Harley Boss Calls For A Small Beginner Bike, Buell Gets Tapped For The JobĪnyway, then Harley-Davidson CEO Jeff Bleustein wanted to keep the good times rolling into the new Millennium. The site quotes the New York Times as having said “But, motorcycle aficionados note, most of those bikes were so-called ‘touring’ bikes that appealed to riders who were unlikely to have bought the huge, mean-looking Harleys in the first place.” ). (The weird thing is that, as RevZilla notes, Japan’s imports weren’t even competing with Harley. The Clinton White House noted that in part thanks to the tariff, Harley sold so many motorcycles that it controlled 56 percent of the large motorcycle market. As the Wall Street Journal reported in 2002, the Motor Company spent the decade posting annual compound earnings growth of 31 percent since 1986. These changes, as well product development that leaned in on building new bikes that looked and felt old, helped Harley-Davidson experienced a downright roaring decade. In 1983, President Ronald Reagan signed the Memorandum on Heavyweight Motorcycle Imports and imposed a 45 percent tariff on imports with greater than 700cc capacities. The company was no longer owned by American Machine and Foundry, it launched the Evolution engine, and the Wisconsin-based bike maker begged the government to stem the flow of cheap Japanese motorcycle imports. Harley had spent the 1980s getting reinvigorated, and it was paying off. The 1990s were a bountiful time to be the Bar and Shield. It was supposed to bring more people into motorcycling and Harley-Davidson (which owned Buell at the time), but ended up running an incredible amount over budget and ultimately maligned by riders. The Blast was a lightweight beginner motorcycle with a few clever Buell-tricks up its sleeve. In 2000, Buell Motorcycle Company started production of a little motorcycle with big promises.
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