A Look At Harley-Davidson's Iconic Snowmobiles From The '70s

Harley-Davidson has a well-earned reputation as the producer of some of the roughest and toughest vehicles to roll on two wheels. Of course, that reputation has come about primarily from vehicles that ride on normal roads (and motocross tracks, in one case). But you don't have a brand stick around for so many decades without at least a little bit of experimentation, including both new kinds of vehicles and the kinds of surfaces they drive upon.

Case in point: during a brief period in the 1970s, Harley-Davidson actually dabbled with a form of transportation that it never had before and never has since then: snowmobiles. Due to a bit of an industrial shake-up, the brand that had previously been known exclusively for motorcycles suddenly found itself producing vehicles for snow transportation. Technically, it still fits the bill of a vehicle on two wheels, albeit with treads instead of traditional tires.

[Featured image by Michael Barera via Wikimedia Commons | Cropped and scaled | CC BY-SA 4.0] 

There's a bit of a convoluted history that led up to the creation of the Harley-Davidson snowmobiles, but it all leads back to a completely separate company called American Machine Foundry, or AMF for short. AMF acquired the Harley-Davidson brand in its entirety in 1969, but a few years before that, it had been designing and selling snowmobiles. The headliner of AMF's snowmobile line was the rather cutely named Ski-Daddler.

After the Harley-Davidson acquisition, AMF decided to go all-in on the popular established brand and rolled its snowmobile line into Harley-Davidson's manufacturing operations. The first Harley-Davidson-branded snowmobile was released in 1971. We should emphasize "branded," because they were technically the same Ski-Daddlers that AMF was already selling, just with some Harley branding slapped on the sides. The only technical difference was that Harley-Davidson-made single-stroke engines were added in; other than that, they were more or less the same inside and out. One of the television ads for these snowmobiles called it "a machine so right, only Harley-Davidson could make it" when Harley ultimately had very little to do with it.

At the height of production, Harley-Davidson was assembling snowmobiles at its Missouri factory alongside another of its non-bike offerings, golf carts. Unfortunately, this coexistence was short-lived, as, in 1975, all snowmobile production was discontinued. This allowed Harley to return mostly to its own devices until 1981, when chief shareholders bought the brand back out from under AMF.

While AMF was banking on the Harley brand to handle the heavy lifting of marketing the Ski-Daddler, the unfortunate fact of the matter was that the prospect was kind of flawed from the start. The main reason the Ski-Daddler wasn't doing very well even before the Harley acquisition was that it was lacking in power and performance compared to its contemporaries, not to mention various vital features like a gas gauge, a kill switch, and a storage compartment. If nothing else, the addition of Harley branding has made the snowmobile a nifty curiosity in the automotive world, with some surviving vehicles finding homes with motorcycle museums and collectors.