Honda's Best-Selling Cruiser of 2020: The Rebel 500
Updated: Sep 2
The best-selling Honda cruiser in the United States in 2020 was also the cheapest cruiser Honda sold. The Rebel 500 listed at $6,199, or $6,499 with ABS, and it arrived that year carrying the first substantial mechanical update the model had received. Honda spent the model year describing the Rebel 300 and Rebel 500 as the industry's top-selling small-displacement cruiser models, and that sentence, written by Honda's own press department, is most of the evidence anyone outside the company has.
A word on how we know this, because it matters more than usual here. Honda publishes no model-level US sales figures, so nobody outside American Honda can put a unit number on the Rebel 500 for 2020, and any page that prints one has invented it. What exists instead is Honda's own segment language, and that language almost always claims the Rebel 300 and the Rebel 500 together as a pair, which means the ranking between those two is not established. We also stop deliberately at best-selling cruiser rather than Honda's best-selling street motorcycle, because the Grom is a real contender for that wider title and nothing public ranks the two against each other.
What the 2020 Rebel 500 actually was
The bike underneath the claim is small, light and cheap. A 471cc liquid-cooled DOHC parallel twin, a 27.2 inch seat height, 408 pounds at the curb or 414 pounds with ABS fitted. Pricing opened at $6,199 and ran to $6,499 for the ABS version.
2020 was the refresh year. Honda fitted a new fork, moved the lighting to LED, and added an assist and slipper clutch that cut lever effort by 30 percent. None of that changes what the bike is. All of it changes how the bike feels in the first hour of ownership, which for a motorcycle sold overwhelmingly to people who have not owned one before is the part that decides whether the sale happens at all.
One number we will not give you is torque. Honda's US operation has never published a torque figure for the Rebel 500 in any model year, and the European figure that circulates online was not published for the 2020 bike. The engine is unchanged across this whole period, but we are not going to attach a manufacturer figure to a model year the manufacturer did not attach it to.
What was going on around it in 2020
The Rebel's refresh was the visible half of Honda's year. The other half was happening one showroom over: the Africa Twin grew to 1084cc for the same model year. That engine had nothing to do with the Rebel in 2020 and everything to do with it in 2021, when Honda dropped it into a cruiser chassis and created the Rebel 1100.
Honda's claim that year, that the Rebel 300 and 500 were the industry's top-selling small-displacement cruiser models, is worth reading precisely. It is a segment claim, not a brand claim, and it covers two models at once. It is also not the sort of thing a manufacturer says loosely, because rival manufacturers read press releases too. Treated as evidence rather than as a measurement, it holds up.
For completeness: Honda's best-selling motorcycle worldwide is not one Americans see, since the Activa scooter in India moved 2,530,667 units in FY2024, which is a different product in a different market and not part of this question.
It is also worth being clear about what a refresh like this is for. A new fork and a lighter clutch pull are not performance changes and Honda did not sell them as such. They address the two things that make a first motorcycle feel unmanageable: how the front end behaves when a nervous rider grabs the brake, and how much a left hand hurts after twenty minutes in stop-start traffic. A 30 percent reduction in clutch lever effort is a bigger deal to somebody in their first month of riding than any amount of extra power would be.
What a 2020 Rebel 500 is worth knowing about today
If you are shopping used, 2020 is the year to start from. The new fork, the LED lighting and the lighter clutch pull all arrive here, and an earlier bike is a meaningfully different machine to live with at low speed and after dark.
The other thing to check on a used listing is ABS. In 2020 that choice cost $300 and added six pounds, taking the bike from 408 to 414. It is not a choice any more. For 2026 Honda dropped the non-ABS Rebel 500 from the range entirely and made ABS standard at $6,799. Non-ABS bikes from this era will circulate on the used market for years, and the $300 that used to separate them is a weak reason to take the version the manufacturer eventually deleted.
The larger point about a 2020 bike is that it is not an old motorcycle in any way that matters mechanically. Honda made no further engine or chassis change to the Rebel 500 for the rest of the period covered by this series. A 2020 bike and a 2025 bike share the same 471cc twin, the same 27.2 inch seat and the same 408 pound curb weight. The differences are the seat and handlebar revision Honda made for 2025, the trim structure, and roughly $300 of list price. That is unusual, and it is the single most useful thing to know before paying a premium for a later model year.
What has not changed is the reason the bike sells at all. 408 pounds and a 27.2 inch seat is the combination that lets somebody who has never ridden get both feet flat on the ground and pick the machine up off its sidestand without help. Every other line on the spec sheet is downstream of that.
The short version
2020 is the Rebel 500's most consequential model year in this six-year run, and Honda has never needed to repeat it. For how the rest of the market looked that year, see our roundup of the best-selling motorcycles of 2020, and for how the Rebel measured up against the Street Glide, the Scout and the GS, see our four-brand comparison for 2020.
Cover photo: "Honda CMX500 Rebel parked at Hogs for Hospice, Leamington, Ontario, 2025-08-02" by Chris Woodrich, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
