Totally Not An EVO Sportster: SWM Stormbreaker 1200

Do you miss the days when you could walk into a Harley-Davidson dealership and buy yourself a nice, shiny EVO Sportster? Well those days are back again, except the bike aren’t at Harley dealers, and they aren’t called Sportsters. Italian/Chinese brand SWM is bringing a similar cruiser to overseas markets under the name Stormbreaker.

Right around the same time (curiously enough!) that Harley-Davidson ended EVO Sportster production in 2022, Chinese manufacturer Shineray announced it would start building a very similar bike called the Stormbreaker V1200. An almost-identical air-cooled V-twin stuffed into an almost-identical chassis, with almost-identical peanut tank perched behind an almost-identical headlight. The Stormbreaker didn’t look 100 percent the same as the Sportster, but it was close, and the spec sheets also aligned closely. How was this legal, and surely Shineray wouldn’t sell it in Western markets… would they?

Turns out that subsidiary SWM will indeed sell the Stormbreaker V1200 in Europe. Funny, we’d heard the EVO Sportster was canceled in Europe, due to emissions problems. Guess the Chinese have figured out that problem, then? The price tag should be the rough equivalent of $14,000 CAD when it gets there.

What would the price be, if it came to Canada? While SWM has been sold in Canada for years, we have heard nothing about the Stormbreaker V1200 coming to our market. Chances are, it would require an MSRP that many would be unwilling to pay. If it was indeed in the $14k range, most people would be putting it on financing, and it wouldn’t take much more financing to get yourself a made-in-the-USA Indian Scout Sixty, with a much more modern design.

In the US, the Stormbreaker would face an even harder battle, although there would certainly be some Sportster tuners who’d want to take a stab at hot-rodding the new bike.

It’s all idle conjecture for now anyway, as we’ve heard zero—zero—talk about the machine making it to our side of the Atlantic.