the dealers were originally told to prepare for new tools and motorcycle lifts designed specifically for the bike. According to electrek, that has changed and Harley told dealers the standard motorcycle lifts would be fine and they won’t need too many special tools to work on the bike.

If Harley can really sell the LiveWire at the dealership well, they have a chance at making the bike a success. As we noted in a previous article, if the company is able to sell 1,000 bikes nationwide, it will have made a boatload of money at $30,000 a pop.

Selling that many bikes only means the company has to convince less than one percent of its customers to buy a LiveWire. It will be interesting to see if Harley’s dealers can pull it off.

 

 

  1. I wonder if this’ll work as well as having Harley dealers try (and utterly fail to even bother) to sell Buells.

  2. From the article: “As we noted in a previous article, if the company is able to sell 1,000 bikes nationwide, it will have made a boatload of money at $30,000 a pop.”

    Maybe. Or maybe not. I don’t know Harley’s costs for parts, materials, labor, factory tooling, factory worker training, overhead, etc. I don’t know how much Harley has spent in marketing and in non-recurring engineering (NRE) on this multi-year project (I sat on a prototype years ago at a motorcycle show).

    It’s also not clear whether the costs associated with training of dealer sales and service personnel, and with the installation of Livewire charging stations, will be borne by the dealers, Harley, or shared between them.

    I’m not saying you’re wrong — just that I don’t know if you’re right.

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