MILWAUKEE — Much of the country is covered in snow and ice, but that didn’t stop Harley-Davidson from announcing eight new motorcycles it’s building for the 2022 model year.
The big takeaway: Baggers rule. The nation’s largest motorcycle maker will make sport-touring versions of its popular Street Glide and Road Glide touring bikes, as well as its new Low Rider cruiser.
“We stand for the timeless pursuit of adventure and freedom for the soul,” Harley-Davidson Chief Executive Jochen Zeitz said during the company’s first model launch of the year. “Today, our mission has never felt more relevant.”
As COVID continues to wreak havoc on the world, Harley is hoping to build on the momentum it started to build last year after introducing its first adventure touring bike, the Pan America, and a modernized version of its bestselling Sportster. For 2022, it revs up the power adding 117-cubic-inch Milwaukee-Eight V-twins to all of its new bikes while continuing a trend it started long ago: looking at the road ahead to attract new buyers while glancing in the rear view for styling cues from its past.
Road Glide ST and Street Glide ST
The new ST versions of Harley’s popular touring bikes are throwbacks to some of their race bikes from the 1920s. Capitalizing on the company’s recent successes at MotoAmerica’s King of the Baggers, the Road Glide ST is a race bike masquerading as a tourer. It has a solo seat, a slightly shorter fender, standard-length saddlebag and aerodynamic shark nose fairing with triple splitstream venting to prevent head bobbling as riders careen across the open road.
The Street Glide ST is a hot rod bagger that combines comfort with performance, including a splitstream vent on its classic batwing fairing and low-profile windshield, tank console and engine guards. Both bikes are available in classic black paint with matching controls, powertrain and exhaust. Matching the mood is a matte dark bronze finish on the cast aluminum wheels and tank graphics. For riders who like a more car-like paint, gunship gray is one of two color options.
While the sport performance on both bikes comes courtesy of the torque-y Milwaukee Eight, the comfort comes from emulsion-technology rear shock absorbers, 49mm forks with linear damping, linked Brembo brakes that include ABS and the usual high-end touring accoutrements: electronic cruise control, a color touchscreen infotainment system and a pair of fairing-mount speakers.
Low Rider S and Low Rider ST
Harley-Davidson spends a lot of time cruising custom shows looking for trends, and what they spotted most recently was a penchant among some Southern California builders to modify their bikes with bigger engines, upgraded suspension and saddlebags — thus the Low Rider S and ST.
The Low Rider S is a cruiser for riders with a need for speed inspired by West Coast style. For 2022, the Milwaukee-Eight 114 engine has been replaced with a more powerful Milwaukee-Eight 117, and the tank console instrumentation has been moved closer to the rider’s line of sight with a new handlebar-mounted speedometer.
Designed as a lightweight and more nimble bagger, the Low Riders S has a deep solo seat, mid-mount foot controls and color-matched speed screen fairing. While the powertrain, front end and exhaust are blacked out, the cast-aluminum wheels are matte dark bronze.
The Low Rider ST plays off the tall bike movement pioneered by California builders. The saddlebags sit high to avoid scraping the pavement when carving canyons, and so do the handlebars, for an experience that feels like the rider is on, rather than in, the bike. The solo seat, however, is deep — to hold riders in place under hard acceleraton. And when he — or, increasingly, she — gets back from a road trip, the saddlebags can be removed in seconds to return the bike to the streamlined cruiser it’s based upon.
Aestheticaly, one of the Low Rider ST’s most striking features is the '80s-style fairing with side ducts straddling the headlight. Fortunately for push-it-to-the-limit riders who are prone to head buffeting, the fairing adds modern performance with triple splitstream vents.
CVO Road Glide, Road Glide Limited, Street Glide and Tri Glide
The most premium offering from what is already a premium brand, Harley-Davidson’s Custom Vehicle Operations or CVO models have always represented the best of the best in Harley style, comfort and performance. For 2022, Harley is offering four limited-production, super-premium CVOs with all the technology trimmings and exclusive colors courtesy of Harley’s partner in custom paint work: Gunslinger.
The goal for the 2022 CVO model was to inject more color and custom paint techniques into their offerings, so this year’s exclusive colors are bright, bold and high contrast, many of them with two-tone schemes and pearl effects.
The 2022 CVO Road Glide, Road Glide Limited, Street Glide and Tri Glide all come with cornering enhanced safety technoloiges, including linked and antilock brakes, traction control, torque slip control, vehicle hold control and tire pressure monitoring. Adaptive LED headlamps that project light into corners based on the bike’s lean angle, a premium Rockford Fosgate audio system and a Bluetooth helmet headset that can connect with up to 16 riders as far as five miles away also come standard.
The CVO Street Glide is a “super-premium hot rod bagger” available with three new paint options, including the exclusive hightail yellow pearl/black hole with lightning silver tone. The CVO Road Glide touring bike, with its shark nose fairing, is also available in three paint colors, including the exclusive wicked orange.
The CVO Road Glide Limited is a luxury tourer upgraded with comfort-oriented, high-end touches, including heated seats and grips, as well as colors that include Dante’s red with a sunglo fade flame pattern. Rounding out the CVO offerings is the three-wheeled Tri Glide, also available in dante’s red.