Honda's Best-Selling Cruiser of 2023: The Rebel 500
Updated: Sep 2
The Rebel 500 stayed Honda's best-selling cruiser in 2023, and Honda's wording about it barely moved. What changed was everything sitting above it. By the end of the model year a Rebel could be a $4,749 starter bike or an $11,299 bagger, and the badge had stopped describing one kind of motorcycle.
As in every year of this series, there is no published number behind that ranking. Honda does not release US model-level sales, so the position rests on the company's own segment language, which for 2023 called the Rebel 300 and Rebel 500 the best-selling entry-level cruiser models in the powersports industry. Read that phrasing carefully: it carries two models rather than one, and it is a claim about a segment rather than about Honda's street range as a whole.
The 2023 Rebel 500
Mechanically a carryover. The 471cc liquid-cooled parallel twin, a 27.2 inch seat, 408 pounds at the curb, 414 with ABS and 414 for the ABS SE. Prices of $6,449, $6,749 and $6,949, each $50 up on 2022.
Honda Europe publishes 31.9 lb-ft at 6,000 rpm for the 2023 bike. Honda's US operation still publishes no torque figure at all, which is worth remembering whenever you see that number quoted on an American spec sheet.
The year the Rebel stopped being an entry bike
Two additions did it. The Rebel 1100T arrived with a fairing and hard bags at $11,299 with the dual clutch transmission, which makes it a bagger by any reasonable definition. And the SCL500 scrambler appeared on the same 471cc platform as the Rebel 500, taking the small engine somewhere the cruiser could not go.
The SCL500 is the quieter of the two additions and in some ways the more revealing. It puts the Rebel 500's 471cc engine into a scrambler, which means Honda was now getting two distinct US street models out of one small twin. That is a manufacturer treating a beginner engine as a platform rather than as a stepping stone, and it is the behaviour of a company that expects the small end of its range to keep paying for itself.
The bottom of the range is worth as much attention as the top. Honda still had a Rebel starting at $4,749 in a year when it also had one at $11,299, and it kept the 500 sitting at $6,449 in between. Ranges usually drift upward once a manufacturer discovers it can sell a more expensive version. This one stretched in both directions at once, which is a different and more deliberate decision.
Put the range end to end and it runs from $4,749 to $11,299. That is a spread of nearly two and a half times, inside one nameplate, in one model year. Honda had turned the Rebel from a model into a sub-brand without ever saying so.
The automation thread continues here too. The dual clutch transmission arrived on the Rebel 1100 in 2021 at $9,999. By 2023 a buyer could have a Rebel with a fairing, hard bags and no clutch lever. If you want to know how that transmission behaves in ordinary use rather than in a brochure, we gathered owner accounts in our Rebel 1100 owner reports.
What makes 2023 slightly awkward is that Honda's marketing language did not follow its own product. The company was still calling the Rebel 300 and 500 the best-selling entry-level cruiser models in the powersports industry in a year when a Rebel could cost more than eleven thousand dollars. Both things are true. They are just true about different motorcycles wearing the same name.
How to shop the 2023 range
The first question is whether you want a small cruiser or a Honda cruiser. Those are not the same question any more. If the job is learning to ride, commuting, and being able to hold the bike up at a stop light, nothing higher in the range does it better than the 500, and paying more inside the family buys you a machine that is harder to do that job with.
If the job is covering distance with luggage, the 1100T is the honest answer and the 500 is not a cheaper version of it. The two bikes share a badge and very little else. Treating the 1100T as an upsell from the 500 is the mistake we see most often in dealership shopping, and it usually ends with somebody riding a bike that is heavier than they wanted.
It is also a good year to look at what four model years of inflation did to this bike, because the answer is: not much. The base Rebel 500 opened at $6,199 in 2020 and at $6,449 in 2023, which is three steps of $100, $100 and $50 across four model years. Whatever Honda was doing with the top of the Rebel range, it was clearly protecting the entry price at the bottom of it.
Within the 500 itself, the 2023 ladder is $6,449, $6,749 and $6,949. Those are small gaps in absolute terms. On a used 2023, the difference between two bikes' service history will matter more than the difference between two trims.
The short version
2023 is the year the Rebel name got too big for the claim Honda kept making about it, while the cheapest bike wearing that name went on leading the segment. For how that looked next to the rest of the market, see the best-selling motorcycles of 2023, and for the Rebel against Harley-Davidson, Indian and BMW that year, see our 2023 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.
