The Best-Selling Motorcycles of 2023: Two Anniversaries and a Handover
Updated: Sep 2
The four category leaders of 2023 were the ones you would have guessed: the Harley-Davidson Street Glide, the Indian Scout, the Honda Rebel 500, and the BMW R 1250 GS. What makes the year worth writing about is not the winners. It is that two of these companies spent 2023 celebrating a round-number birthday, and one of them replaced its best-selling motorcycle in September.
A Note on Where These Numbers Come From
Start with the part most best-seller lists skip. Harley-Davidson does not publish model-level unit sales. Polaris, which owns Indian, does not either. Neither does American Honda for the US market. What those three publish is broader: shipments by product family, market share at the brand level, and the occasional press release sentence claiming a title inside a carefully drawn segment.
BMW Motorrad is the only one of the four that publishes model-level figures at all, and even those come with fine print. Through this period BMW reported the R 1250 GS and the R 1250 GS Adventure as a combined pair, and it did not split individual models out until its 2025 report.
So three of the four picks below are consensus rather than measurement. They rest on family-level shipment data, on what the manufacturers themselves claim in writing, and on broad agreement among dealers and the trade press. That is a defensible way to name a winner. It is not the same thing as counting. If you see a site print a specific unit figure for the Street Glide, the Scout or the Rebel 500, that figure was invented. We are not going to do that here.
Harley-Davidson: The Street Glide Special
Through model year 2023, Harley sold the Street Glide and the Street Glide Special as two separate SKUs, and the Special was the one buyers actually chose. It listed at $27,999 in base Vivid Black before freight, ran the Milwaukee-Eight 114 at 1,868cc, made 118 lb-ft at 3,250 rpm, weighed 827 lb in running order and put its laden seat at 26.1 inches. That is the bike people mean when they say the Street Glide won 2023.
One caveat gets left out constantly: the Road Glide sells in the same ballpark, and no public data separates the two. Anyone claiming the Street Glide beat the Road Glide by some measured margin is filling in a blank.
The family data does support the pick. Harley shipped 179,984 motorcycles worldwide in 2023. Grand American Touring accounted for 92,683 of them, up 3.2% on the year. Cruiser was 63,945, Sport and Lightweight 18,228, Adventure Touring 5,128. Touring was more than half the company, and within touring the Street Glide is the volume bike.
The 120th anniversary gave the year its character. Harley built seven limited editions and, unusually, published the build counts: Fat Boy 114 at 3,000 units, Heritage Classic at 1,700, Street Glide Special and Road Glide Special at 1,600 each, CVO Road Glide Limited at 1,500, Ultra Limited at 1,300 and Tri Glide at 1,100. Read those as a statement of intent. The anniversary money went almost entirely to cruisers and baggers.
Indian: The Scout Platform
Indian's answer is a platform, not a model, and the distinction matters. In 2023 the Scout family was at its widest, seven SKUs sharing the same 1,133cc liquid-cooled 60-degree V-twin: 100 hp at 8,100 rpm, 72 lb-ft at 6,000, and a 25.6-inch seat that has probably done more for Indian's sales than any other number on the spec sheet. The Scout Bobber sat at $12,249 and the base Scout at $13,249.
What is not established, and what we will not pretend is established, is which individual Scout led. No source ranks the Bobber against the Rogue against the base bike. Indian's own language is about the platform, and the platform is what the claim rests on.
The brand-level context is the more interesting part of Indian's 2023. Polaris cited Indian's North American market share above 13%, up from 2% in 2014. That is a decade of a revival project turning into a real competitor, and the Scout carried most of it. Seven variants of one midsize cruiser is not a hedge. It is a company deciding where its business actually is.
Honda: The Rebel 500
The Rebel 500 changed nothing mechanically in 2023. Same 471cc liquid-cooled parallel twin, same 27.2-inch seat, same 408 lb curb weight for the base bike and 414 lb with ABS. Prices were $6,449, $6,749 and $6,949 across the three trims. Honda US publishes no torque figure for this engine in any year. Honda Europe does, and its number is 31.9 lb-ft at 6,000 rpm.
What changed in 2023 was everything around it. Honda added the Rebel 1100T, a bagger with a fairing and hard bags at $11,299 in DCT form, plus the SCL500 scrambler on the same 471cc platform. That is the year the Rebel stopped being an entry-level model and became a sub-brand running from $4,749 to $11,299. The 500 sat in the middle of it and kept doing the work.
Honda's own claim for 2023 was that the Rebel 300 and 500 are the best-selling entry-level cruiser models in the powersports industry. Note the wording. Honda claims them as a pair, and it bounds the claim with entry-level. Whether the 500 outsells the 300, and whether either outsells the Grom, are open questions that no public data answers.
BMW: The R 1250 GS
BMW is the only brand here where we can quote real figures. In 2023 the R 1250 GS and GS Adventure sold roughly 56,000 units combined worldwide. Add the new R 1300 GS, which contributed 4,528 units in a partial year, and the whole GS line came to 60,535. BMW Motorrad's global total was 209,257, another record.
The bike itself was unchanged: the 1,254cc ShiftCam boxer, 105 lb-ft at 6,250 rpm, a 33.5-inch standard seat, 549 lb, $17,995 for the GS and $20,345 for the Adventure. One footnote, since we are being careful: BMW's global release gives 6,250 rpm for peak torque and BMW USA gives 6,500. We use the global figure.
Then on 28 September 2023 BMW revealed the R 1300 GS as a 2024 model, and 2023 became a handover year. The 1250 pair still carried the volume, but the bike that would define the next several years had already been shown. That is an unusual position for a best seller: winning the year while being publicly superseded for the last three months of it.
2023 in Context: Two Anniversaries and a Handover
Harley turned 120 and BMW Motorrad turned 100, and both did what companies do with anniversaries, which is look backwards. Limited editions, badges, heritage paint. It made for a loud year and a fairly quiet one on product, at least on the American side.
The more useful story is in Harley's category numbers. Sport and Lightweight shipments fell from 33,894 in 2022 to 18,228 in 2023, and Adventure Touring fell from 10,774 to 5,128. The first of those is not a mystery: Harley discontinued the legacy air-cooled Sportster 883 and 1200 in North America at the end of 2022, in its own words in the FY2023 release. The company's small and middleweight business contracted by design while Touring grew 3.2%. The mix moved further toward the expensive end.
BMW spent the same year doing the opposite thing. It replaced its best-selling motorcycle. The R 1300 GS was not a facelift, and its full-year effects would not land until 2024, but the decision was made and shown in 2023 while the anniversary bunting was still up.
Honda, as usual, did the least dramatic and most durable thing. It left the Rebel 500 alone and built more bikes around it.
2023 reads like a placeholder year, and mostly it was. Placeholders are still informative. Two of the four winners were machines their makers had already decided to replace or reprice, and a third was a platform about to be redesigned from the ground up. Only the Rebel 500 was exactly what it looked like: a cheap, light, unglamorous motorcycle that a lot of people wanted at a price that made the decision easy. Most of what happened next was already visible in 2023, if you were looking at the product pipeline instead of the confetti.
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.
