When you think of Harley-Davidson, you tend to think about loud, heavy motorcycles that, with exceptions, often feel a bit like they’re from another time. What you don’t think about is any kind of car-like trike, let alone one as bananas as the infamous Polaris Slingshot. However, there was a time when Harley-Davidson was so crazy it bought a company that made an ancestor to the Slingshot, and HD had every intention of slapping the Bar and Shield on it. Harley would eventually get its head on straight and rid itself of the TriHawk 304, but did the company make a mistake?
As I learned this summer, the Polaris Slingshot doesn’t make a ton of sense. It tries to be like a car, but it doesn’t have a roof, is missing a wheel, and doesn’t have a ton of storage. It also tries to be like a motorcycle, but it’s big, heavy, and you steer it with a steering wheel. You might think that’s the worst of both worlds, but the Slingshot has lots of fans, including myself. Sometimes, you just want something a bit stupid.
The Slingshot isn’t the first of its kind, though it is certainly the most popular. Other companies tried to produce different types of three-wheel vehicles before Polaris found a winning formula, and the Hawk Vehicles Trihawk 304 was among those hopefuls. I think it even looks like what a Polaris Slingshot would have likely been if conceived in the 1980s.
But why, why would America’s iconic brand of motorcycles bother with a car-like trike powered by a French engine? Sorry, did I not mention the French engine? OK, yeah. I’ll get to that.
Trikes Have History
While most people think of trikes today as vehicles like the Can-Am Spyder and the Polaris Slingshot, this basic concept dates back over a century.
Powered three-wheel vehicles have been around since the dawn of the automotive industry. I mean, the Benz Patent-Motorwagen was a trike. Morgan, a famed producer of trikes, put together its first trike in 1909. That vehicle featured a motorcycle engine up front between two wheels and a single wheel handled the rear end. Yep, the so-called “reverse trike” configuration is easily over a century old.
The best source for history on the TriHawk 304 seems to come from the enthusiasts still keeping them alive today. According to the Trihawk304.com website history page, the TriHawk trike was the brainchild of Lou Richards. Richards grew up in Seattle and then joined the Navy, where he worked on construction projects in the Philippines. In his life post-Navy, he’d go to school for industrial design, engineer a motorized skateboard, and later founded Formax, a company whose hamburger patty-forming machines had a near monopoly in the fast food industry.
What does a successful businessman and designer do with some of his riches? He decides to make his own sports car, of course. It’s a story we’ve heard so many times. After all, Tesla’s actual roots are in Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning wanting to take their own newfound riches to make their own ideal version of a sports car.
The TriHawk
Back in the 1980s, Richards wanted to make a high-performance sports car inspired by the Lotus Super 7. However, Richards, like the many businessmen before and after him, soon found out that you can’t just build a production car and send it off into the market. That car would have to meet stringent regulations. The solution back then was the same as it is today: Just chop off a wheel, then it’ll be classified as a motorcycle. Now, you don’t have to worry about crash testing, occupant protection, or tough emissions standards.
Now, Richards wasn’t a car designer, so he brought on people who knew what they were doing. His chassis designer was famed racecar builder Bob McKee and his designer was David Stollery, known for the second-generation Toyota Celica. Early engineering and development took place in Mokena, Illinois, but the project would eventually move to California, getting the name Hawk Vehicles along the way.
Reportedly, McKee was responsible for the vehicle’s frame and firewall while Stollery took care of the design of the TriHawk’s fiberglass body. Then they ran into a problem. Small outfits like Hawk Vehicles didn’t have the resources to make their own engines, so they had to reach out to car manufacturers to see if they could buy engines. The team figured they needed a flat-four, so that led them to the boxer gurus at Subaru. Unfortunately, Subaru wasn’t interested, so they had to keep looking.
Eventually, Hawk Vehicles landed at Citroën, and the French automaker was willing to sell Hawk Vehicles the entire front-wheel-drive powertrain from the GSA, which gave the TriHawk an air-cooled 1,299cc flat four good for 64 HP. Reportedly, Citroën also offered engineering assistance to the project, including some time in a wind tunnel.
Series production of the TriHawk began in 1983 and somehow, it seemed the team pulled it off. The trike weighed just 1,350 pounds wet, so the 64 HP was more than plenty. Auto journalist Michael Jordan reviewed the Trihawk in the June 1983 issue of Car and Driver magazine, and wrote, “You just stab the throttle and steer the wheel; it’s kind of like a Formula Ford, only better.”
According to a brochure I found online, the TriHawk held 11 gallons of fuel, shifted with a five-speed transaxle, and rode on 13-inch wheels. The company also said that the TriHawk was fed from a Weber carb and that owners would be able to oil changes every 5,000 miles, but oil filter changes every 10,000 miles. And while the TriHawk wasn’t crash-tested, Hawk Vehicles touted the uninterrupted perimeter frame, chrome-moly rollbar, racing fuel cell, and three-point harnesses as safety features. In the brochure, the elimination of the fourth wheel wasn’t said to be because of regulations, but to optimize the vehicle’s power-to-weight ratio, increase aero, and to reduce frictional drag.
Reportedly, Hawk Vehicles also put racing drivers behind the wheels of TriHawks to show off just how well the TriHawk vehicles drove and handled. In 1983, the price of a TriHawk 304 was $14,888, or $47,997 today. Yes, when you account for inflation, the TriHawk was substantially more expensive than a Polaris Slingshot is today. Perhaps that might be why, over the TriHawk’s short run of only three model years starting in 1983, only about 96 examples left the factory.
Milwaukee Gets Involved, Then Bails
There’s an additional twist to this story. Before the TriHawk bowed out of production, it briefly fell under the ownership of Harley-Davidson. In 1984, Richards’ health was declining and he wanted a new caretaker for his sports car brand. Harley-Davidson was still in its period of throwing everything at the wall and seeing what stuck, so it bought in.
If that sounds weird, it was. Normally, situations like this would be attributed to American Machine and Foundry’s ownership of Harley-Davidson. From 1969 to 1981, AMF dragged Harley-Davidson in a bunch of different directions in a desperate hope that something would make money. It was during this time when Harley-Davidson made snowmobiles, golf carts, and partnered up with Porsche in an effort to make what could have been a V4 or V6 masterpiece of a motorcycle. Harley even filled out a range of small-bore bikes through Italian firm Aermacchi.
However, the purchase of the TriHawk project happened after Harley-Davidson got itself away from AMF. Yet, clearly some of that AMF crazy spirit was still inside of Harley because it bought Hawk Vehicles, intending to bring production to Milwaukee. There, Harley would make the TriHawk a truly mass-market vehicle. Brochures and documentation were even printed up that proudly called the company, now named TriHawk Inc., a subsidiary of Harley-Davidson. Jeffrey L. Bleustein ran the TriHawk division for the year that Harley owned the company.
Unfortunately for the project, Harley-Davidson did not follow through on putting the TriHawk into mass production. Instead, the company continued to produce and sell a handful of TriHawks out of the Hawk Vehicles’ original California facilities before dumping the whole project in 1985, resigning the TriHawk to the dustbin of history. Its designer, David Stollery, didn’t want to give up on a trike future and went on to design the FireAero. I do wonder what would have happened if Harley had gone further than just buying the company and selling some units. Would the TriHawk have gotten Harley power up front?
It’s unclear why Harley gave up on the TriHawk, however, it could have been because of the climate the Bar and Shield was operating in. The 1980s were a tumultuous time for Harley. It finally shook off AMF, got the Evolution engine into production, and attempted to quash imported motorcycles through President Reagan’s infamous Memorandum on Heavyweight Motorcycle Imports, which imposed heavy tariffs on large imported bikes. Harley perhaps had too much on its plate to worry about the French-engined trike in its portfolio.
The good news is that while there are only about 96 or so of these out there, their enthusiastic owners have ensured many examples have existed into the modern day. They sometimes show up for sale at various auction sites, but they’re a case where rare does not automatically equal valuable. One went up for bidding on Cars & Bids this year and the auction ended at $10,000 without a winner. Oof.
Still, if you can find one of these, you’ll own a truly weird piece of history. It’s an ancestor to vehicles like the Slingshot, a wasted effort by Harley-Davidson, and one guy’s dream all in one. At the very least, it looks like it’s a ball of fun to drive, and that’s what matters most.
I’m sure there’s more information out there about the TriHawk, but I hit a dead end. Sadly, one critical resource I use for research, the Internet Archive, has been hit by two data breaches and is currently not working. If you know any additional information about Harley’s relationship with the TriHawk, email me at mercedes@theautopian.com.
Nothing better to drive out to find a Tracker to take you into Zone 7.
An actual designer did that thing?! I always thought it was some guy with a dream, but no vision who just threw a body over the components. At that price, I’m surprised they sold as many as they did.
The Trihawk appears to have snaps to attach a roof and side panels, I’d argue that feature alone is enough to make it vastly superior to the Slingshot or Vanderhall
And they made Golf and Utility Carts. 2 Stroke or Electric
All I recall is someone in my neighborhood had one back then; it was red.
I always remember thinking of it and the GM Lean Machine in the same thought, mostly b/c these sorts of things were so crazily unusual back then and seemed to signal to me “the future” in that early ’80s sorta way. Like how the Ford Taurus and Probe would in the latter part of the decade.
It’s a very visible example of the kinds of expeditions that caused Harley-Davidson to become extremely conservative starting in 1988 and lean all in on their 1940s heritage. It really makes you wonder what would’ve happened had they continued trying to push away from that.