The Best-Selling Motorcycles of 2022: The Quiet Turning Point

The four category leaders of 2022 were the ones you already know: Harley-Davidson's Street Glide family, Indian's Scout platform, Honda's Rebel 500, and BMW's R 1250 GS with its Adventure sibling. Third year running, same four names. What makes 2022 worth writing about is not the result. It is what each of these companies quietly started doing to the platforms sitting next to their best sellers.

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

So three of these four are consensus picks. They rest on the family-level shipment data the companies do publish, plus the companies' own claims about their own products. That is a reasonable basis for naming a leader. It is not a sales chart, and we are not going to print a unit number we do not have.

For 2022 the Harley and Indian evidence is moderate rather than thin, which is an improvement on 2020. BMW gives a real figure, rounded and combined across two models. Honda gives a segment claim about a pair of bikes. We will keep flagging which is which as we go, because the difference matters more than the conclusion.

Harley-Davidson: the Street Glide Family

Grand American Touring accounted for 89,849 shipments in 2022. Cruiser took 59,010, Sport and Lightweight 33,894, and Adventure Touring 10,774. Touring remained the centre of the company, and the Street Glide remained the centre of touring.

The trim caveat holds for one more year. Street Glide and Street Glide Special were still separate SKUs through model year 2023, and the Special was the likelier individual winner, so read this as the family and most likely the Special. That bike: Milwaukee-Eight 114, 1,868cc, 118 lb-ft at 3,250 rpm, 26.1 inch laden seat, 827 lb, $27,449. And the Road Glide continued to sell in the same ballpark with nothing public separating them, which is a caveat we will keep repeating because it keeps being true.

Here is the quiet part. In January 2022 Harley launched the Street Glide ST and the Road Glide ST, and those were the first time the Milwaukee-Eight 117 appeared outside a CVO. The big engine stopped being a limited-edition halo and started being something you could order on a regular touring bike. Two model years later that engine would be standard across the redesigned Street Glide. 2022 is where that path becomes visible.

The other 2022 move was the Nightster in April, on the Revolution Max 975T. And at the end of the year, in Harley's own words in its FY2023 release, the legacy air-cooled Sportster 883 and 1200 were discontinued in North America. A model line that had run for decades ended, and the company barely paused on it.

Indian: the Scout Platform

Scout stayed the top-selling platform, and platform is the operative word: several SKUs, no public source establishing which individual one led. Indian's own April 2024 wording is the cleanest support available, "As our top-selling platform, Scout has long been a staple in our lineup," alongside a Polaris-sourced Star Tribune figure of roughly 100,000 sold globally and cumulatively across 2014 to 2024. Cumulative, over a decade.

The 1,133cc liquid-cooled V-twin was unchanged: 100 hp, 72 lb-ft at 6,000 rpm, 25.6 inch seat. Two new entries widened the platform at the bottom, the Scout Rogue at $11,499 and the Rogue Sixty at $9,999. On the Scout Bobber's 2022 price we have seen roughly $12,249, but we hold that one loosely; it may reflect a later point in the model cycle rather than the launch figure. Weight we are leaving out entirely, because the published numbers for this generation conflict and do not reconcile.

Indian's headline act was the all-new Chief, and it arrived as a model year 2022 bike. It was revealed in February 2021, which is why you will see it called a 2021 Chief in places. It is not. The Chief brought a steel tube frame, a round headlight, a four inch round TFT, and a choice of Thunderstroke 111 at 1,811cc and 108 lb-ft or Thunderstroke 116 at 1,890cc and 120 lb-ft. Seat height 26 inches, 670 lb in base form, six variants from $14,499 to $20,999.

The FTR was also reworked for model year 2022, and not gently: the 19 and 18 inch wire wheels were replaced by 17 inch cast wheels wearing sportbike rubber. Indian took its flat-track-styled bike and pointed it at the road. Whatever you think of that decision, it is the company admitting what people were actually doing with it.

Honda: the Rebel 500

Mechanical carryover. 471cc liquid-cooled parallel twin, 31.9 lb-ft at 6,000 rpm per Honda Europe's verified figure, 27.2 inch seat, 408 lb, 414 lb with ABS and with the SE, at $6,399, $6,699 and $6,899. Honda US still publishes no torque number for this bike, which is why the European figure is the one we quote and why we say where it comes from.

Honda's 2022 marketing language is worth reading closely, because it tells you which claims the company is willing to make. It called the CRF300L "the motorcycle industry's top-selling dual-sport model" and the Grom "one of the powersports industry's most popular motorcycle models." Note the precision of the first and the vagueness of the second. Honda will name a segment leader when it has one. On the Rebel it names the pair, 300 and 500 together, which is exactly why the ranking between those two is not established and why we do not claim the Rebel 500 beats the Grom for Honda's best-selling US street bike. Nobody has published anything that settles it.

BMW: the R 1250 GS

BMW published "almost 60,000" for the R 1250 GS and GS Adventure combined in 2022, against "over 60,000" the year before. Rounded, combined, global. Read against a company that was growing, that is a mild drift rather than a decline, and the pair still accounted for roughly 30 percent of BMW's global volume. Two model designations, nearly a third of the company.

2022 was BMW Motorrad's first year over 200,000 motorcycles, at 202,895, up 4.4 percent and another record. US sales were 17,690. The S 1000 RR passed 10,000 units. The GS itself was untouched: 1,254cc ShiftCam boxer, 105 lb-ft at 6,250 rpm per BMW's global release, 33.5 inch seat, 549 lb, $17,995, or $20,345 for the Adventure. BMW USA lists that torque peak at 6,500 rpm; we use the global figure and note the disagreement rather than picking one silently.

What 2022 Was Actually About

Every one of these four companies spent 2022 working on something other than its best seller, and in three cases the work pointed at the platform underneath it. Harley let the 117 out of CVO jail and killed the air-cooled Sportster. Indian replaced the Chief outright and rebuilt the FTR's wheels and tyres around what owners were actually riding. BMW crossed 200,000 while its flagship pair softened slightly against a growing total. Honda changed nothing at all on the Rebel and kept the segment claim.

None of that shows up in the 2022 result. All of it shows up later. The 117 becomes the standard Street Glide engine in 2024. The Scout gets an entirely new engine in 2025. The GS gets replaced and then watches its Adventure variant overtake it. If you want the year the six-year run stopped being a straight line, it is this one, and you would not have known it from the leaderboard.

The leaderboard itself, meanwhile, still spans $6,399 to $27,449 and 408 lb to 827 lb. Three years in, that spread is the most durable fact in this series.

2022 is a year that rewards reading the product announcements more than the shipment tables. The shipment tables say nothing changed. The announcements say every one of these companies had already decided what it was going to do next, and had started doing it in public, next to a best seller nobody was touching yet.

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.