The Best-Selling Motorcycles of 2024: The Year Everything Got Replaced
Updated: Sep 2
The 2024 winners were the Harley-Davidson Street Glide, the Indian Scout, the Honda Rebel 500 and the BMW R 1300 GS. Same four names as the year before, and three of them were completely different motorcycles. This was the year the industry stopped celebrating and started rebuilding.
A Note on Where These Numbers Come From
The honest disclosure first, because it changes how you should read everything below. Harley-Davidson publishes no model-level unit sales. Polaris, Indian's owner, publishes none. American Honda publishes none for the US market. All three report at a coarser grain: shipments by product family, brand-level market share, and press release claims scoped to a segment of their own choosing.
BMW Motorrad is the only one of the four that publishes model-level figures, and for 2024 even BMW does not help much. Its headline number covers three models together with no split between them. BMW did not break out individual models until its 2025 report.
So three of the four picks here are consensus, built on family-level shipment data and the manufacturers' own language. The BMW pick is worse than that: it is an inference, and we say so in the BMW section rather than dressing it up. Nobody outside these companies knows the unit counts. Anyone printing one is guessing.
Harley-Davidson: The Street Glide, Rebuilt
For model year 2024 Harley collapsed the Street Glide and Street Glide Special into a single Street Glide, then redesigned it from the ground up. Harley's own description was the most comprehensive product development in the touring platform in well over 10 years, which is marketing language, but for once the spec sheet backs it.
The Milwaukee-Eight 117 became standard, 1,923cc making 130 lb-ft at 3,250 rpm and 105 hp. Weight dropped to 811 lb. Rear travel went up to three inches. A 12.3-inch TFT display running Skyline OS replaced the old cluster, four ride modes arrived, and Harley claimed a 60% average reduction in helmet buffeting from the new fairing. Laden seat height stayed at 26.1 inches while the unladen figure moved to 28.1.
The number that mattered most was on the tag. Base price was $25,999 in Vivid Black, excluding roughly $850 of freight. That is about $2,000 less than the outgoing Street Glide Special, for more engine and less weight. Price cuts on a flagship American bagger are rare enough to be worth stopping on.
It worked, at least in its own lane. Harley's FY2024 release states that the launch of the new Street Glide and Road Glide contributed to nearly 5% growth in the US Touring segment and drove the company's market share there to 74.5%. That is a segment share, not a sales figure, and it is US only.
The wider picture was less flattering. Total 2024 shipments were 148,862, down from 179,984. Grand American Touring was 85,757, which is 57.6% of everything Harley shipped. Cruiser fell to 46,235, Sport and Lightweight to 12,335, Adventure Touring to 4,535. Harley won the touring argument while the company got smaller. Both things are true.
Indian: The Scout, In Transition
Indian spent 2024 selling one motorcycle and advertising another. The model year 2024 Scout was the old 1,133cc platform in a colors-only year, Scout Bobber still at $12,249. In April, Indian revealed the model year 2025 Scout, a complete ground-up redesign, and from that point the bike on the showroom floor was visibly the outgoing one.
The new bike gets its proper treatment in next year's post, but the headline is the engine: the SpeedPlus 1250, 1,250cc, 105 hp at 6,300 rpm and 82 lb-ft at 6,300, which Indian put at 11% more power and 14% more torque than the 1,133. The Scout Bobber moved to $12,999 and 522 lb as shipped.
On the sales claim, 2024 is actually the strongest year for evidence. Indian's own April 2024 release calls Scout its top-selling platform. A Star Tribune piece the same month, sourced from Polaris, described Scout as the best selling model in the Indian lineup and put roughly 100,000 sold globally since 2014. That is a cumulative decade total, not an annual rate, and it should never be divided by ten and reported as a yearly figure.
Note the word platform. Scout is five to seven SKUs depending on the year, and no source establishes which one leads.
The context is harder. Indian's global volume in 2024 was 25,792 units, well off its 2021 peak, with the US down roughly 15%. Announcing a new engine in April while the old bike sits in dealerships is a difficult way to run a year, and the numbers show it.
Honda: The Rebel 500, Untouched
Honda changed nothing. The Rebel 500 carried over: 471cc liquid-cooled parallel twin, 27.2-inch seat, 408 lb base, 414 lb with ABS, 416 lb for the SE. Prices crept to $6,499, $6,799 and $6,999. Honda US still publishes no torque figure; Honda Europe's is 31.9 lb-ft at 6,000 rpm.
Honda's claim for the year was that the Rebel 300 and 500 are the industry's most popular entry-level cruisers. As always, the two bikes are claimed as a pair and the segment is bounded. Whether the 500 outsells the 300 is not established anywhere, and whether the Rebel 500 outsells the Grom as Honda's best-selling US street bike is a genuinely open question. We do not know, and neither does anyone else outside Honda.
At brand level, 2024 was Honda's year in the US: roughly 20% share, narrowly ahead of Harley-Davidson at 19.9%. That is a brand figure, not a model figure, and it is a snapshot rather than a permanent state of affairs.
BMW: The R 1300 GS, and an Honest Caveat
Naming the R 1300 GS as BMW's 2024 best seller is an inference. BMW reported over 68,000 units across three models with no split published, and those three span two generations of the boxer GS. The R 1300 GS is the reasonable read given it was in its first full year and had replaced the outgoing bike, but it is not a published fact and we are not going to write it as one.
What is documented is the machine. The R 1300 GS runs a 1,300cc boxer making 145 hp at 7,750 rpm and 110 lb-ft at 6,500. Underneath is a new sheet-metal main frame with a die-cast aluminum rear section, and the gearbox was relocated below the engine. Suspension moved to EVO Telelever at the front with a revised EVO Paralever at the rear. Standard seat height is 33.5 inches, with options spanning 32.3 to 34.2. A new Enduro riding mode joined the list. US price was $18,895.
The number that makes the case: 523 lb, which is 26 lb lighter than the R 1250 GS, with more displacement and nine more horsepower. Adventure bikes rarely lose weight across a generation change. BMW Motorrad's global total in 2024 was 210,408, an all-time record.
2024 in Context: The Year Everything Got Replaced
Three of these four bikes were new, newly revealed or in their first full year, and that is not a coincidence. Harley, Indian and BMW all reached the same conclusion at roughly the same time: the platform that had been carrying the company needed to be replaced rather than refreshed.
They went about it differently. BMW replaced the GS and made it lighter. Harley replaced the Street Glide and made it cheaper, which is the more surprising move and the one that shows most clearly what Harley thought the problem was. Indian replaced the Scout's engine outright and then had to sell the old bike for another nine months while everyone waited.
Honda did none of it, kept a $6,499 motorcycle in production unchanged, and finished the year narrowly ahead of Harley-Davidson in US brand share. There is a lesson in that, and it is not a comfortable one for companies whose product plans run on anniversaries.
The four winners of 2024 were the same four names as 2023, but the year proved the names were doing a lot of work. Underneath, the market had moved: Harley's shipments fell nearly 17% even as its touring share climbed, Indian's global volume kept sliding, and BMW set another record while quietly declining to tell anyone which of its bikes sold what. The one constant was the cheapest bike on the list, unchanged, still winning.
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.
