After all, motorcycle companies build specific adventure bikes, but one of the tag lines for the LiveWire is “a bolt of lightning that electrifies the urban grid.” Not exactly what you want to hear before an overlanding expedition. But the bikes in the show, which started shooting in September 2019, the same month the LiveWire hit dealerships, are not the exact same ones you’ll find if you walk into a Harley-Davidson shop today.

There’s no doubt that people are going to come away from the show wanting to try out a LiveWire for themselves, whether they’re bikers or not. Right now, they need all the promotion they can get Levatich is out (maybe voluntarily, maybe not), Jochen Zeitz, who was instrumental in the LiveWire project, is in, and the beleaguered company is trying to navigate the pandemic and the uncertain future of the motorcycle industry.

For Harley, they get promotion for their relatively new “super-premium halo product,” as former president and CEO Matt Levatich described it to InsideHook - one that will define the future of the company. For McGregor and Boorman, they get to be pioneers, taking not just electric motorcycles, but electric vehicles in general - the supposed future of personal transportation - where they’ve never gone before. There are clear reasons for giving BMW the boot this time in favor of the Harley-Davidson LiveWire. They whittled it down to an off-roader from BMW and KTM, and eventually went with the former company for both previous Long Way trips. If you’ve read the first book (which is a fantastic, and surprisingly candid, account) or watched the TV series, you know there was heated debate about which bikes would be best to ride for months across inhospitable terrain. There was Long Way Round in 2004, where they drove east from London to New York City, followed by Long Way Down in 2007, where they rode south from John o’ Groats, Scotland, to Cape Town.

I expected James to be tight-lipped about how they got the Long Way Up team to choose the electric Harley over, you know, every other motorcycle on the market, electric and gas alike.īut the thing is, this is the third round-the-world bike trip for McGregor and Boorman.

Ewan mcgregor motorcycle long way round