Style, tradition, and technology in this battle of the frame-mounted-fairing American touring motorcycles—the 2020 Indian Challenger Dark Horse vs. Harley-Davidson Road Glide Special.

For decades, Harley-Davidson sat atop the throne of American motorcycling virtually unchallenged. Not that many companies didn’t try to get a piece of the heavyweight motorcycle market, but no company has ever succeeded like The Motor Company in combining products customers want with a knockout backup of unbroken cultural experience that comes from surviving and often thriving since 1903. But when Indian Motorcycle was revived by Polaris and started producing all-new heavyweight V-twin cruisers and touring bikes for 2014, a century-old rivalry was reborn.

Indian came out swinging with its Thunder Stroke 111 air-cooled engine and H-D fired back with the pushrod, four-valve-per-cylinder Milwaukee-Eight. Now Indian provokes its competitor once more with the 2020 Challenger and its liquid-cooled, SOHC PowerPlus 108 engine, seeking to dethrone the Harley-Davidson Road Glide as the platform for performance-minded builders and change what it means to be an American bagger altogether. To seek answers, we pitted a 2020 Indian Challenger Dark Horse against the 2020 Harley-Davidson Road Glide Special. Any long-term challenger (ahem) to Harley-Davidson has to succeed on both the technical and cultural level. Consider that from 2000–2019 Harley-Davidson sold more than 1.9 million touring models, an average of roughly 96,000 units a year. Overcoming a foundation like this is Indian’s great battle, and also Harley-Davidson’s, as it is clearly competing against its own highly successful existing product with timeless design.

Although Harley-Davidson doesn’t break out sales by specific model, the baggers have been the real volume leaders in the touring line. It’s no surprise, because this gives you the comfort and convenience of a touring platform in a motorcycle that is more nimble and rideable. Touring heritage leads you to expect easy six-hour stints in the saddle, but bagger style and performance will have you pulling these bikes out of the garage for much shorter trips.

We intended to do both, with a couple of several-hundred-mile days and lots of local riding. Two separate “long” days were conducted, one with Road Test Editor Michael Gilbert, the other with Editor-in-Chief Mark Hoyer. But before any of that, we weighed the bikes on our scales, took them to our closed-course testing facility to gather performance data, and ran both bikes on our in-house Dynojet 250i rear-wheel dynamometer. Numbers logged, Gilbert and I hit the road to Angeles Crest Highway north of Los Angeles, known for its many turns, amazing mountain scenery, and fine blacktop. But you can’t get there from our Orange County office without slogging across 70 miles of some of the busiest roads in the country. A balanced test, in other words. So, after checking tire pressures and adjusting shock spring preloads (the Harley has a big knob, the Indian requires an included wrench), Gilbert and I left the office, sticking to side roads until we were out of town.

While overall profile and V-twin layout make initial riding impressions similar, one thing is plain: Launching from traffic lights, the Challenger consistently pulled ahead, despite its overly active traction control, which is too inhibiting even in the most permissive of three available ride modes (it can also be turned off). The Indian’s engine is just more lively and pulls stronger, longer, despite the two V-twins having similar bottom-end torque numbers. As we continued to make our way through town, both bikes maneuvered through traffic without producing excessive heat felt by the rider—each bike’s rear-cylinder-deactivation system coming into play at stops. Even with their size, these motorcycles are easily managed at low speed and surprisingly fun to ride from stop to stop thanks to the high torque numbers, but the Challenger carried itself better, feeling lighter than its 839-pound-wet weight suggests. “The Indian maneuvered better at slow speed,” 5-foot-7-inch Gilbert said. “I was more confident navigating tight traffic than I was on the 849-pound Harley.”

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