Harley Servi-Car Fans and Restorers

Adding a  vintage Harley Davidson parts section to Parts For Motorcycles, I got sidetracked looking into the history of the Harley Davidson Servi-Car.

A site dedicated to the Harley 45 Flathead engine has a section on the Servi-Car including history, pricing, pictures and more. The section head note bemoans the unheralded status of the Servi-Car in Harley Davidson history and points out that if not for the Servi-Car, the Flathead 45 would not have been Harley’s longest-running production engine. The Harley Davidson website currently lists the introduction of the Servi-Car as a 1932 milestone event and notes that in 1964 the Servi-Car became the first Harley model to be equipped with an electric starter.

The original brochure from the 1932 introduction of the Servi-Car markets it to car dealerships for use in picking up and delivering customers’ cars. The Servi-Car came with a tow bar for this purpose. The idea was that a motorcycle-based vehicle was cheaper to buy, operate, and maintain and did not require an extra hand to follow a service tech picking up or returning a car to a customer.

Police forces were the other major purchasers of Servi-Cars, which are commonly associated with their usefulness for parking meter duty.  The box on the back allowed officers to carry more on the trikes than motorcycle-mounted police could carry on their bikes.

On a Police Motorcycles site I noticed the custom modification in the picture at left. That Servi-Car has a metal tube frame piece wrapped all the way from the driver’s feet around the back of the box. Perhaps the police maintenance department got tired of repairing smashed rear wheel fenders, or maybe they were trying to keep pedestrians’ feet out from under the wheels. In one of the pictures, the trike is decorated for Christmas and has garland wrapped around those side fender bars, so at least they served some purpose.

Police Servi-Cars had a siren, but since none had an electric starter until 1964, the siren could not run off a battery. The solution was an air horn powered by a rear tire in much the same way that bicycle light generators ran, but these do not generate electricity, just air flow through the horn. This is a prized collectible piece for restorers of these vintage machines. The one in the photo at right recently sold on eBay for $767.