Whats Right and (mostly) Wrong with Harley-Davidson in 2020

Episode 247 of Law Abiding biker kicked off some thoughts. 

Harley Davidson has been in trouble lately. My knowledge and experience puts me in a particularly good place to evaluate what they've been doing right and wrong. There's much more wrong.

• I'm a biker. 25 years, Road Captain. I spend my weeks figuring how to get out as much as I can on the weekends. And during the week. And for long trips..
• I'm trained as a business consultant, having spent 35 years improving peoples business process. I have an MBA in Finance from NYU Stern Graduate School and have worked for PwC, HP, IBM, consulting on marketing, sales and supply chain. My clients included helping Trev Deeley (Harley of Canada) design processes and systems to run the firm.
• I'm very computer literate, which is a big part of vehicles today.
• I grew up around cars, dad owning a gas station from the day I was 7. I understand how engines work and can and have built cars from just a body and frame..

To keep it as short as possible:

• Harley never modernized. From engines to forks to radios and lack of GPS. My 2012 Street Glide
  
  has no usb, no bluetooth, no screen and no GPS though most have been standard years before.  You can buy Indians and Yamaha's with overhead cams and water cooling. Harley's Milwaukee 8 is a horrible attempt to have pushrods actuating 4 valves with large claw like actuators. This gets Harley the improved flow of 4 valves per cylinder, but with heavy low RPM valvetrains. Modern engines use overhead cams to actuate light high RPM valvetrains that provide both torque and HP.  Another example of going halfway, Harley water cooled the heads to keep the rider cool, but that leaves the air and oil cooled motor without enough cooling to support performance improvements, like higher compression ratios.
• Harley wants to sell you a platform and then have you spend thousands to dress it up and get the performance to where it should be. Many things you should get for your $25,000 - decent exhaust, nice real leather seats, extended bags, etc. are all extra. The cowbells on many Road Kings, the first thing you see on the bike, are cast, no chrome or black. Boom boxes still need to be manually upgraded, often at a cost when Apple and Android update apps and maps virtually automagically. Harley would sell many more bikes if $25,000 motorcycles had good shocks, nicely stitched leather seats, real bar options and good performance. Harley wants you to buy the bike for $25,000 and add $10,000 in chrome, cams and power commanders. Racks and decent windshields that fit a big
  
  rider (Indian and others have standard adjustable windshields). H-D should sell you a $23,000 bike you're proud to ride and that can get down the road. People don't do much to Diavels or Chieftans or Challengers, they come nicely equipped. The Diavel has some 152 horsepower. Harley is selling bikes with less features, value and performance. That works when the H-D name used to cause lines for bikes. When you have solid competitors like Indian, Ducati, Customs and others, you have to give people great product.
• Harley can make a beautiful, well done, nicely optioned bike. They call them CVO's and charge $40,000+ for them. The $25,000 bikes should be more like the $40,000 CVO's and they'd sell a whole lot more.
• Closely related to #1, but too important not to repeat, riders don't care if the engine has a 45 degree v and pushrods. We're past that. Our F-150's have v6's with overhead cams and turbos.
• Give us good HP and Torque out of the box and sound like an H-D. An Indian Challenger with a breather and Cams and a remap can put out 145HP. You think you can get any (non-CVO) Harley to 145hp with a $1,000 investment?
• Harley already owns the technology with an assist from Porsche. Bump the V-Rod Revolution motor up a few hundred cc's and tune to get good HP and torque and you're there. A V-Rod with good exhaust is water cooled and sounds great. I don't care if you leave pushrod tubes to make the Revolution+ look like a V-Twin, leave them empty or have them flow oil to the heads.

            Harley needs to address the old classy style, like a Deluxe or a
            Heritage but they should be built like resto-mods. Old style
            class on the outside,  new technology, 4 valve overhead
            cam power on the inside.

• Expensive. Everything from clothes to service is expensive.
• Harley is badge engineering 20 years after General Motors showed it didn't work. We have Road Kings, Street Glides, Road Glides and Electroglide/Ultras with very little if any real differences. The same chassis. My buddy got a Road Glide Ultra as a loaner, probably one of the worst boring combinations of the Road Glide fairing (which I like) with the rest of the bike being the way too heavy for me Ultra.  While Harley is investing in potential new areas, the best two bikes in the lineup, those that are the Harley name, the Softail and the Tourers are badge engineered mediocrity.
• Make an attempt to give those people that want new modern styling newer designs. Perhaps a younger or more forward thinking audience. For example, Harley Saddlebags haven't changed in years they are designed to meet that classic look, design something that flows to the back and
  
  melds with a Street Glide fender, that covers the exhaust stock, it makes for better looking ride. You can have two tourer saddlebag designs, a fresh design might actually sell to a younger generation.

Many Harley guys, particularly the new riders that should be attracted don't care about the 45 degree V and pushrods that Harley is clinging to. Its not even clear they know what those parameters are. Recently my buddies loaner from H-D here was running like crap. He let a HOG member ride it to see what was wrong and the member of the Harley Owners Group comes back with his diagnosis. "Its running on only 3 cylinders..". No lie.

Swinger vs Stinger

Swinger.. vs...Singer

Four Wheel Drive vs AWD

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I've tried to use the Internet to do research on the difference between Four Wheel Drive and All Wheel Drive. While All Wheel Drive explains what it does well, Four Wheel Drive requires some qualification. The concepts of Four Wheel Drive and All Wheel Drive are both poorly understood.

Lets start with Four Wheel Drive. If you crawl under a old Jeep, say a CJ5 you'll find a driveshaft running from the engine and transmission, but instead of going to a front or rear differential the driveshaft first goes into a transfer case. A transfer case is made up of gears and/or chains, and is typically a very simple device. For those with some car and bike experience, picture the primary drive on a Harley Davidson with two outputs. It sends roughly half the power of the engine to the front and the other half to the rear wheels or axle.

Two driveshalfts exit the transfer case, each going into a differntial usually near the center of the front and rear axle. These use a ring and pinion gear to turn the driveshafts 90 degrees, where they attach to individual axles to drive the wheels. Most differentials only drive one wheel at a time. The reason for this, and why they are called differentials is that as a car drives the wheels go different distances. When a car goes around a corner the inside wheels drive a shorter distance than the outside wheels. The simplest way to make up for this is to drive one wheel on an axle and have the other axle not be driven (free wheeling).  To make matters worse, the way they are designed, most standard differentials send the engine torque to the wheel with the LEAST traction.

Open Differential

This means that in a normal, relatively inexpensive Four Wheel drive system, one wheel drives on the front axle and one wheel drives on the rear axle. A simple, standard 4WD system is in fact 2 wheel drive. They work better than the typically rear wheel drive system because a wheel turns on both axles. It also means that at least one wheel will turn on the front axle that has the motor and 55%-60% of the cars weight. The front axle provides most of your traction in low traction conditions because of having a larger percentage of the cars weight over its tires, given them more traction.

Better Four Wheel drive (4WD) systems come with Limited Slip differentials. These are differentials that more evenly adjust the torque to go out of its two axles. They are more complicated, and more expensive. Limited Slip come in many types, including fixed (split) value, torque sensitive, speed sensitive, and electonically controlled. They use different methods to run and adjust the torque split based on traction, speed etc. 4WD with limited slip is a very effective step up from standard 4WD. Since there is still some slip, limited slip diffentials can go around corners while bringing 4 driven wheels into play. This is the first time you're getting all 4 wheels working to provide traction when you need it. A 4WD system with limited slip is where the systems capability, driving all four wheels, matches the name Four Wheel drive. Its also the most similar to All Wheel Drive.

Limited Slip Differential

Real off road racers and heavy duty off roaders move up to differentials called lockers. This actually locks both wheels together on either axle. The good news is both wheels rotate at the same speed. The bad news is these systems cannot operate in all conditions on a normal car. They require a slippery surface to allow the wheels to slip and travel at different speeds.  When you drive a locked differential on dry ground however, the wheels will "chuck" at you. They skip over the sticky pavment with more force, which you can feel in the steering and even the car.  This makes the vehicle very hard to drive and will wear tires and driveline parts out quickly. Some systems that run full time 4WD have unlocking rings on the front wheel hubs to lock and unlock the front wheels from the front driving axles. When the wheel hubs are unlocked, the wheels don't attach to the turning axles and each wheel can travel at their own speed. You would re-lock the hubs when the weather gets bad.

Another way you can accomplish locked axles is to use a switched locked diffential. These are typically available on very expensive and technical vehicles. The Ford Raptor, a special offroad version of a Ford pickup, comes with a remotely lockable rear differential. It can be unlocked to allow the back wheels to move easily at their own speed on high traction surfaces like dry concrete and be locked remotely to have both wheels turn at the same speed on surfaces with low traction.

ALL WHEEL DRIVE

All Wheel Drive is typically a more sophisticated system than Four Wheel drive. Companies like Subaru or Audi have a differential or clutch packs in the middle of the car, similar to the transfer case in function that it distributes power as needed to the front and rear axles. But its far more sophisticated than a 4WD transfer case. Torsen gears combined with computer controls can vary the output from locked to variable between the front and rear axles.

When the power gets to the axles, many of these systems continue to use computers and sophisticated differentials to control the exact torque that goes to each wheel. So if one wheel has traction in the snow, the computer can switch most of the power to the axle with the most traction and the differential can send most if not all of the power to the wheel with the most traction. This type of system has additional benefits to bad weather performance. For example, systems like Acura's SHAWD (Super Handling AWD) use computers and sensors to shift the power to the appropriate wheels to keep the car from skidding off the road and to help the car handle better. For exmaple, if an Acura with SHAWD is making a left turn, it passes more power to the right side tires to help the car rotate to the left, and those wheels to travel the longer distance they have to in a left turn. 

Torsen Differential

All Wheel Drive comes in many flavors and has many benefits. In some hybrids, it can even be accomplished by a traditional gas or diesel engine powering one axle and one or two electric motors powering each of the other two wheels. These are of course are all controlled by computer to allow them to work smoothly together! The advantage to this type of system is lighter weight - there is no heavy center differential or transfer case. The small dissadvantage to such a system is that you cannot put the power from all of the motors out from any one wheel/tire.

I hope this helps to explain the difference between Four Wheel Drive (4WD) and All Wheel Drive! Please send me your feedback!

Snow Driving Tips with Nemo Approaching..

With in 8 or more inches of snow headed out way with Nemo and us not having much snow for a few winters, lets go through some tips.  First no matter what you drive, drive slow and easy. 4 wheel drive doesn't help you stop,...leave more distance and slow down. I see more SUV's  off the road than cars. Once a car is moving it typically handles better than a top heavy SUV. Once an SUV gets moving on the snow, its still big and heavy.

Dress for the weather.  If you get stuck you don't want to be in a short sleeve shirt and sandals. If you get stuck, build up a rocking motion, back and forth. Don't spin the wheels very much - you will burn out your transmission and dig yourself in deeper.   Forward, reverse, forward easily until you build up enough momentum to keep going. In a 4wd - learn how to go into 4wheel lock and low range if you have it (many trucks may require you to be not moving and/or in neutral - check the manual BEFORE you need it). My best piece of advice, no matter what you drive, is throw a shovel and towels in the car - shovel any high spots under the car, snow under the car holding the car up off the wheels is the biggest reason for getting stuck). Shovel the snow around the wheels -- make enough room to let you build up a forward and back rocking motion (the towels? mostly for you being wet and sweaty by this point and needing someplace to throw a wet dirty shovel).

Its always a good idea to keep moving. Getting a car moving from a stop is the single hardest thing to do in the snow.  If you can let the car creep along at 2 MPH, its much easier than starting from a stop.  Try to stop facing flat or downhill, not facing uphill.  Of course while going uphill getting started is your problem, going downhill, stopping can be like ice skating.

Plan your stop early around cars and especially when coming up to stoplights - you dont want to slide into an intersection and oncoming cars. In fact, when your light turns green, make sure you look both ways - just because the light is Red for oncoming cars, doesn't mean they all can stop in the snow.

Make sure you have at least 3/4 to a full tank of gas, decent tires (I guess its too late now if you don't, right?), that the air pressure is normal (or a little low) NOT HIGH (low pressure helps build traction - high pressure makes the tires harder). BTW, the gas in your tank helps in two ways - most cars have more weight over the front tires than the rear - at 7lbs a gallon the 150lbs in the rear helps the rear tires do more work. Throwing a couple of 50lb sandbags in your hatch or trunk doesn't hurt either, but don't overdue it as some point you'll just make the car/truck lower and increase the chance of getting caught up in high snow.
If you get on ice - try to get off the brakes, move 6 inches or a foot and a half to your left or right, and try the brakes again - the surface could be rougher or have more snow on it. If that doesn't work - try it again, even moving back where you were it could be different as you move on. Typically, the best place in near the shoulder - while people may have turned the center into ice, the sides could have more snow which is easier to stop in than snow.
With 8-12 inches or more, I wouldn't even consider going out in a RWD (Rear Wheel Drive) car - yes I know your BMW may have traction this and that.  That helps to keep the tires from spinning - but it doesnt change the laws of physics.  No matter how many electric nannies you have, in most cars roughly 55% of the weight is on the front wheels, 45% on the rear. With RWD and snow, it is very difficult to push 100% of car with 45% of the weight on the two wheels doing the pushing on slippery surfaces.
Just to show that my methods work, two or three years years ago when we got pounded, I threw a shovel in my fwd car and went out to get my exs friend in a 4wd Toyota Sequoia. I was able to get her out of 20+ inches of snow by shoveling out around the wheels and instead of her drivng and just spinning the wheels, rocking the truck to get enough movement to get the truck moving and keeping it moving out of the big snow it was stuck in.

Google Latitude

(Note - since writing this Google has cancelled Latitude)

Quick Blog today - as the season begins, I'm thinking how I'm gonna get all of my friends together. I work too hard during the week to chat everyone up. I have some that I send an email, some on Facebook, some on HDForums, some on BON, and I never really get to everyone, because while we may be going to the same place, likely we're coming form different starting points, with different people, throughout the day. Often, on Tuesday after a great day out, I learn that 15 of my buddies were in New Hope, or at OCC too.

I know Bikers aren't the best to accept technology, but we're getting there. Many have embraced CB's. More recently, its a flood - cell phones, GPS's and fuel injection all make the ride better. There's even a lot of stuff working quietly inside the bike like new battery technology.

Google makes a great tool called Latitude. You can use this on virtually any phone. GPS enabled phones will allow you to know where someone is within a few feet. Without GPS, the system uses telephone tower connections to tell where you are. This is actually a very good compromise because if you're inside, or on a bus or train, the system still knows roughly where you are.

Before you go "but anyone will know where I am". I've been using it for a year. I tell it exactly who can know where I am. If you're banking on-line, or using a GPS, heck if you even have a computer online, a good hacker can already tell if you're home using or not, so this isn't really any more of a risk of your privacy than starting up your GPS or laptop.

Now picture this, we drop kickstands at 11:30 in Flemington and realize that 3 of your best buds are in New Hope. Instead of missing them, you text them and make a plan to ride up and grab lunch, and ride for the rest of the day together.

You can setup the tool to send you a text when you and a friend are close to each other. You can rumble into Frenchtown and a few minutes later, you can get a text that says "Steve S is within 5 miles". Latitude even learns that you and a friend may work together and not tell you if you're close by every Monday thru Friday morning.

Go to http://www.google.com/latitude/intro.html, put in your cell phone and follow the instructions. BTW, the application Latitude runs over is Google Maps. This is by far the best application to help find a phone number, or a pub near where you're going for lunch.

You simply type "Pub" and it shows you all the bars, closest to where the maps is centered first, with a rating by users from zero to five stars. It give you the phone number, and you can dial right from Google Maps. I don't even have the number of places I call regularly in my phone like the quicklube down the block, its so easy to type "Quick Lube, Jackson NJ" into Google Maps.

My brothers and some friends have been using it for 9 months or more and it's great. Now if I can just get the rest of my riding buds on!!

2010 Riding Season

I'm excited for the 2010 riding season. I am looking forward to getting out. While in years past, I've ridden on Christmas Day and New Years day, this year, there wasn't a single day when my schedule and the weather and the roads would let me out. That makes me more anxious to get out and blast out a couple hundred miles. I got three words. Watch your ass.

Here in Jersey we typically have very good roads. But we haven't had a winter like this in some time. As the snow begins to clear, I've been watching the roadbeds realizing that a winter like this can be terrible on new and old roads. Potholes are caused by cars and trucks hitting the pavement over and over, causing cracks. Water then gets into the cracks and freezes. The cracks are often treated during the summer to save the roads. When we have a winter like this, the damage can be more than any normal maintenance can handle. Water gets below the pavement and the water freezes under the pavement. Ice takes up more space than water. If you don't believe me, go put a closed bottle of Poland Spring in the freezer and come back in two or three days. As the water freezes, it expands, which cracks the pavement, causing loose pavement, or potholes.

We've had at least three good snows this year leading to water and freezing multiple times. It seems that with DMV here in NJ putting down a couple of inches to top new roads, the water is settling just below the new top and we're getting 1 1/2 to 2 inch potholes. These are pretty bad in a car, but cars have an extra tire, or three. On the cycle, we don't. There are many intersections that are just more pothole than pavement.

One of the problems we have is that this type of pothole, because the cracks start first in the car tracks, are precisely in our stagger lanes. I think for the first couple of months of the year, we may have to be conscious of giving more room front and back to allow folks to avoid potholes when ridding staggered.

This will be particularly bad on the blacktop roads we have all over the back roads of NJ, exactly the lightly traveled roads we like to ride. The concrete used in many other parts of the country, or for first building the roads, does not crack anywhere near as easy.

How do you ride through a pothole? First option is to go around it. Leave yourself enough room from the person staggering with you to allow you to move around a pothole. And if you're riding alone, leave enough room after the car in front of you to see one come out under the car and avoid it. I find a good way to practice this is to see if you can avoid every manhole cover that the car in front of you rides over. If you can't avoid the manholes, you're not leaving yourself enough space.

What if the road is covered? Well, then you are going to need to slow down - but get off the brakes, off the gas and be going as straight as possible when you hit the pothole. Grip the bars tight enough to make sure that the pothole doesn't knock you off your line - but use your elbows as a spring to let the bike hit the pothole and you stay in control.

Another problem we have is that when snow gets pushed onto roads and shoulders and
parking lots, dirt and pebbles get moved with it. With so much snow, there has been little place to put it so the plows have left snow and dirt and rocks right where we're going to be riding in a month. When the snow melts the crap stays.

Three or four days ago, I came down a tree lined road and actually seemed to have a low hanging branch clip my cars mirror. It didn't do any damage, but it made me realize that it was going to be worse for motorcyclists. There are down trees down all over - from the snow snapping off limbs. The conditions are weaking branches, and the water and the snow on those branches are causing them to snap in half or snap off completely. When I'm on my bike I don't want to clip a tree with my shoulder, and I certainly don't want to be riding over them when they are in the road. If you come across branches in the road, take a firm grip of the handlebars, leaving just enough movement to let them move a bit with what they hit the obstacle, come off the gas to stabilize the motorcycle and keep the back wheel from spinning or kicking up the tree. There are some that recommend giving some power when the front wheel hits a big obstacle to shift weight to the back wheel, but I think that if the bike will make it over the obstacle, and its something like a tree that can shoot up and move, possibly in front of someone you are riding with or kickup into you or your back wheel/chain/belt, I would try to hit the tree with the bike stable, with you going straight, and off the throttle and off the brake.

If you've ever worked a plow, you realize its hard to know where the street ends and where grass or dirt starts. We put up poles in parking lots to try to stop the plows from destroying concrete flower beds, and to save the plows and the trucks from getting a big jolt from running the plow into a fire hydrant hidden by the snow. But we can't put these poles all up and down the countries side roads. As a result, plows, and the drive wheels of plows and other cars and trucks, have been turning up the sides of country roads all winter. Everywhere you turn, they've put dirt and sand and rocks onto the roadway.

It's going to be treacherous out there - ride safe-er.

New Pro's..

I've ridden since as long as I can remember - Honda's and Kow's as a kid. And been big enough to give a grizzly a decent fight for almost as long. So goin from the sabbatical that many of us take to have a family and kids to riding a big Harley eight years ago was pretty easy for me.

This year, I learned that it doesn't come as easy for some. I took a course to learn what I was doing, and to get my license. My friend JG, who learned with me took the course as well. My brother Aron got run through the course exercises by me, and then took the course with my friend Chris.

There are a lot of factors that need to be taken into account when you judge how fast you move up from learning to a big bike. JG bought his uncles Heritage Softail and did fine - he's a natural and 6'1 and 260. Even when the Heritage gave him a hard time, and the Screamin Eagle Ultra's that followed got tough to handle, his combination of experience, natural ability, training and the ability to muscle it got him through.

Brother Aron learned to ride for the first time ever on his Dyna. I rode it home for him. More than a few people pick up a bike from Lombardi Harley Davidson, on Staten Island in New York City and have a hard time learning to ride AND negotiate New York City traffic all at the same time. They tell stories about VRods that have gone out with an inexperienced rider aboard and come back a couple hours later on a flatbed. Aron listened, he took to it well, he's 6'3" and 220 and between strength, ability and the class, got through a couple of learning years and now is an excellent rider, and still on the same trusty Dyna. Maybe one of the important things is that he never really made a move without listening to what I had to say, or one of our other experienced friends. For example, I told him that the class was not optional, it was required, particularly if he were not gonna get on a pretty big bike right from the start.

This year however, I've learned that I think that someone always need to have an experience rider to ask, and listen to, before makin big moves.

Let's take Ed. Ed's a big guy, about 45 and he saw all of us riding and went up and bought a Road King. There's about 20 of us now - everyone typically has a good combination of skill, experience or a "Rabbi". This was Ed's first bike. Ever. No class. No listening to better bikers. So far, I've been out with Ed twice. He yells at me and JG for riding too fast when we're riding on a nice country road 5 or 7 mph over the limit. It's so bad that mini-vans get between us. At a SI HOG meeting, he put the bike down during a 5 MPH altercation with a bus. He's full of excuses. The bike has a shake at 50-55 mph. He thinks SI HOG and all the rest of us ride too fast. I rode the bike - it's fine. This guy, new to riding should never have learned to ride on a 700+lb bike. He had size - but doesn't have the natural ability to get on a big bike - he needed to learn skills on something easier to handle, and build up his confidence as well. Of course, he should take the motorcycle course. Two probably. He needs to listen to people rather than once he made it to the corner, think he had it all covered. I believe he's gonna get hurt. Hopefully, it won't be bad and he'll get better and learn. By the way, he passed his NY State license test which will show you how useless the tests are at judging real ability!

Similarly, my friend, lets call her Claire, I got great respect for. She is over 60 and has ridden bitch for years. She's great - when she rode on back with me, you never even knew she was there, except for the arm around you somewhere. She decided, with some push from friends, that she was going to learn to ride. She bought a Rebel, took the course, and she's been out doing some pretty serious mileage for someone just starting. She's doin great. So we were talking about a new bike. She's not the most mechanically or bike inclined. For example, she likes the way the Victory's feel but thought that 100 CI would be too much power - she was going to buy a Victory and pay someone to put a smaller motor in.

The problem is, Claire made it to the corner on her Rebel and now thinks "I'm a Pro." Anyone who's been riding for some time knows she has joined the great fraternity of people who ride, but is just beginning to really learn. She's much better than she was when she started so she thinks she has it mastered. No more need to speak to anyone else - she rides, now. But there is a tremendous amount of learning that goes on in the first four or five years of riding, that can only be accomplished by putting miles under your belt. I recommended she look at Dyna's or go to a custom guy (she's got a few bucks) and buy a bobber, like a Sucker Punch
Sally. She decided she was going to surprise us all and went to the local custom builder I recommended on her own, and told him how well she's doing. I've spoken to him since and it's not his issue - she told him she could hand the Custom Fat Boy he sold her. Why not she reasoned, she can put her feed down on the floor. Now god bless, I hope she can handle it, but I think the first time this 62 year old, 130lb grandma has to walk this 650 lb bike (post post edit - my bro is correct a FB is at least 700lbs) across an intersection or a parking lot at 4 mph, or has to stop quickly, or has to muscle it around someone, she is going to put the bike down. If she has to stop quickly, I'm nervous she's gonna lock up the rear on this heavy bike and high side it. I don't think there is any way she is going to walk this bike backwards up any kind of hill to park it.

Riding is a combination of a few things. You gotta have a bit of cohones to ride. You can't be afraid, which I think is Ed's big problem. You need to have some natural ability. My mom could never learn to drive a stick and a motorcycle would be a no sell. And you might not ever know who'll get it and who won't. I think the best example of this is that my middle brother bought a Honda cruiser, a 650lb Road King clone, about the same time Ed got his Road King. He also didn't get training, but he had way more natural ability and has been cracking many of the real good learn to ride books. While Ed is still struggling, and dropping the bike next to NYC Transit Authority Buses, my brother Jeff is riding two up with his wife, his daughter and his son and in my eyes doing quite well. He seems to always have control of the bike and can keep up with a pack quite well.

You need to get training, and be willing to learn. And you have to account for your size. A big person, that has some motorcycle in their blood can handle learning on a bigger bike because if you stop suddenly and put your foot down on gravel, or a slippery white line, you can grab the bike if its leaned over a bit, even if its starting on its way down. And you can stay in control of the bike through an emergency better.

I realize that the trend is for folks to want to ride big fancy bikes. But I think that people need to pay attention to friends with experience, what's the saying, "You Don't Know What You Don't Know". And as a rule of thumb, I think if you can't back the bike you are riding up a medium sized hill, the bike is too big for you. If you're riding an Ultra and can't get it to budge without the motor rockin - you should be riding a Dyna with bags on it. If you're riding a Deluxe and can't get it to move well forward or backward, then you should be riding a bobber or a FatBob. Just because big fancy bikes are out there and you fancy them doesn't mean that you should. The down side is not 'oops, did I scratch that', it could be serious injury. The same way if a small person can't see out to find all the sides of a Ford Expedition, maybe a Explorer is a better choice - just because Harley makes a Fat Boy and an Ultra Classic doesn't mean it's the safe bike for everyone to ride or to ride. Or to ride right now, with your present level of experience..