Harley-Davidson's Best Seller of 2020: The Street Glide Special
Updated: Sep 2
Ask which Harley-Davidson sold best in 2020 and the answer almost everyone gives is the Street Glide Special. That is our answer too. It is also the least secure answer in this six year series, because under Harley's own reporting categories that year, Touring shipped 56,067 units and Cruiser shipped 55,229, and a gap of 838 across two entire families is not much to build a claim on.
Harley-Davidson does not publish unit sales by model and never has. What the company publishes is shipments grouped by family, plus whatever its own marketing chooses to highlight in a given year. So the Street Glide Special as 2020's best seller is a consensus pick supported by family level shipment data and Harley's own language, not a figure anyone can point at. Nobody outside Milwaukee holds the model level numbers.
The 2020 Street Glide Special
The bike was the Milwaukee-Eight 114, 1868cc, in Harley's Touring chassis. Seat height was 26.1 inches laden and 27.2 inches unladen. Weight in running order was 827 lb. Base price in Vivid Black was $27,699, excluding freight.
Torque needs a footnote before anyone quotes it. Harley's published figure for the M8 114 in 2020 was roughly 122 to 123 lb-ft at about 3,000 rpm. From MY2021, the published figure for the same engine became 118 lb-ft at 3,250 rpm. The engine did not get weaker between those two model years. The published measurement changed. If you ever see the 2020 number sitting next to the 2021 number in a table, as though the bike lost five pound feet overnight, that is the reason.
One more piece of housekeeping that applies to the first four posts in this series. Through MY2023, the Street Glide and the Street Glide Special were separate SKUs, and the Special was the likelier individual winner of the two. Harley collapsed them into a single Street Glide for MY2024. Separately, the Road Glide sells in the same ballpark and no public data separates the two, so nothing here should be read as the Street Glide beating the Road Glide in any measured sense. It has never been measured in public.
What was actually going on in 2020
2020 was not a normal selling year for Harley, and it was not a normal building year either. US production was suspended from 18 to 29 March at York, Tomahawk and Pilgrim Road after a positive COVID case. Revenue fell 24% across the year. Net income landed at $1 million.
The bigger story was self inflicted and entirely deliberate. The Rewire, Harley's restructuring under Jochen Zeitz, cut the planned model count by roughly 30%, exited 39 markets, cut around 160 dealers, and cut year end dealer inventory by 59%.
That last figure is the one that matters when you are trying to name a best seller. When a manufacturer removes more than half of the motorcycles sitting on dealer floors, what sells is shaped by what is physically there, not only by what buyers walked in wanting. The 2020 sales mix is a supply outcome as much as a demand outcome. That is unusual enough that it should change how much weight you put on the result.
The planned model count cut compounds it. The lineup that generated 2020's mix was not the lineup Harley had intended to sell that year, and roughly a third of the models that had been planned were cut before they reached a showroom. A best seller chosen from a catalog that was actively being cut is a different kind of fact from a best seller chosen from a full one.
Here is the year in the numbers Harley did publish: 145,246 motorcycles shipped worldwide, Touring 56,067, Cruiser 55,229, Sportster and Street 33,950, with US retail sales of 103,650. Touring led Cruiser by 838 units. In every other year covered here the touring platform has a clear margin over everything else. 2020 does not give it one. For how the rest of the industry looked under the same conditions, see our roundup of the best selling motorcycles of 2020.
How to read the 2020 answer
Treat the Street Glide Special as the most likely name rather than as a measured result. For it to be the wrong answer, one of two things has to be true. Either the Cruiser family actually outsold Touring at retail in a way the shipment split does not reveal, or no single touring SKU pulled clear of the others inside that 56,067. Both are live possibilities in a year when inventory was being drained on purpose.
What is not in doubt is the shape of the company. The bagger sat at the top of a lineup that had just been cut back hard, and it stayed at the top for the next five years. 2020 is simply the year that position was least comfortable, which makes it the year worth being honest about rather than the year to quietly skip.
For how Harley's position compared with Indian, Honda and BMW under the same conditions, we put all four side by side in Harley vs Indian vs Honda vs BMW, 2020.
The Street Glide Special is the right answer for 2020. It is also the only year in this series where we would not argue very hard with someone who picked differently.
Cover photo: "Harley-Davidson Street Glide parked at Hogs for Hospice, Leamington, Ontario, 2025-08-02 04" by Chris Woodrich, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
