The Best-Selling Motorcycles of 2020: What Actually Moved

Four motorcycles led their corners of the market in 2020: Harley-Davidson's Street Glide family, Indian's Scout platform, Honda's Rebel 500, and BMW's R 1250 GS. Not one of them was new that year. Only one of the four companies involved will tell you how many it actually sold.

A Note on Where These Numbers Come From

Start here, because it changes how you should read everything below. Harley-Davidson publishes no model-level unit sales. Polaris publishes none for Indian. Honda publishes none for the US market. BMW Motorrad is the only one of the four that puts model-level figures in public, and even BMW only split individual models out for the first time in its 2025 report.

So three of these four are consensus picks. They are supported by the family-level shipment data the companies do publish, and by the companies' own marketing language about their own bikes. That is a real basis for a call. It is not a sales chart, and we are not going to print an invented unit number to make it look like one.

2020 is also the weakest-evidence year in this series for both Harley and Indian. For Harley we have touring segment shipment volume and the fact that the Street Glide was the accepted answer in the years either side of it. For Indian we have retroactive inference: the company has since called Scout its top-selling platform, and there is no reason to think 2020 broke the pattern, but nothing published at the time proves it. Where we are inferring, we will say so.

Harley-Davidson: the Street Glide Family

Harley shipped 145,246 motorcycles worldwide in 2020. Touring accounted for 56,067 of them, Cruiser 55,229, and Sportster and Street 33,950 between them. US retail sales came to 103,650. The Street Glide sits in that first bucket and is, by consensus, most of what that bucket was.

One caveat that matters and gets skipped constantly: through model year 2023 the Street Glide and the Street Glide Special were separate SKUs, and the Special was the likelier individual winner. So the honest phrasing for 2020 is the Street Glide family, most likely the Special. That bike ran the Milwaukee-Eight 114, 1,868cc, with a 26.1 inch laden seat height, 827 lb in running order, at $27,699 in base Vivid Black before freight.

The second caveat: the Road Glide sells in the same ballpark and no public data separates the two. Anyone telling you the Street Glide beat the Road Glide by some margin is telling you a feeling, not a measurement.

What actually happened to Harley in 2020 is more interesting than which fairing won. US production was suspended from 18 to 29 March at York, Tomahawk and Pilgrim Road after a positive COVID case. Revenue fell 24 percent and net income came in at $1 million. Then came The Rewire, which cut the planned model count by roughly 30 percent, exited 39 markets, cut around 160 dealers, and cut year-end dealer inventory by 59 percent. Supply, not demand, shaped the mix. Leading a year like that means leading a lineup the company had deliberately made smaller.

Indian: the Scout Platform

Scout is a platform, not a model, and that distinction is not pedantry. It spanned several SKUs, and no source establishes which individual Scout led in any given year. The sourceable claim is that the platform led. Indian's own words, from an April 2024 release: "As our top-selling platform, Scout has long been a staple in our lineup." A Star Tribune piece the same month, sourced from Polaris, called Scout "the best selling model in the Indian lineup" and put roughly 100,000 sold globally and cumulatively across 2014 to 2024. Cumulatively. Do not divide that by ten and call it an annual rate.

The Scout Bobber of this period ran a 1,133cc liquid-cooled 60 degree V-twin making 100 hp at 8,100 rpm and 72 lb-ft at 6,000, on a 25.6 inch seat, at $10,999. We are leaving weight out of it, because the published figures conflict, 552 lb wet against 533 lb dry, and they do not reconcile.

Indian's real 2020 story was the Challenger: liquid-cooled PowerPlus 108, 1,770cc, 122 hp, 128 lb-ft, a 26.5 inch seat, 796 lb wet, $21,999, and an explicit "Challenger Challenge" campaign aimed squarely at the Harley Road Glide Special. It was the most aggressive thing Indian did all year. It was not the volume leader.

Honda: the Rebel 500

The Rebel 500 got a genuine refresh for 2020: new fork, LED lighting, and an assist and slipper clutch that cut lever effort by about 30 percent. Underneath, the 471cc liquid-cooled parallel twin carried on, with a 27.2 inch seat and 408 lb curb weight, 414 lb with ABS, at $6,199 or $6,499 with ABS.

Honda's own 2020 language calls the Rebel 300 and Rebel 500 "the industry's top-selling small-displacement cruiser models." Note the pair. Honda almost always claims them together, and the ranking between the 500 and the 300 is not established anywhere. Neither is the Rebel 500 against the Grom, which is a real open question for anyone who wants to say "Honda's best-selling street bike." We are not saying that. The cruiser claim is Honda's own, and that one holds.

On torque, Honda US publishes no figure for the Rebel 500 in any year, and the European figure is not verified for MY2020, so there is no number here. The engine did not change. The published data simply does not exist.

One footnote to keep the scale honest: Honda's actual global volume leader is a small-displacement Asian commuter, with the Activa scooter in India the best-supported single nameplate at 2,530,667 units in FY2024. Different question, different market. Elsewhere in the 2020 range, the Africa Twin grew to 1,084cc.

BMW: the R 1250 GS

BMW is the one brand here with real numbers, and 2020 is the year it does not have one for the GS. The company shipped 169,272 motorcycles, and boxers accounted for roughly 80,000 of them combined. No GS-specific figure was published at all. This is the thinnest BMW year in the series, and the call rests on that boxer volume plus every year on either side of it.

The bike itself: 1,254cc ShiftCam boxer, 136 hp at 7,750 rpm, 105 lb-ft at 6,250 rpm, 33.5 inch standard seat, 549 lb, $17,895, or $20,195 for the Adventure. On that torque peak, BMW's global release says 6,250 rpm and BMW USA says 6,500. We use the global figure and flag the discrepancy rather than pretending it is settled.

2020 was the GS's 40th anniversary and also the year of the R 18, the 1,802cc Big Boxer cruiser, the largest boxer engine BMW has built. Worth noting what has happened since: BMW has never published R 18 unit figures, and the cruiser has not appeared in a single model-level highlight from 2020 through 2025. That is consistent with a soft reception. It is not a quantified claim, and we are not going to treat it as one.

What 2020 Was Actually About

Supply. Harley stopped building motorcycles for eleven days in March and then spent the rest of the year building fewer of them on purpose: fewer models, fewer markets, fewer dealers, and dealer inventory cut by more than half. That is a company deciding what it will sell rather than discovering it.

Against that, look at what won. Four bikes that already existed. The genuinely new machines of 2020, Indian's Challenger and BMW's R 18, were the year's interesting stories and neither of them led anything. The Challenger picked a fight with the Road Glide. The R 18 has spent every year since failing to turn up in a BMW model-level highlight.

The other thing worth noticing on the way past: the four winners listed at $6,199, $10,999, $17,895 and $27,699. A 408 lb beginner twin and an 827 lb bagger were both category leaders in the same twelve months. Price is not what decides this. Fit for purpose is.

2020 did not reveal much about what riders want. It revealed what manufacturers could physically get onto a showroom floor. The four bikes that led it were the ones already in production, already understood, already the safe build. What makes the year worth writing up is that the same four would go on to lead the next five as well, which suggests the result was not simply the pandemic picking winners.

Cover photo: "Harley-Davidson Museum May 2024 06 (The AMF Years--1981 Nova Touring non-functional prototype--OHV V-Four)" by Michael Barera, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.