LiveWire:5 Years In
and 1%
of Plan

The finding, and the trail that led to it

Five years in, one percent of plan. Here is how a percentage led me to the contracts.

Start with what they said. 13 December 2021, the investor call announcing the merger, filed with the SEC as a Form 425. Harley-Davidson’s CFO, on the record, for 2026: “approximately 100,000 units,” revenue “from $35 million today to almost $1.8 billion,” and “profitable on both an EBITDA and cash flow basis.” That plan carried a $2.31 billion valuation.

It is 2026. Trailing twelve months: 923 motorcycles. $31.3 million of revenue. A parent guiding a $70–80 million loss. Units at 0.9% of plan, revenue at 1.7%, and the top line below where it stood the day the plan was announced. Call it one percent. I have watched a lot of product plans miss. I have never watched one miss by the whole plan.

That is the finding. The rest of this is about why, and whether the structure under the company lets anyone fix it. The trail started somewhere much smaller.

I saw a number online: LiveWire, 386% unit growth in Q2. Accurate. Also 55 motorcycles to 267, and fifty-five motorcycles is not a base, it is a parking lot. Normally that is worth a shrug. What turned it into two weeks of reading was where it led:

• Open the 10-Q for the denominator and you find a write-down eating 87% of the gross loss.
• Ask why anyone writes down brand-new inventory and you land in a manufacturing agreement priced cost-plus.
• Read that agreement and there is a second one, with KYMCO, signed the same day.
• Read the services contract next to them and Harley can terminate on ninety days’ notice, no reason required.
• At the bottom of the pile: a loan with its conversion feature removed and a lien over basically everything put in its place. $76.8M, due December 2027.

None of that is in the earnings release. None of it has been reported. It lives in the exhibits, the attachments nobody opens, including most of the people paid to cover the stock.

The trail, in five documents

The order I read them in. Each one sent me to the next.

1. Q2 2026 earnings release · 8-K, 23 Jul 2026 →

   386%. 55 motorcycles to 267. I went looking for the retail number the company itself calls its share measure and found it grew 171%, not 386%. Same table, different line.
2. Form 10-Q · 5 Aug 2026 · segment note →

   The write-down. About 87% of the quarter’s gross loss was a net realisable value adjustment on brand-new S2s. You don’t write down new inventory unless it is carried above what it will fetch. The filing doesn’t say why. So: who set the price?
3. Contract Manufacturing Agreement · H-D · 26 Sep 2022 →

   Cost-plus. Harley builds, LiveWire buys into its own inventory at Harley’s cost plus a mark-up. Miss the volume and there is a provision for the parts Harley already bought: $6.1M of it, once, in 2023. And there is a second agreement, signed the same day, with KYMCO.
4. Master Services Agreement · H-D · 23 Dec 2024 · §8.3(c), §8.4 →

   Ninety days. Everyone quotes the “forty percent” clause. The paragraph under it lets either party terminate for convenience on ninety days’ notice. No trigger required.
5. Amended & Restated Term Loan · H-D · Nov 2025 · §1(c)(iii), §1(d) →

   The seat change. Conversion feature gone. Security interest over substantially all assets in. First $10.0M of any ATM proceeds goes to Harley. $76.8M due 15 December 2027, compounding to about $85M. This was signed before the quarter above was even reported.

The paperwork, on one screen

Four instruments. Read the cards and you can skip the rest; every section below is the arithmetic they imply.

• Why LiveWire. It is the only pure-play electric motorcycle company in the U.S. that has to file with the SEC. Everyone else hands you the numbers they feel like handing you. Here the press release can be checked against the arithmetic.
• Who this is for. Suppliers deciding whether to tool up. Investors sizing a position. Dealers weighing a franchise. Riders wondering if the warranty outlives the company.
• What I did. Read all 260 filings for both companies, the agreements and the exhibits nobody quotes. Every figure links to its source. Corrections are published, not made quietly.
• Who I am. Ex-Harley product manager (Touring, CVO, Trike), ex-Honda planning lead on the Grom, now an independent expert witness. No position in anything named here. Full bio and method in §14.

386% more motorcycles, and the loss did not move

Both numbers come from the same table, same segment, same two periods. No outside denominator, nothing to argue about. It is the cleanest comparison in the filing, which is probably why nobody used it.

The other number: 76% market share

The same post carried a second number: 76% U.S. market share. Of what? Three annual reports later, nobody has written it down.

The company’s own filing names the number that measures share, and it isn’t the one in the post. Q2 2026 10-Q:

Retail is the share measure, by LiveWire’s own definition. The 10-Q’s table:

The 386% is 94% wholesale: bikes shipped to dealers, an invoice, not a customer. The number the company itself calls the measure of demand grew 171%. Anyone who has worked a month-end close at an OEM knows the difference between those two numbers, and knows which one goes in the post.

To be fair on the point that matters: retail beat wholesale in the quarter (293 vs 267) and the half (412 vs 358). Dealer stock went down. This was not channel stuffing; the demand is real at its scale. But 386% and 171% are different claims about different things, and only one is about riders.

One day, two filings

The 386% quarter went out on 23 July 2026, 8-K, Item 2.02. That was the good news. The bad news arrived the same afternoon, by letter.

Same day, the New York Stock Exchange told LiveWire it was out of compliance with Section 802.01C: thirty straight trading days under $1.00. That letter was disclosed six days later, in a separate 8-K under Item 3.01.

What was promised, on the record, in December 2021

The joint Harley-Davidson / AEA-Bridges call announcing the deal, filed as a Form 425. I use their numbers as the benchmark because they picked them. Nobody made them say 100,000.

The business is smaller than the day it was sold

Revenue was $35.8M in 2021, the year the deal was announced. Trailing twelve months to 30 June 2026: $31.3M. The high-water mark was 2022, at $46.8M.

Five years. An accumulated deficit of $337.4M. And the top line is below where it started, against a plan that called for 51x.

Seven years walking down the price ladder

Every LiveWire has been cheaper than the one before it. The overhead never followed the price down.

Read it as a portfolio and the shape is a barbell with nothing in the middle. Premium performance at one end, a $3,600-class minimoto at the other, Dust in the quadrant where price runs ahead of the bike. No LiveWire between $5,000 and $11,000, which is where two-wheel volume lives and exactly where Can-Am parked the Pulse and the Origin.

The lineup, drawn to type

Manufacturer photographs, linked to source. Alta’s site has been dark since 2018; the Redshift image is archived press material.

Image credits: LiveWire ONE, S2 Del Mar and S4 Honcho photographs © LiveWire Group, Inc., from the company's own product pages; Dust Model_1 © Dust Moto; Alta Redshift © Alta Motors (archived press image). Honda Grom photographs © American Honda, product and lifestyle imagery. Reproduced here for editorial comment; confirm rights before any commercial distribution.

S2, strippedLiveWire platform render

The cost-plus product. Every one built for LiveWire is bought at Harley’s cost plus a mark-up.

H-D LiveWire, 2019Dealer floor, launch year

The $29,799 bike that started the ladder. Same motorcycle became the $21,999 ONE two years later.

DocumentedA product that appears in no filing except one exhibit

The Amended and Restated Contract Manufacturing Agreement filed 22 May 2026 is with KYMCO, not Harley. Its recitals name the covered product: “LiveWire’s Parisian maxi-scooter.” MOU dated 17 October 2024, joint design and manufacture of an EV maxi-scooter.

“Parisian” and “maxi-scooter” appear nowhere else in any LiveWire filing. Not a 10-K, not a 10-Q, not a release. A fourth vehicle programme, under contract for nearly two years, exists in the public record only in the preamble of an exhibit. I know what a fourth platform costs a 150-person company. Nobody has been told it exists.

The same agreement puts LiveWire on the hook for a Minimum Annual Volume Commitment per product, enforced by an Order Deficit Impact Fee: miss the number and you take the shortfall or pay for it anyway. Take-or-pay. It sits alongside the per-product minimums owed to Harley from calendar 2027. Exhibit A, the products, volumes and prices, is redacted in full:

Clipped from the filingEx. 10.2 to Form 8-K · 22 May 2026 · Exhibit A, p.1Open on EDGAR →

The entire products schedule. Twenty-eight cells, every one of them [***]. Four rows by seven columns: anyone in supply chain will recognise a pricing and volume grid. It is exactly what an investor would need to know, and it is the one thing the filing withholds.

Every pivot moved the price. None of them moved the overhead.

Two things fall out. First, the S2 now sells at roughly the realised average the segment reports: $11,999 sticker against $11,483 recognised. That is the simplest explanation for the write-downs: a cost-plus transfer price sitting above where the market clears the bike. The filing doesn’t itemise the cost, so that is an inference, labelled as one in §06.

Anyone who has run a transfer-price negotiation between an OEM and its own sub knows how that meeting goes.

Second, the Honcho is not another rung. It is a different business: $4,999, built by KYMCO, sold into the minimoto segment. It shares a badge with the S2 and not much else. Dust points the same way. Put those next to STACYC, the only segment that makes money, and the portfolio describes a retreat from the premium on-road thesis that justified $2.31 billion.

Left to right, a company that vacated the top of its own map. The ONE, once $29,799, is now $13,999 and the most expensive thing the brand sells. Can-Am, which bought the Alta patents, brackets the S2 from below on both rows.

And the Honcho does not land in open space. It lands inside the e-moto band, on top of Sur-Ron and Talaria, $1,400 above the gasoline Grom that outsells everything in the category. The one uncontested position on the map is $6,000–$10,000, where nobody, LiveWire included, builds anything.

Alta Motors, and the first time this happened

Before LiveWire was public, Harley-Davidson’s decision to stop funding had already decided the fate of a different American electric motorcycle company.

The irony is worth one line. The Alta patents went to BRP, which now competes in the category. The Silicon Valley R&D centre Harley built instead became the LiveWire business whose R&D has since fallen from $54.1M to $23.9M a year.

Eight years and roughly $394M of cumulative losses later, the assets Harley declined to buy are sold by a competitor, and the ones it built are not named in its own five-year plan.

Alta MotorsBrisbane, California · 2010–2018

The first American electric motorcycle company Harley invested in, then dropped.

Alta Redshift SMBrisbane, California · archived press image © Alta Motors

Alta Redshift SM. Harley bought a piece of this company, then pulled out. The patents are BRP’s now.

Alta Motors, Brisbane CARedshift on the bench · archived image

Brisbane, California. The operation Harley didn’t buy, then built its own version of down the road.

Where the money actually goes

Q2 2026, Electric Motorcycles segment, per bike: $13,655 of revenue in. $23,172 cost of goods out. $58,049 of selling, admin and engineering on top. Read those three again. Then try explaining them to a dealer principal who just floored six.

The S4 Honcho meets a category ceiling

The S4 Honcho is priced: $4,999 Trail, $5,499 Street. Built by KYMCO, not Harley. Different plant, different country, different contract, and a different set of minimums.

On the 23 July call, management said production had started and first units would reach dealers later in the summer. So the Honcho contributed nothing to the 386% quarter. Everything below is forward arithmetic on a product that has not yet sold at scale.

S4 HonchoLiveWire lifestyle image

Wood-grain plastics and knobbies. A minimoto, priced $1,400 above the one that owns the segment.

KYMCO assembly, TaiwanManufacturer image · not the Honcho line specifically

KYMCO, Taiwan. Product built here now carries a minimum annual volume and a deficit fee. Take-or-pay.

S4 Honcho, show boothLiveWire event display · 2026

Hats, koozies, a rug, a hunting-season photo wall. This is the Grom’s customer, at $1,400 above the Grom’s price.

Electric Motorcycles segment opex runs about $62M a year. For Honcho gross profit alone to cover it you need somewhere between 46,000 units at a 31% margin (the 2021 long-term target) and 103,000 at 14%.

FIG 09Breakeven volume against the segment that existsU.S. units per year, one scale

LiveWire actual Category benchmark Breakeven range required

The segment, in motionHonda lifestyle image

Two Groms, downtown, two-up on a $3,599 sticker. This is the customer the Honcho is competing for.

Grom, $3,599Honda lifestyle image

About 10,000 a year, my estimate from planning the bike. The category leader, and very nearly the category.

The Kawasaki Z125 Pro, priced within $200 of the Grom, doesn’t meaningfully compete. The segment isn’t “small motorcycles.” The segment is the Grom, and everything else is rounding. When I ran planning on that bike, the competitive set was one line on the sheet. A new entrant doesn’t get to assume the leader’s volume; it takes what the challengers take.

The Honcho is a change in revenue mix, not a change in solvency.

At an optimistic 3,000 units and 31% margin, the Honcho throws off about $4M of gross profit against $62M of opex. Six percent of the overhead. It arrives 39% above the category leader’s price, with no nameplate, 105 dealers, and range and charging friction a $3,599 gasoline Grom doesn’t have.

Note what hasn’t changed. After cutting cost per unit 47%, headcount 18% and R&D from $54.1M to $23.9M, the volume needed to break even is still roughly the 2021 plan number. The cost-out was real. It didn’t move the breakeven.

How many Honchos would keep LiveWire afloat?

“Afloat” is a cash question. LiveWire burned $29.9M in H1 2026, call it $60M a year. That is the hole the Honcho would have to fill alone.

Contribution per unit is the variable. At a recognised wholesale price near $4,300, a KYMCO-built bike plausibly returns $500–$1,500 a unit after landed cost, freight, warranty and dealer support. Planner’s numbers, pencilled before finance sees the BOM.

Mid-case: 50,000–120,000 Honchos a year, centring near 65,000. Seventy times the company’s entire trailing-twelve-month volume.

619 Honchos per dealer, per year. Twelve a week, every week, at every store. I have run dealer allocations. Twelve a week is not an allocation. It is a Grom-shaped fantasy.

A typical powersports store retails a few hundred motorcycles a year across every brand it carries; the ones that do a thousand are famous. And 65,000 units at $4,300 is $280M of revenue, nine times the company’s current total.

Run it the other way. At a realistic 3,000 units the Honcho contributes about $2.7M against $60M of burn: 4.5% of the hole.

The likely case: roughly 2,000 units

Set the tables aside and take the realistic number. A category leader doing about 10,000 a year with Honda’s network behind it; a new nameplate at a 39% premium; 105 dealers; an electric powertrain in a segment that buys on price. Roughly 2,000 Honchos globally in the first full year is defensible. It may be generous.

At that volume the Honcho doesn’t just fail to help. It costs money three ways, and two of them are in writing.

Dust doesn’t change this on any near timetable. Assets bought May 2026; the Hightail still in validation in Bend, Oregon. Meaningful volume is 2027 at the earliest, and off-road electric is not a volume category at $10,950. The consolation is symmetrical: consideration is up to $14.75M but mostly contingent and in stock, so a programme that never scales never pays out.

Dust, riddenDust Moto image

The acquired programme. Real bike, real riders, small category.

Hightail, production specDust Moto spec sheet

42 hp, 75 mph, 4.4 kWh, under 100 kg. Volume in 2027 at the earliest.

What the paperwork actually says

Two contract manufacturing agreements, same day, 26 September 2022: Harley-Davidson Motor Company Group and Kwang Yang Motor Co. Services from Harley run under a separate Master Services Agreement, restated 23 December 2024, seven-year term to end-2031.

Here is what its termination article says. The clip is below the table.

And the KYMCO agreement, which is the heavier of the two

The KYMCO agreement, dated 19 May 2026, is longer, longer-dated and more tightly bound than the Harley deal:

A correction to earlier revisions of this brief

Earlier drafts treated the 40% clause as the thing capping how much production could move to KYMCO. Reading it properly, that overstates it.

Section 8.4 lets either party terminate the entire MSA for convenience on ninety days’ notice. Harley doesn’t need the 40% trigger. It needs no reason at all, and convenience is faster than the 180-day route.

Clipped from the filingEx. 10.1 to Form 8-K · 26 Dec 2024 · Master Services Agreement, p.11 of 33Open on EDGAR →

Both clauses, one page. 8.3(c) is “forty percent” spelled out in words, which is why a search for “40%” misses it. 8.4 is the one that matters.

What the 40% clause is evidence of is intent. In 2022, and again in December 2024, both sides contemplated LiveWire moving manufacturing away from Harley, and Harley wanted a trigger tied to it. Worth recording. Not a cap.

And “production” is not a defined term. It appears once, lowercase, in 8.3(c). A termination right turns on a word the contract never defines.

My read, as industry interpretation: in Harley’s planning vernacular “production” means motorcycles built at the plant. Unit output, not revenue, not platforms. I used the word that way for years. On that reading the test is a unit-count ratio and STACYC falls outside it. Natural reading of an undefined term; still an interpretation.

Cash, and a date that cannot be moved

Cash burned in H1 2026: $29.9M. Runway per the 10-Q: about twelve months, call it August 2027. The Harley term loan, $76.8M secured on substantially all assets, matures 15 December 2027.

And what would it actually take to pay it back?

• Six quarters from 30 June 2026 to 15 December 2027. Burn is about $15M a quarter.
• The debt grows while you wait: no interest payable until maturity, accreting at SOFR + 4.00%, compounded semi-annually. The December 2027 payoff is closer to $85M.
• Burn plus payoff less cash on hand: about $122M that has to come from somewhere.

135,000 Honchos in fourteen months. Twenty-one per dealer, per week.

That is 13.5 times the Grom’s entire annual U.S. volume, in a bit over a year, from a company that sold 923 bikes in the last twelve months through 105 dealers. And the Honcho isn’t shipping in volume yet.

The at-the-market programme is the only other lever, and it isn’t one. The Term Loan sends the first $10.0M of net ATM proceeds to Harley as prepayment. LiveWire has paid $800K of that. Until $10M has gone to the lender, the ATM raises no usable cash. An ATM that pays the bank first. The clause:

The Q3 2026 financing 8-K

LiveWire dealer floor, 2026

Clipped from the filingEx. 10.1 to Form 10-Q · 10 Nov 2025 · Amended & Restated Term Loan, p.4 (DocuSign scan)Open on EDGAR →

A DocuSign scan, not a clean draft. The operative sentence starts “Borrower shall prepay” and ends at $10,000,000.

Past that, $48.4M is undrawn, under 40% of the gap even if fully placed. Placing it means issuing roughly $48M of stock into a 44-million-share float at $1.16, which isn’t a financing so much as a description of what happens to the share price.

What a financial resolution could look like

The repositioning, in dated instruments

Read alone, each is housekeeping. Read in order, they describe one thing.

In fifteen months, Harley-Davidson went from parent to secured creditor. It didn’t leave the table. It changed seats.

Every step is a filed instrument with a date on it. What the sequence means is interpretation; that it happened is not. An equity backstop became a secured claim, the borrower got fenced in, and the only equity lever it has left was made to pay the lender first.

Clipped from the filingEx. 10.1 to Form 10-Q · 10 Nov 2025 · Amended & Restated Term Loan, p.4, §1(d)Open on EDGAR →

Equipment, fixtures, inventory, accounts, contract rights, IP, goodwill, “all products and proceeds of the foregoing.” That is what “substantially all assets” looks like written out.

One fact drives the whole set. Harley holds the secured note and ~78% of the equity. In a normal workout a creditor negotiates with shareholders; here they are the same party. The only outside interest is the ~22% public float.

The incentive that probably sets the timing

Every target in “Back to the Bricks” is an HDMC target: EBITDA above $350M by 2027, 25–30% gross margin, opex under 20% of sales. LiveWire’s $70–80M annual drag isn’t in those metrics but it is in the consolidated results. Anything that deconsolidates LiveWire improves the reported picture at the cost of crystallising the loss. That tension is the most plausible driver of when, whatever the what.

What to watch, in order of information value

The Harley-Davidson read-through

LiveWire is a $247M company with a 44-million-share float. Harley is a $27.81 stock that actually trades. The bigger question for most readers is what LiveWire is doing to the parent’s numbers, and what changes if it stops.

Harley consolidates LiveWire as one of three segments. LiveWire’s losses run straight through H-D’s income statement, reduced only by the slice attributed to minority holders.

On the half year: LiveWire’s H1 net loss was $36.3M, $1.5M of it to minorities. Strip out the remainder and H-D’s attributable net income goes from $104.6M to $139.4M, a third higher, and H1 diluted EPS from $0.97 to about $1.33. Annualised, LiveWire is worth on the order of $0.65 of Harley EPS.

Which reframes the question for anyone holding HOG rather than LVWR. Harley is absorbing roughly $70M a year, about $0.65 of EPS, from a segment absent from its own plan and whose funding it has publicly capped. The strategic decision is made and disclosed. The accounting hasn’t caught up. When it does, the reported numbers move: one way on earnings, possibly the other on a one-time charge.

Ground Truth No. 02 takes up the parent: Harley’s carrying value of LiveWire, the write-off arithmetic, and whether Back to the Bricks is reachable on HDMC alone.

Outlook: my judgment Inferred

The commercial question is settled, and arithmetic settled it. Clearing December 2027 on product needs roughly 135,000 Honchos in fourteen months, in a segment whose best seller does 10,000 a year with Honda behind it. No ramp closes that. The Honcho may be a good motorcycle; it cannot be a solvency event.

At the realistic figure, about 2,000 units, the position is worse than neutral: 3% of annual burn covered, a probable deficit fee against a minimum it can’t meet, and Harley pushed below the 40% floor. Nothing under roughly 40,000 units changes a conclusion here.

So the financial question is the only live one, and one party decides it. Harley holds the note, the lien, 78% of the equity, the board, the covenants, the manufacturing, the dealer financing, the building, and a services agreement it can cancel on ninety days’ notice. There is no counterparty with leverage. The public float has a ticker symbol and a very good view.

Timing points to the first half of 2027. Twelve months of runway lands around August 2027; the note matures in December. And the FY2026 10-K arrives around February 2027, when an auditor has to take a going-concern view with nine months of cash against $85M coming due.

Base case: extension or restructuring on Harley’s terms. Cheapest path, keeps every option open, no write-off headline, and Harley controls both sides of the table. The tell is an 8-K amending the credit agreement.

What would surprise me is outside capital. The lien and the covenants make LiveWire close to unfundable by anyone willing to rank behind Harley, which is the practical meaning of the risk factor about funding “from sources other than the Company.”

A complication nobody has priced. Four vehicle programmes in flight: S2, Honcho, Dust, and the undisclosed Parisian. Minimum-volume commitments to two manufacturers. A $23.9M R&D budget and about 150 people. I have watched OEMs with ten times the headcount struggle to carry four platforms.

What the stock did, and what insiders did with it

Four years of share price with every reported insider trade laid over it. No names. The pattern is the point.

• The line goes from about $10 to $1.16.
• The circles only ever appear on the way up. Spikes, never troughs.
• One kind of mark never appears at all: a purchase.

All Forms 3, 4, 4/A and 5 filed under CIK 0001898795, 26 September 2022 to 3 September 2026, parsed from the SEC’s XML: 134 ownership filings, 141 reported transactions, 16 officers and directors. Two amended transactions counted once. Value is shares × reported price.

In four years as a public company, no officer or director has bought a single share on the open market. Not at $10, not at $12.29, not at $0.65. Common enough, people paid in stock rarely buy more, but it is the one signal that costs nothing to send and has never been sent.

Both clusters follow the same event: a retail-driven spike with nothing from the business behind it.

• May–June 2025. The stock went from $1.01 to $4.50 in a week on 220 million shares. Over the next fortnight seven insiders sold $2.07M at $5.50 to $8.60.
• July 2026. From $0.66 to an intraday $3.57 on 233 million shares; the 386% release was the spark. In the three days after, four insiders sold $776K at $1.98 to $2.38. Same week the company disclosed the NYSE letter it had held since release day.

What was promised. What was delivered.

Every forecast below was made by LiveWire or Harley in a filed document, and every result is from a filing too. Where guidance was revised mid-year, both numbers are shown and the verdict says which one was hit.

Forecasts: LW EV Holdings Form 425 (14 Dec 2021); HOG 10-K FY2021, FY2022, FY2023, FY2024, FY2025; HOG 10-Qs of 10 May 2023, 9 Aug 2023, 6 May 2024, 6 Nov 2024, 6 May 2025, 6 Aug 2025, 5 Nov 2025; LVWR 8-Ks of 5 Feb 2025, 1 May 2025, 30 Jul 2025 and 4 Nov 2025. Results: LVWR 10-K FY2022–FY2025 unit tables (wholesale plus company retail, the company’s own “Electric Motorcycle unit sales” measure); LiveWire segment operating loss as reported by Harley-Davidson in its 10-Ks; LVWR 10-Q Q2 2026. 2025 cash use is derived from the filed cash balances ($64.4M to $82.8M) net of the $75M loan draw and is approximate.

Where the forecast actually lives

People ask where LiveWire publishes its unit guidance. Mostly, it doesn’t. LiveWire’s own 10-K has never carried a forward volume number. It is in Harley’s annual report instead: one paragraph in the MD&A Outlook, wedged between the HDMC margin guide and the HDFS guide.

LiveWire repeats it in the bullets of its earnings 8-K. Four annual reports, clipped below. Watch the number: 750–2,000, then 1,000–1,500, then 1,000–1,500 again, then gone.

FIG 15The volume guidance, as filedFour annual reports · two earnings releases

2023 · 750–2,000 unitsDelivered 660

Clipped from the filingHarley-Davidson 10-K FY2022 · filed 24 Feb 2023 · MD&A, OutlookOpen on EDGAR →

2024 · 1,000–1,500 unitsDelivered 612

Clipped from the filingHarley-Davidson 10-K FY2023 · filed 23 Feb 2024 · MD&A, OutlookOpen on EDGAR →

2025 · 1,000–1,500 unitsDelivered 653

Clipped from the filingHarley-Davidson 10-K FY2024 · filed 26 Feb 2025 · MD&A, OutlookOpen on EDGAR →

2026 · no unit numberLoss only

Clipped from the filingHarley-Davidson 10-K FY2025 · filed 26 Feb 2026 · MD&A, OutlookOpen on EDGAR →

LiveWire, in its own voiceSame numbers

Clipped from the filingLiveWire 8-K · 2 Feb 2023 · Ex. 99.1, “2023 Financial Outlook”Open on EDGAR →

Withdrawn three months later1 May 2025 8-K

Clipped from the filingLiveWire 8-K · 5 Feb 2025 · Ex. 99.1, “2025 Financial Outlook”Open on EDGAR →

DocumentedSix documents, one sentence each, and the sentence gets shorter every year. By FY2025 the parent guides the loss and nothing else. On 1 May 2025 LiveWire pulled the unit range itself: uncertainty “limits our ability to provide updated units projections with the necessary level of precision and reliability, we have chosen to withdraw our previously issued units guidance at this time.” A company that stops telling you how many it will sell has usually stopped knowing.

The people did the work. The paperwork didn’t.

Most of this brief is contracts and a loan. Before the final word, what the people inside LiveWire actually pulled off, each one filed, each one real, each one followed by why it still isn’t enough. That second line is the whole story: not a lineup problem the engineers can fix, not a demand problem the dealers can fix. A structure problem, and structure lives in exhibits.

LiveWire, Milwaukee

STACYC

All figures from LVWR Form 10-K FY2025 and Form 10-Q Q2 2026, and the Q2 2026 earnings release; per-unit figures are arithmetic on filed numbers as shown in §06. The 2021 plan of record is from the Form 425 of 14 December 2021.

So here is the fair summary, and I would say it to any of them to their face. This team inherited a $2.31 billion valuation, a 100,000-unit promise and a cost structure built for a company ten times its size. They cut, sourced, re-priced, rebuilt a network and launched two platforms.

What they don’t have is a lineup with volume in it. What they can’t get is a set of contracts that let them win if they found one. You cannot execute your way out of cost-plus, take-or-pay, a services contract Harley can end on ninety days’ notice, and a secured note held by your own parent. Those were signed by people above them, some before most of them arrived.

Every document, linked

Each row opens the filing on EDGAR. Nothing here rests on a secondary source or somebody else’s summary.

Non-SEC sources: manufacturer pricing pages, linked at the point of use. No MIC figure is reproduced; where segment volume appears, it is my own estimate and says so.

Who wrote this, and how

Corrections log

Each of these was asserted in an earlier revision and corrected on reading the document. The log is published because a method is only worth what its error-handling is worth.