Listen, I know you’re probably sick to death of reading and hearing about tariffs. And I certainly don’t blame you; I’m right there with you. Unfortunately, though, they’re not done with us yet, and I’m not the kind of person who believes that burying our heads in the sand will ever do anything useful.
So instead, I’m going to tell you about them, because they are indeed going to hit motorcycles (and powersports in general) again. That clearly should be a matter of concern for us all, here in our cozy, crazy little preferred niche.
As you may or may not already know, Fridays are a very special time for news in general, broadly speaking. Why? Well, think about where your own head is at on a Friday afternoon. You’re probably already thinking about what you’re going to do Friday night, or maybe this weekend. Most people who work Monday through Friday are already mentally checked out on a Friday afternoon.
So, that’s when lots of folks like to try to quietly sneak bad news out the door.
That preamble is all to tell you that on Friday, August 15, 2025, the US Customs and Border Protection agency announced a new list of 407 specific items that will now be considered “as steel or aluminum derivative products.” On Tuesday, August 19, 2025, this list was formally added to the Federal Register, which is the official record of all such rule changes in the nation.
Among the 400-plus new items added to the list, motorcycles and their parts and accessories are specifically included. The new provision states that “all imported derivative iron or steel products that are classified in the following provisions of the Harmonized Tariff Schedule of the United States (HTSUS is the official acronym, but you could probably also call it HT-SUS if you’re feeling petty), including products admitted into a U.S. foreign trade zone under “privileged foreign status” as defined by 19 CFR 146.41, prior to 12:01 a.m. eastern daylight time on August 18, 2025, unless the derivative iron or steel product was processed in another country from steel articles that were melted and poured in the United States.”
It then goes on to list each of the new additions by code number, in the way that such documents frequently do. For our purposes, the number we’re interested in is 8714.10.00, which includes motorcycles, mopeds, and their parts and accessories.
Notably, not only was this news unceremoniously kicked out into the wild on a random Friday afternoon; it also gave those companies that deal in any of the items categorized under those 407 separate codes virtually no time to prepare themselves, since it would go into effect just four days later.
If you’re a company trying to map out compliance procedures for reporting, does four days sound good to you? To comply with HTSUS reporting procedures, makers and importers of items in these newly added categories must provide detailed descriptions of the steel and aluminum (or derivative) content included in the affected product categories. That’s on top of any other tariffs being assessed for non-steel or non-aluminum parts of those products.
Do you know of any motorcycles that don’t use either steel or aluminum? Usually, that ‘or’ is an ‘and.’
And not to send us all into a potential despair spiral, but there’s also a lot of noise about coming semiconductor tariffs as well. Remember semiconductors, the nice little computer chips that run pretty much everything in daily life, including and especially our smartphones and all the fancy rider aids present on most modern motorcycles and powersports equipment? Yeah, those. Those are next, though we don’t yet know to what extent they’ll (and consequently, we’ll) be hit.
Because make no mistake: It’ll be those of us who are buying the motorcycles who will literally pay the price. Not Honda. Not Harley. Us. We, the people.
The really, truly frustrating thing about all of this is, we’ve been here before. And recently, too. Remember 2018? After that initial announcement, the US and the EU engaged in a bit of back-and-forth over reciprocal tariffs for the next few years, continuing to kick the can down the road. In case your eyes already glazed over sometime before you were born while reading about all this, the expiration date on that can-kickage was March 31, 2025. A date which has now passed at the time of writing.
What’s not totally clear yet is whether this additional metals content reporting burden will result in tariffs that are added to the country-by-country ones, or how total tariffs will be calculated on affected goods. One customs broker told Bloomberg that the increasing complexity of these layers of overlapping tariffs make things more difficult for big companies, but next to impossible for smaller ones.
“I’m trying to think of a [customs] client that’s not impacted. These are American companies that employ American people that are being ambushed by their own government,” Shannon Bryant said.
Incidentally, adding insult to injury is the fact that these new tariffs apply to goods already in transit or in warehouses; not only to goods that arrive after the deadline. Previous tariffs adjustments were not levied this way. As of June 2025, the imported steel and aluminum tariffs were raised to 50 percent, but given the rate of change of tariffs this year alone, it may have changed between the time of writing and the time you’re reading this piece.
Again, I repeat something I’ve been asking pretty much since this started: If you’re any kind of company, big OR small, how do you plan? With this much uncertainty, it’s next to impossible.
Is that the real point of all this? To just make all the little guys throw their hands up in disgust and bow out, so only the biggest companies with the deepest pockets—in other words, those who can afford to hire an army of compliance specialists to hash this entire headache-inducing mess out—are left? And then, because smaller companies will inevitably fall by the wayside (or just bow out of the US market and remain in other markets instead), we the people who want to buy motorcycles (or whatever other thing is included in the ever-expanding tariffs database) will have fewer and fewer choices.
And they’ll be more and more expensive, which will suck if you’re a person who likes to be able to buy things. Like, say, motorcycles.
But What About Jobs?
As you may have noticed, here at RideApart, we’re concerned about workers (probably because we, too, are also workers). Generally speaking, we want good things for riders and workers; two categories that frequently overlap, as it happens.
Remember how I mentioned that we’d already done this particular song-and-dance back in 2018? The U.S. Federal Reserve Board of Governors analyzed data generated by that earlier experiment in tariffs, retaliatory tariffs by other countries, and their subsequent effects on the health of US manufacturing jobs.
And you know what they found? I’ll just quote the paper’s abstract directly here to keep it simple, since you’ve stuck with me this far. Thanks for that, by the way; I know it’s a painful topic, but it’s one we need to discuss.
“Despite being intended to boost manufacturing activity, we find U.S. industries more exposed to tariff increases experience relative reductions in employment, as a small positive effect from import protection is offset by larger negative effects from rising input costs and retaliatory tariffs. Higher tariffs are also associated with relative increases in producer prices due to rising input costs. Lastly, we document broader labor market impacts, as counties more exposed to rising tariffs exhibit relative increases in unemployment and declines in labor force participation.”
The TL;DR version: Generating increased value for shareholders doesn’t benefit either employees, job-seekers, or consumers who just want to buy a new motorcycle (or anything else, for that matter). And that’s where we’re at right now. If this was an amusement park map, we’d have a big red dot sitting on this piece with bold text that reads, “You Are Here.”
I’m not amused. Are you?