The Best-Selling Motorcycles of 2021: The Rebound Year

The same four bikes led their categories again in 2021: Harley-Davidson's Street Glide family, Indian's Scout platform, Honda's Rebel 500, and BMW's R 1250 GS with its Adventure sibling. What changed was the volume underneath them. 2021 is the year the numbers came back.

A Note on Where These Numbers Come From

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 these four that puts model-level figures in public, and even BMW only split individual models out for the first time in its 2025 report.

That means three of these four are consensus picks, resting on the family-level shipment data the companies do publish and on the companies' own marketing language about their own products. It is a defensible call. It is not a sales chart, and we will not invent a unit number to make it look like one.

2021 is a better-evidenced year than 2020 on both the Harley and Indian side, and BMW actually gives us a figure for the GS pair. Where a number is rounded, combined across models, or brand-level rather than model-level, we say so in the sentence rather than burying it.

Harley-Davidson: the Street Glide Family

Harley shipped 188,494 motorcycles in 2021, up from 145,246 the year before. Grand American Touring took 93,961 of them, Cruiser 59,494, Sportster and Street 25,123, and the newly created Adventure Touring category 9,916. Touring was half the company. The Street Glide is the bike most people mean when they say touring.

The trim caveat still applies. Through model year 2023 the Street Glide and the Street Glide Special were separate SKUs, and the Special was the likelier individual winner, so read this as the Street Glide family and most likely the Special. That bike ran the Milwaukee-Eight 114, 1,868cc, quoted at 118 lb-ft at 3,250 rpm, on a 26.1 inch laden seat, 827 lb, at $27,099.

A note on that torque figure, because it trips people up. Harley's published number for the same M8 114 moved from roughly 123 lb-ft at 3,000 rpm to 118 lb-ft at 3,250 rpm from model year 2021. The engine did not get weaker. The published measurement changed. Anyone selling you a story about a detuned 2021 Street Glide is reading a spec sheet revision as an engineering decision.

And the Road Glide still sells in the same ballpark, with nothing public separating the two. We are not going to pretend that gap has been measured.

The interesting Harley news in 2021 was elsewhere. The Pan America 1250 arrived in February, the company's first adventure bike, on the new Revolution Max 1250. The Sportster S followed in July on the Revolution Max 1250T. Those two bikes are why an Adventure Touring line exists in the shipment table at all. Neither came close to the Street Glide on volume, and neither was supposed to. They were Harley proving it could still build something that was not a bagger.

Indian: the Scout Platform

Scout is a platform, not a model. It spanned several SKUs, and no public source establishes which individual Scout led in any year, so the sourceable claim is the platform. Indian's own April 2024 release put it this way: "As our top-selling platform, Scout has long been a staple in our lineup." The Star Tribune, sourced from Polaris the same month, called Scout "the best selling model in the Indian lineup" at roughly 100,000 sold globally and cumulatively across 2014 to 2024. Cumulatively. That is a decade of sales, not a year of them.

Pricing in 2021 was the strongest argument the platform had: $10,999 for the Scout Bobber, $11,499 for the base Scout. Underneath, the 1,133cc liquid-cooled V-twin made 100 hp and 72 lb-ft at 6,000 rpm on a 25.6 inch seat. We are leaving curb weight out, because the published figures conflict and do not reconcile.

2021 was Indian's high-water mark in this window. Global volume passed 30,000 units for the first and only time across these six years, per motorcyclesdata. That is a brand figure, not a model figure, and it is worth being precise about the difference: it tells you Indian had a very good year, not how many Scouts left showrooms.

Honda: the Rebel 500

The Rebel 500 carried on mechanically unchanged: 471cc liquid-cooled parallel twin, 27.2 inch seat, 408 lb, 414 lb with ABS, at $6,299, $6,599 with ABS, and $6,799 for the new ABS SE trim. Honda US publishes no torque figure for this bike in any year, and the European number is not verified for MY2021, so there is none here.

The Rebel's actual 2021 story is the model that appeared above it. The Rebel 1100 launched using the Africa Twin's 1,084cc parallel twin, at $9,299 for the manual and $9,999 for the DCT version, with a 27.5 inch seat, 509 lb in DCT form, and three ride modes. That DCT bike is the first genuine automatic in a mainstream US cruiser, and it is a considerably more interesting piece of engineering than anything on the Street Glide's spec sheet that year.

Honda also reworked the Gold Wing: trunk up 11 litres to 61, enough for two full-face helmets, Android Auto added, 45 watt speakers, priced from $23,900 to $32,600.

Two things we will not claim. The ranking between the Rebel 500 and the Rebel 300 is not established anywhere; Honda almost always claims them as a pair. And the Rebel 500 against the Grom is a genuine open question, which is why "Honda's best-selling street bike" is a phrase we avoid. The supportable claim is the small-displacement cruiser one, and it is Honda's own.

BMW: the R 1250 GS

This is where 2021 gets a real number. BMW published "over 60,000" for the R 1250 GS and R 1250 GS Adventure combined. Combined, and rounded, and global. There is no US model-level breakout and never has been. But it is a published figure from the manufacturer, which is more than the other three brands offer in any year of this series.

It sat inside a record company year: 194,261 motorcycles, up 14.8 percent. Boxers were roughly half of everything BMW sold. For scale on the rest of the range, the S 1000 R managed 4,796 units and the M 1000 RR 1,070. The GS pair was not leading by a nose.

The bike was unchanged: 1,254cc ShiftCam boxer, 136 hp at 7,750 rpm, 105 lb-ft at 6,250 rpm, 33.5 inch seat, 549 lb, $17,995, or $20,345 for the Adventure. BMW's global release gives the torque peak at 6,250 rpm while BMW USA says 6,500. We use the global figure and flag the disagreement.

What 2021 Was Actually About

Recovery, and what companies chose to do with it. Harley added 43,000 shipments over 2020 and spent its attention on two bikes that were not baggers. BMW set a company record and sold roughly half of it as boxers. Indian hit a volume peak it would not see again in this window. Honda launched a 1,100cc automatic cruiser into a segment that had never had one.

What none of that changed was which bike led each brand. The four winners of 2021 are the four winners of 2020. The new machinery went into adjacent categories, or above the leader in the range, or into segments the brand did not previously contest. Nobody launched a direct replacement for their own best seller, which tells you those four models were not seen as problems that needed solving.

The price spread is worth a second look too: $6,299 at the bottom and $27,099 at the top, with a 408 lb beginner twin and an 827 lb bagger both leading their categories in the same twelve months. Whatever decides these outcomes, it is not price and it is not size.

2021 reads like a normal year that happened to be surrounded by strange ones. Demand came back, factories ran, and the interesting product was interesting rather than urgent. The result was four category leaders repeating themselves without much drama, which is boring to report and probably the single most useful thing this series has to say: these bikes were not winning because of a moment. They kept winning after the moment passed.

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.