4 ms·

This always bugged me about Harley Davidson, because only around 70 to 80% of the parts are made in America. Most of Harley-Davidson's sold across the globe are

This always bugged me about Harley Davidson, because only around 70 to 80% of the parts are made in America. Most of Harley-Davidson's sold across the globe are made outside of America. Yet.. it's "Made in America" when in fact it's just assembled here. Always felt that was dishonest but IIRC they use a special loophole

bugbuddy 2y ago
The easy fix for this is to use a nutrition style labeling for origin. Just list the origin of each part. Problem solved.
- readyman 2y ago
  Easy? Maybe it seems that way if you know nothing whatsoever about American politics.
kbenson 2y ago
Almost no vehicle manufacturers make all their own parts, and vetting the source of every part to make sure also were all made in the states would just mean that some parts are unavailable. Also, its important to think of the other side of the made in the U.S.A. label which was to bring foreign manufacturers to the states for our market. Think Honda and Toyota. Getting the majority of the parts made here and the assembly here was a major benefit to those areas it affected compared to having that all happen in Japan. If you required 100% or close to it, would that have even happened? There are both positives and negatives to the current system, but in a global market I'm not sure it's sane to expect complex products with many parts to have a single national origin.
- KennyBlanken 2y ago
  Nobody is "expecting complex products with many parts to have a single origin." And normally I'd agree that Made In the USA is diet xenophobia, but Harley specifically, and heavily, lean into being "made in the USA" - as do their owners, and certain politicians who introduced tariffs (and caused retaliatory tariffs in the EU. Which Harley sidestepped by, drumroll please...opening assembly plants in southeast Asia!) Some engine components, some drivetrain components, all the electricals, all the suspension, and wheels are all made outside the US. That leaves the frame/body panels and some engine/drivetrain components as the only stuff sourced in the US - and yes, the engine/bike assembled in the US.
  - kbenson 2y ago
    > And normally I'd agree that Made In the USA is diet xenophobia, but Harley specifically, and heavily, lean into being "made in the USA" - as do their owners And so do Toyota and Honda for the vehicles that are made here, but even those are only a certain percentage, which allows them to say so. It's the same playing field, so I don't really think it matters. And honestly, I think most people if pressed care that it's assembled here by people here and that at least most the parts are from here, especially major parts. Beyond that it's just corporate branding and PR, and as long as they're all playing by the same rules and people generally understand and agree with it (which I think they do, and if they don't I think if they were pressed to think about it they would come to understand fairly quickly and think it's mostly okay if presented all the facts), so I have a hard time getting thinking it's all that big of a deal, as long as the majority of U.S. sold bikes are made in the U.S. and bikes sold elsewhere are made wherever. I do think it's all a bit stupid and a big PITA, but they all do it so they're all stupid and weird in the same way. Note: I'm not really sure why people decided to downvote you instead of engage, it's not like I think your POV on HD is invalid, just different than how I see it, so I gave you an upvote to counteract it a little. Maybe someone else can do the same. Seemed a shame to have a valid position not given any discussion.
- mindslight 2y ago
  To do this right you'd have to set up something like a VAT style system where each vendor in the tree specifies how much of the value of their product was produced in the US. Otherwise the obvious incentive is to import the largest subassemblies you can, with perfunctory final assembly in the US. Then again this would give foreign made products a running start (Amazon Chineseum that's 3x the cost of Aliexpress - 70% made in the US!), and it would probably be only that last 20-30% that actually resulted in domestic blue collar jobs which are the ostensible desire of such labeling.
  - londons_explore 2y ago
    This is done, but it's pretty easy to game by pricing parts 'unusually'. Especially when it is a subsidary of your own company producing the parts overseas, you can decide if ECU control circuit boards are worth $1 or $1000. And you would be able to produce paperwork and find experts who would value it at either, or anywhere in the middle. (since there is no market price for highly specialist circuit boards which can't be sold to anyone else).
    - mindslight 2y ago
      I'd say there's a hard floor for the cost of board components plus the labor/management of assembling them. But yes I can imagine fraud being generally rampant. It does make you think though, now that we've got such computation and communication capabilities - if creating and publishing such kinds of reports became mandatory, such that individual consumers could benefit from a lot more analysis on what they're buying rather than the mere final price.
    - gamblor956 2y ago
      No, you can't. This is governed by transfer pricing laws. Tax authorities can and will assess penalties for behavior like that.
      - londons_explore 2y ago
        > For tax purposes such transactions are treated by reference to the profit that would have arisen if the transactions had been carried out under comparable conditions by independent parties. [UK tax authority] And thats where the fact engine ECU's are useless to anyone else comes into it - their market value can be near nil.
damontal 2y ago
I guess it depends on what you mean by “made”
karaterobot 2y ago
If 4 out of 5 parts were made in the country, and the bike was assembled in the country, it does not bother me to claim the bike is made in the USA. For a complex assembly with hundreds or thousand of pieces, there's some wiggle room, and 70-80% is close enough that I wouldn't feel lied to. On the other hand, if I bought a wooden spoon, or even a saucepan, and it said "Made in USA" on it, and I found out that it wasn't 100% made in the USA from materials produced here, I'd feel differently because those are relatively simple products (compared to a motorcycle) where every piece much more crucially defines the whole. I don't know what the cutoff is, though: a product doesn't have to be 100% USA-made components, but 51% would be too little. Ballpark, 70%+ would be the over-under where I'd start to feel misled.
- rootsudo 2y ago
  Does it count as made in USA if said HD motorcycle has software, made, in, India? How about designers not in USA?
  - jjtheblunt 2y ago
    That reminds me of Apple's "Designed in California" on some products. (My 2016 Mac Pro also said Made in the USA, as it was in Texas.)
  - karaterobot 2y ago
    On a motorcycle? Not to me. Maybe to others. I would interpret the "made" in "made in USA" as referring specifically to the manufacturing of the physical bike.
jrexilius 2y ago
I've run into this problem trying to build hardware in the US[1]. There are certain components where it's just not possible to find them in the US. But that is as a start-up.. as a company the size of Harley, they certainly could design and commision them here if they wanted. [1] https://www.anomie.tech/articles/making-hardware-in-the-US/ https://www.anomie.tech/articles/making-hardware-in-the-US/
coolhand2120 2y ago
What part do you consider to be critical enough in the act of making you call it “made here”? Virtually nothing is wholly made in any one place. Even poetry relies on the paper and pencil industry.
geor9e 2y ago
Are any brands better? Looks like the only car squeaking over 80% is Tesla on this big table https://kogod.american.edu/autoindex/2023 https://kogod.american.edu/autoindex/2023 It's very difficult being a Mechanical Engineer trying to source American parts. America just doesn't have the infrastructure for a lot of things you need. And even when it does, often you find China can do it better, faster, and cheaper. I can get a box of CNC machined parts for $10 each via 2 day DHL for a $200 shipping fee. An America shop would take just as long and charge me a couple hundred bucks for just one. And try finding some niche bearing on mcmaster-carr if you filter by USA, nearly the entire catalog disappears. A global supply chain is just the reality of mass producing machines these days. And imports can only have one Country of Origin so we can't be too detailed on the labels.

bugbuddy 2y ago

The easy fix for this is to use a nutrition style labeling for origin. Just list the origin of each part. Problem solved.

readyman 2y ago
Easy? Maybe it seems that way if you know nothing whatsoever about American politics.

kbenson 2y ago

Almost no vehicle manufacturers make all their own parts, and vetting the source of every part to make sure also were all made in the states would just mean that some parts are unavailable. Also, its important to think of the other side of the made in the U.S.A. label which was to bring foreign manufacturers to the states for our market. Think Honda and Toyota. Getting the majority of the parts made here and the assembly here was a major benefit to those areas it affected compared to having that all happen in Japan. If you required 100% or close to it, would that have even happened? There are both positives and negatives to the current system, but in a global market I'm not sure it's sane to expect complex products with many parts to have a single national origin.

KennyBlanken 2y ago
Nobody is "expecting complex products with many parts to have a single origin." And normally I'd agree that Made In the USA is diet xenophobia, but Harley specifically, and heavily, lean into being "made in the USA" - as do their owners, and certain politicians who introduced tariffs (and caused retaliatory tariffs in the EU. Which Harley sidestepped by, drumroll please...opening assembly plants in southeast Asia!) Some engine components, some drivetrain components, all the electricals, all the suspension, and wheels are all made outside the US. That leaves the frame/body panels and some engine/drivetrain components as the only stuff sourced in the US - and yes, the engine/bike assembled in the US.
- kbenson 2y ago
  > And normally I'd agree that Made In the USA is diet xenophobia, but Harley specifically, and heavily, lean into being "made in the USA" - as do their owners And so do Toyota and Honda for the vehicles that are made here, but even those are only a certain percentage, which allows them to say so. It's the same playing field, so I don't really think it matters. And honestly, I think most people if pressed care that it's assembled here by people here and that at least most the parts are from here, especially major parts. Beyond that it's just corporate branding and PR, and as long as they're all playing by the same rules and people generally understand and agree with it (which I think they do, and if they don't I think if they were pressed to think about it they would come to understand fairly quickly and think it's mostly okay if presented all the facts), so I have a hard time getting thinking it's all that big of a deal, as long as the majority of U.S. sold bikes are made in the U.S. and bikes sold elsewhere are made wherever. I do think it's all a bit stupid and a big PITA, but they all do it so they're all stupid and weird in the same way. Note: I'm not really sure why people decided to downvote you instead of engage, it's not like I think your POV on HD is invalid, just different than how I see it, so I gave you an upvote to counteract it a little. Maybe someone else can do the same. Seemed a shame to have a valid position not given any discussion.
mindslight 2y ago
To do this right you'd have to set up something like a VAT style system where each vendor in the tree specifies how much of the value of their product was produced in the US. Otherwise the obvious incentive is to import the largest subassemblies you can, with perfunctory final assembly in the US. Then again this would give foreign made products a running start (Amazon Chineseum that's 3x the cost of Aliexpress - 70% made in the US!), and it would probably be only that last 20-30% that actually resulted in domestic blue collar jobs which are the ostensible desire of such labeling.
- londons_explore 2y ago
  This is done, but it's pretty easy to game by pricing parts 'unusually'. Especially when it is a subsidary of your own company producing the parts overseas, you can decide if ECU control circuit boards are worth $1 or $1000. And you would be able to produce paperwork and find experts who would value it at either, or anywhere in the middle. (since there is no market price for highly specialist circuit boards which can't be sold to anyone else).
  - mindslight 2y ago
    I'd say there's a hard floor for the cost of board components plus the labor/management of assembling them. But yes I can imagine fraud being generally rampant. It does make you think though, now that we've got such computation and communication capabilities - if creating and publishing such kinds of reports became mandatory, such that individual consumers could benefit from a lot more analysis on what they're buying rather than the mere final price.
  - gamblor956 2y ago
    No, you can't. This is governed by transfer pricing laws. Tax authorities can and will assess penalties for behavior like that.
    - londons_explore 2y ago
      > For tax purposes such transactions are treated by reference to the profit that would have arisen if the transactions had been carried out under comparable conditions by independent parties. [UK tax authority] And thats where the fact engine ECU's are useless to anyone else comes into it - their market value can be near nil.

damontal 2y ago

I guess it depends on what you mean by “made”

karaterobot 2y ago

If 4 out of 5 parts were made in the country, and the bike was assembled in the country, it does not bother me to claim the bike is made in the USA. For a complex assembly with hundreds or thousand of pieces, there's some wiggle room, and 70-80% is close enough that I wouldn't feel lied to. On the other hand, if I bought a wooden spoon, or even a saucepan, and it said "Made in USA" on it, and I found out that it wasn't 100% made in the USA from materials produced here, I'd feel differently because those are relatively simple products (compared to a motorcycle) where every piece much more crucially defines the whole. I don't know what the cutoff is, though: a product doesn't have to be 100% USA-made components, but 51% would be too little. Ballpark, 70%+ would be the over-under where I'd start to feel misled.

rootsudo 2y ago
Does it count as made in USA if said HD motorcycle has software, made, in, India? How about designers not in USA?
- jjtheblunt 2y ago
  That reminds me of Apple's "Designed in California" on some products. (My 2016 Mac Pro also said Made in the USA, as it was in Texas.)
- karaterobot 2y ago
  On a motorcycle? Not to me. Maybe to others. I would interpret the "made" in "made in USA" as referring specifically to the manufacturing of the physical bike.

jrexilius 2y ago

I've run into this problem trying to build hardware in the US[1]. There are certain components where it's just not possible to find them in the US. But that is as a start-up.. as a company the size of Harley, they certainly could design and commision them here if they wanted. [1] https://www.anomie.tech/articles/making-hardware-in-the-US/ https://www.anomie.tech/articles/making-hardware-in-the-US/

coolhand2120 2y ago

What part do you consider to be critical enough in the act of making you call it “made here”? Virtually nothing is wholly made in any one place. Even poetry relies on the paper and pencil industry.

geor9e 2y ago

Are any brands better? Looks like the only car squeaking over 80% is Tesla on this big table https://kogod.american.edu/autoindex/2023 https://kogod.american.edu/autoindex/2023 It's very difficult being a Mechanical Engineer trying to source American parts. America just doesn't have the infrastructure for a lot of things you need. And even when it does, often you find China can do it better, faster, and cheaper. I can get a box of CNC machined parts for $10 each via 2 day DHL for a $200 shipping fee. An America shop would take just as long and charge me a couple hundred bucks for just one. And try finding some niche bearing on mcmaster-carr if you filter by USA, nearly the entire catalog disappears. A global supply chain is just the reality of mass producing machines these days. And imports can only have one Country of Origin so we can't be too detailed on the labels.