Continuing their glacially slow trickling of information, Harley-Davidson has sprinkled a couple more details to us about its upcoming Pan America motorcycle.
Expected now in late-2020, the Harley-Davidson is an American v-twin adventure-tourer, which the Bar & Shield brand hopes will attract new blood into its cult of two wheels.
At the core the machine, is a 60° liquid-cooled v-twin engine, which Harley-Davidson is giving some specs about at EICMA.
Confirming what we already knew, the Revolution Max engine in the Pan America will displace 1,250cc, but the rest of the information is a welcomed surprise.
Power is tipped as being “more than” 145 hp, while peak torque is set to be “more than” 90 lbs•ft. Neither of these figures are anything to sneeze at in the ADV category, though they do fall a little short of the marquee numbers from KTM and Ducati.
Still, the Harley-Davidson Pan America compares well to bikes like the BMW R1250GS (134hp / 105 lbs•ft), which is perhaps a more analogous motorcycle in terms of likely customers.
Of course, it will be interesting to see what the wet weight of the Pan America comes out to be, and then there are things like pricing, electronics, and other features to consider.
Looking at the bike at the EICMA show, some obvious attributes of the Pan America caught our eye. First up is the chassis design, which Harley-Davidson says, uses the engine as a stressed member.
However, Harley-Davidson’s engineers have done more than this, as the Pan America chassis is literally built off the cylinder heads of the engine, in a way that is very similar to what was done with the 1199/1299 Panigale from Ducati.
This generally requires the engine cases to be very robust, since flexing of the engine can have very bad effects on the motor’s internals, but yet this has to be balanced against the need to have a supple chassis to absorb bumps at lean.
As the people at Ducati can tell you, this is not an easy balance to make, though it does tend to produce a light motorcycle.
The next item of note is how very narrow Harley-Davidson has managed to make its adventure bike…except for the radiators and cooling system, which protrude from the machine in a similar fashion that was seen on the Rushmore motorcycles.
It is hard to gauge the width of the motorcycle because of this, since there is an obvious increase in the bike’s girth because of the cooling apparatus, but since its comes from such a narrow part of the bike, it could be deceiving.
Our eyes say that the low and wide radiators are going to be hazards when it comes to true dual-sport riding, but then again, one could say the same thing when they see the BMW R1250GS / Adventure, and the boxer-twin engine has certainly done nothing to stem the tsunami of sales that BMW Motorrad gets from its iconic ADV machine.
As you can imagine then, Harley-Davidson’s answer to out many questions on seem to breed more questions themselves. A year is a long time to wait to get our dirty motorcycle-loving mitts on this bike, and see what it is all about.
Source: Harley-Davidson
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