[Jeff Higgins]

Ken, you have a couple of your facts wrong. The first collaboration between Harley and Porsche during the early '80's was a water-cooled V4. Think Yamaha Venture Royale; H-D beat them to it by several years. Two prototypes survive under lock and key with H-D. In the end, they chose not to manufacture it and instead put all of their efforts into the Evo. There were a lot of reasons for that decision. Time and H-D's subsequent success have proven it was a good decision.

Porsche had absolutely nothing to do with the Evo. Ever. In any capacity. Nor with the Sportster, piston squirters notwithstanding. These were in use long before Porsche started using them, by the way. They were in somewhat common use by the time H-D adopted them. They did not seek Porsche's input on them.

The only other colaboration between H-D and Porsche has been the V-Rod. As others have pointed out, Porsche is still primarily an engineering firm. They do cars on the side. You would be amazed at the products they have had a hand in designing, from engines in several makes of Japanese cars to kitchen appliances. Any manufacturer contracting with Porsche and taking advantage of their engineering expertise is not necessarily innept because of that. Many companies will farm out engineering work on new products to avoid staffing up during the development phase, only to let all those engineers go once the product hits the market.

There are Harleys out there that get ridden, by the way. I have a couple of them. One is a '76 Sportster that I have owned since '79. I lost track of the miles on it over a decade ago, with several changes of speedos and what not. I lost track at somewhere over 150,000 miles. I'm on my fourth top end job, but the bottom end is original, never rebuilt. It leaks less oil than my 911, which is not a leaker by any stretch. My other bike is a 2000 Road King. I have just shy of 75,000 absolutely trouble-free miles on it. My riding buddy has an '03 anniversary edition Heritage Softail with over 40,000 miles on it already. Granted, none of this is the norm (for any make or motorcycle) but there are those of us that roll up some serious miles on these things.