Honda's Best-Selling Cruiser of 2021: The Rebel 500
Updated: Sep 2
The Rebel 500 kept its position in 2021, and that was not the interesting part of the year. 2021 is when the Rebel stopped being one motorcycle and became a range, and when Honda put the first genuine automatic transmission into a mainstream American cruiser. The best seller sat still while everything above it moved.
The usual caution applies, and it applies to every post in this series. Honda releases no US sales by model, so the Rebel 500's position is a consensus read built on Honda's own segment claims rather than on a published count. Honda's claims in this period almost always name the Rebel 300 and Rebel 500 as a pair, so which of the two leads is not settled. The defensible form of the claim is best-selling cruiser, which is Honda's own framing, and we hold to it.
The 2021 Rebel 500 on paper
Mechanically, nothing. The same 471cc liquid-cooled parallel twin, the same 27.2 inch seat, 408 pounds at the curb and 414 with ABS. What changed was the price list, which grew a third rung: $6,299 for the base bike, $6,599 with ABS, and $6,799 for a new ABS SE trim.
Torque is again absent, and deliberately so. Honda's US operation publishes no torque figure for this engine in any year, and the European number was not published for the 2021 bike either. We would rather leave the cell empty than fill it with a figure borrowed from a different market and a different model year.
The year the Rebel became a family
The Rebel 1100 arrived for 2021 on the Africa Twin's 1084cc parallel twin, with a 27.5 inch seat, three ride modes, and a price of $9,299 for the manual. The version that mattered was the other one. At $9,999 with Honda's dual clutch transmission and 509 pounds on the scale, the Rebel 1100 DCT was the first genuine automatic in a mainstream US cruiser. Nothing else in the American cruiser aisle would let a rider leave the clutch lever off the handlebar entirely.
It is worth being precise about why that is a category event rather than a feature. Automatic twist-and-go machines were not new in America; scooters had been doing it for decades. What did not exist was a full-size American cruiser, in a mainstream manufacturer's showroom, that a rider could operate without a clutch lever. Every other route into motorcycling still required somebody to learn a clutch before they could learn anything else. Honda removed that step, at a price roughly $3,000 above the Rebel 500 rather than in some low-volume flagship.
That is a bigger deal than the sales charts show, because it starts a thread that runs through the rest of this series. Honda spent the following years pushing automation down the price list rather than up it. If you want to know how the automatic version reads to people who actually own one, we collected that separately in our Rebel 1100 owner reports.
Elsewhere in the range, the Gold Wing was updated for the same model year: the trunk grew 11 litres to 61, enough for two full-face helmets, Android Auto was added, the audio moved to 45-watt speakers, and pricing ran from $23,900 to $32,600. Between the Rebel 500 at $6,299 and a Gold Wing at $32,600, Honda's 2021 US lineup covered about as wide a spread as any manufacturer in the market.
There is a pattern in that. In 2021 Honda updated the top of its cruiser and touring range and the top of its price list, added a new model above the best seller, and left the best seller itself mechanically alone apart from an extra trim. It is a company behaving as though it already knew which part of the range was working.
What the 2021 lineup means if you are shopping now
The useful thing about 2021 is that it created a real decision where there had not been one. Before it, wanting a Honda cruiser meant a Rebel 300 or a Rebel 500. After it, the question is whether you want the small one or the large one, and the numbers are not close: 408 pounds against 509, a 27.2 inch seat against 27.5, $6,299 against $9,299 or $9,999.
Our reading is that the two bikes are aimed at different problems rather than at different budgets. The 500 exists to be manageable. The 1100 exists to be a cruiser you could take somewhere. Buying the 1100 because it is the more expensive Rebel is the wrong reason, and buying the 500 because it is the cheap one is only the right reason if low weight and a low seat are actually what you need.
The DCT question sits underneath that. If the reason a 1100 appeals is that it takes the clutch out of the equation, that is a legitimate reason and it is the one thing the 500 cannot offer in this model year at any price. If the reason is that it is the bigger Rebel, that reason will not survive the first year of ownership. Honda would eventually push automation down the range rather than reserving it for the top of it, but in 2021 the $9,999 DCT was the only way in.
On the 500 itself, 2021 introduced the three-trim ladder that Honda has kept ever since. The gaps are small in cash terms and worth thinking about on a used listing, where a $500 spread between the top and bottom of the 2021 range is often less than the difference between two bikes' condition.
The short version
2021 did not change the best-selling Honda cruiser. It changed what the name on its tank meant. For the wider market that year, see the best-selling motorcycles of 2021, and for the Rebel against its rivals from Harley-Davidson, Indian and BMW, see our 2021 four-brand comparison.
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.
