Dancing the Polka

I think I’m about ready to give up on Polaris. I’ve long been a fan of its motorcycle products – first Victory Motorcycles, then Indian Motorcycle – but that fandom has often been spiked with agony and frustration. 

Like the multi-year stretch when Victory produced seemingly nothing but variations on the Cross Country theme (just thinking of the Magnum still makes me angry). Or when it led everyone to believe it was going to make a supernaked and instead delivered a rebadged Scout.

If I’m being fair, a lot of Indian’s early missteps could be attributed to growing pains. The Chief Vintage, for example. Indian probably should have known that no one in 2014 actually wanted leather fringe and metal-studded seats. But that bike was part of the relaunched brand’s opening offering under Polaris. You can understand how the company might have made the mistake of listening to the wrong people before then. I mean, to this day, if you go to Sturgis or Daytona or the like and ask riders what they want you’ll get a surprising number of them asking for CB radio set-ups.

But those guys don’t actually buy new motorcycles. They ride the same FLHS they’ve had since 1988. So, if you had gone to them and asked what they expected a modern Indian to look like, they would have pointed to a Roadmaster from the ’50s and said: “Exactly that.” And then when you produced it for them they would have blinked politely, then carried on riding their Electra Glide.

No longer a newbie

More than a decade on, though, I feel Indian needs to be owning its mistakes. It needs to own the fact that it still doesn’t know what it is and what it wants to be, and that, as a result, it is doing head-smackingly stupid stuff like unceremoniously scrapping the FTR platform.

You may have missed that news. Indian didn’t bother to announce it. We only know about it thanks to the eagle eye of Motorcycle.com’s Dennis Chung. Digging through the footnotes of Polaris’ Q4 2024 earnings presentation he found this sentence: “The Company realized certain costs associated with the wind down of the FTR product line beginning in the fourth quarter of 2024.“

That’s it. As of this writing, the FTR is still being sold, according to Indian’s UK website, but as far as the brand’s parent company is concerned, the platform ceased to exist back in December. Chung theorizes that the implementation of Euro 5+ rules at the start of this year may have helped push the bike over the edge. Maybe. After all, it was always intended to be something that gained more traction in Europe than in Trumpistan. If that wasn’t happening, Polaris may have decided it wasn’t worth the effort to tweak the bike’s 1203cc liquid-cooled V-twin engine to get it through updated regulations.

In so doing, it is effectively turning its back on all the things the FTR platform could have been. We’ll almost certainly never get the Indian adventure bike that I’ve spent the last several years wishing for. Indian will no longer have a model that makes it really stand out from its American competition, nor will it have a platform that it could build upon to help it stand out from all the other competition.

Lack of a USP

This is problematic and it speaks to the issue I mentioned above. Indian doesn’t seem to know who it is or who it wants to be, and, as a result, consumers don’t either. In marketing speak, it lacks a USP, a “unique selling proposition.” Think about it: what sets Indian apart from its competitor(s)? What makes it unique?

Without the FTR, Indian has positioned itself as a brand that makes bikes that are marginally better than those made by Harley-Davidson – depending on your opinion – but which are usually more expensive and which lack the community, dealership network, aftermarket, and mystique of bikes made by Harley-Davidson.

The brand’s recent expansion of its liquid-cooled PowerPlus platform is a good move, but it’s housing those engines in bikes with styling that is clearly derivative of Harley styling. And the fact is – and has always been – that if people want a Harley, they’re going to buy a Harley. Additionally, at present, there are markedly fewer people like that. The MoCo has been struggling in recent years. In Q4 2024 it reported a net loss of more than $116 million.

Let’s tell Indian what to do

But let’s try to be fair here. If a brand isn’t succeeding to the extent that it would like to be, and it’s suffering an internal and external identity crisis, what’s the best thing for it to do? Scale back. Reduce what it’s doing until it hones in on what it’s really good at, what makes it unique, then start expanding out from there.

By dropping the FTR, maybe that’s what Indian is doing.

Meanwhile, exact sales figures are a closely guarded secret at Indian, but it has said that its Scout platform is its most popular and best-selling. So, start there. Aesthetically, Scouts are immensely superior to the modern Sportster line, and the 85 hp Scout Bobber Sixty costs roughly £3,000 less than the comparably powered Nightster.

Within that, I’d take a look at the Scout line-up and ask about certain bikes: do we really need to claim this as a separate model (eg, Sport Scout, Super Scout), or can it just be something that customers create with accessories? Modular platforms are all the rage, and make sense, but having too many bikes that are seemingly indistinguishable from one another, but for the presence of a piece of luggage, dilutes the brand and makes you look lazy.

Repeat this process across all your line-ups. Especially the Chief. Then, depending on sales, consider whether you can drop any other lines, like the air-cooled Chieftains. If you’ve got PowerPlus versions of the Chieftain, do you really need versions that are hotter and slower?

Once you’ve scaled everything back, for the love of God, sort out your dealer network. I mean, I don’t know how strong dealerships are in the United States, but in the UK only a tiny handful of the brand’s 16 dealerships are worth visiting. Many approach Indian with the same interest and attitude as one might when selling, say, a bike from Voge.

Most of all, break yourself from the default mindset of looking at what Harley is doing and thinking: “Ah, that’s what the people want.”

Wrong. That’s what Harley riders want. And the overwhelming majority of those riders are only ever going to buy Harleys. You will never, ever, ever beat Harley at its own game. Figure out how you’re truly different and be that.

In the meantime, however, I’m afraid you’ve pretty much lost me.