Harley-Davidson’s Strategic Move To Environmental Sustainability: “LiveWire” Project

Dailycsr.com – 01 July 2015 – Emanuela Piccoli reports about the green approach taken by the company of Harley Davidson. The motor company of Harley-Davidson needs little introduction for it is no doubt among the “most renowned brands” of America which leaves its brand mark in its “throaty rumble of Harley Davidson’s motorcycles”.
 
The path of success of the said company has been carved with the help of hundred and ten years of tradition which successfully gathered “a faithful customer base”. The brand of Harley-Davidson has become a method, among the customers, to distinguish themselves as “tradition lovers”. Therefore, there is always a chance that this kind of customer base can often “reject attempts of innovation”.
 
Nevertheless, trudging through such reluctance, the company has worked for the last fifteen years to ensure “environmental sustainability” which does not compromise on the “customer’s dreams of personal freedom and to the motorcycling experience”. Consequently, the company has been taking “proactive steps” to favour “environmental sustainability”, like:

 
The manufacturing plant needs energy to run itself, which in turn emits the maximum quantity of greenhouse energy. Therefore, the company has made extensive efforts to reduce its green house emission by forty percent within a span of six years “from 2004 to 2010”. The company also has plans on hitting a figure of “less than 5% waste by 2017” which they want to bring down further to “less than 2 %” by the year of 2022.
 
Moreover, the company also took simple steps in attempt of reducing “energy consumption”, for which they diligently shut down all the equipments and turned off all the lights when they were not being used. In order to achieve this, the company “created a central lighting control system” whereby the “facility managers” were able to automatically programme lights to get switched off “during periods of no occupancy”.
 
Furthermore, the company has sponsored a project, namely “Renew the Ride”, whereby the stakeholders and the customers are invited to engage themselves “in some activities” like planting trees, or donating to “the Nature Conservancy”. When the company celebrated its “110^th anniversary”, the employees engaged themselves in planting hundred ten trees in a park that is situated in Milwaukee’s Menomonee Valley. In fact, they even plan on planting an outstanding number of “111000 trees” soon.
 
The attempts to decrease the emissions of CO₂ and other such harmful gases in order to simultaneously improve in efficiency would lead the “motorcycle manufacturers” in adapting and developing technologies that can fit into the products to shape “new and innovative” designs of motorcycles. As a result of the said attempt, the “biggest step” towards sustainability has been the launch of "LiveWire” in 2014, the first electric motorcycle of Harley-Davidson.
 
In order to materialise the project “LiveWire”, the electric motorcycles were brought to various cities of North America wherein consumers were offered rides, so that they could generate useful feedbacks. In fact, the said project’s next stoppage would soon be in Europe. Consequently, the retail-availability of the electric motorcycle product will be dependent on the inputs provided by the customers of the test rides. The “livewire” project is an attempt to adapt “an entirely new business model” which would not disappoint the old ones and its supporting customer base. 






References:
http://www.gl4b.org/2015/02/harley-davidsons-green-approach.html