Honda's Best-Selling Cruiser of 2022: The Rebel 500
Updated: Sep 2
Nothing happened to the Rebel 500 in 2022. Same engine, same chassis, same seat height, a $100 move on the sticker. It led its segment again anyway, which is the more interesting fact and the harder one to write about honestly.
This is the year the provenance caveat earns its place. Honda publishes no US sales by model, so this is a consensus pick resting on the company's own segment wording rather than on a counted result. Honda claims the Rebel 300 and Rebel 500 as a pair nearly every time it makes the claim, so which of the two actually leads is not established anywhere public. And the ceiling on the claim is best-selling cruiser rather than Honda's best-selling street motorcycle, because the Grom is the one plausible challenger for that wider title and no source ranks the two against each other.
The 2022 Rebel 500, unchanged
471cc liquid-cooled parallel twin. 27.2 inch seat. 408 pounds at the curb, 414 with ABS, 414 for the ABS SE. Prices of $6,399, $6,699 and $6,899 across the three trims, each $100 up on 2021.
2022 is also the first model year where a torque figure can be attributed at all. Honda Europe publishes 31.9 lb-ft at 6,000 rpm for the 22YM bike. Honda's US operation publishes nothing, so treat that as a European figure for a European homologation rather than as an American spec, and note that the engine is the same one that was in the 2020 bike.
Why an unchanged bike keeps winning
The temptation is to explain a repeat win with a product argument. There is not one available here, because the product did not change. The explanation is the segment.
Entry-level cruiser buyers are a renewing population rather than a fixed one. Every model year, a new group of people walks into a dealership with the same set of constraints: they want to reach the ground, they want to pick the bike up, they want an insurance quote that does not end the conversation, and they want to spend around six thousand dollars. Those constraints do not change from year to year, so a product that answers them does not need annual revision to keep answering them. Honda's rivals kept updating machines aimed at riders who already ride. Honda kept selling one aimed at people who do not yet.
Honda's language in the same product cycle supports that reading in a way that has nothing to do with cruisers. The company called the CRF300L the motorcycle industry's top-selling dual-sport model and described the Grom as one of the powersports industry's most popular motorcycle models. Three different segments, three claims, and the common factor is small, cheap and approachable rather than fast, new or heavily revised.
That Grom claim is also the reason we keep the Rebel's title narrow. The Grom is the only Honda in the US street range with a plausible case for outselling the Rebel 500 outright, and because Honda does not publish model-level US figures, nobody outside the company can settle it. Anyone who tells you which of the two is Honda's American best seller is guessing.
Seen across the whole period, Honda's revision cadence on this bike is close to nothing. The fork, lighting and clutch update landed in 2020. The next change of any kind to how the Rebel 500 rides was a revised seat and handlebar position in 2025. Between those two points, five model years, Honda added a trim, moved prices in $50 and $100 steps, and left the motorcycle alone.
What that means for a buyer
A practical consequence: the 2022, 2023 and 2024 Rebel 500 are the same motorcycle. If you are shopping used across those years, model year is close to irrelevant and condition, mileage and trim are what should decide it. The list price moved from $6,399 in 2022 to $6,499 in 2024, which is not enough of a gap to chase.
The short version
2022 is a carryover year and this is a short post on purpose. For the market context that year, see the best-selling motorcycles of 2022, and for how the Rebel compared with the Street Glide, the Scout and the GS, see our 2022 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.
