The Gold Wing and the Touring Class Nobody Else Enters
Updated: 2 days ago
Ask which motorcycle is the best full dress tourer and the question runs into trouble before anyone answers it. In the United States that format has essentially one serious entrant, and the bikes buyers line up against it are built to answer a different question. This post is about what happens to a category when almost nobody else enters it.
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A full dresser and a bagger are not the same purchase
The distinction sounds like enthusiast pedantry and it is not. A bagger carries a fairing and hard saddlebags and stops there. A full dresser adds a top box, a passenger backrest and passenger accommodation built for hours rather than errands, and treats audio, navigation and weather protection as structural rather than bolted on.
Harley's 2024 Street Glide is a bagger. It runs the Milwaukee-Eight 117 at 130 lb-ft at 3,250 rpm, weighs 811 lb, carries a 12.3 inch TFT display and four ride modes, and launched at $25,999. That is an enormous and highly capable motorcycle, and it is not organised around the passenger. When Harley wanted a full dress bike in that same family for 2025 it added one, the Street Glide Ultra, at $30,749. The gap between those two prices is the gap between the categories, stated by the manufacturer itself.
Which is why the comparison buyers reach for first, Gold Wing against Street Glide, is usually not a comparison at all. Anyone weighing those two has not finished narrowing the decision, because the bikes answer different questions. The bagger question is what a rider wants under them on a long solo weekend. The full dresser question is what a passenger will still sit on at hour six.
What Honda changed in 2021, and what it deliberately did not
The 2021 update is the line that matters when you read a used listing. The trunk grew by 11 litres to 61 litres, which Honda described the way owners actually measure it: two full face helmets. Android Auto was added alongside the CarPlay already fitted. Speaker output was quoted at 45 watts. The range ran from $23,900 to $32,600 depending on trim.
Almost nothing else changed, and that is the interesting part. No new engine, no new frame, no repositioning. Honda fixed the two complaints that had followed the previous redesign, luggage volume and phone compatibility, then left the motorcycle alone. Prices have drifted upward since without the bike being reinvented, which is how a manufacturer behaves when no rival product is applying pressure.
Compare that with the rest of this series between 2020 and 2025. Harley redesigned the Street Glide and cut the base price. Indian replaced the Scout's engine. BMW replaced the GS and then watched the Adventure variant overtake the standard bike. Honda changed the Gold Wing's luggage and its phone integration.
The competitive field, or the absence of one
The other three manufacturers answer touring, they just answer it in other formats. BMW's touring volume sits in adventure touring, where the GS pair alone accounted for roughly 30 percent of BMW Motorrad's global sales in 2022. People cross continents on a GS and it is still not a full dresser: no trunk as standard, no integrated stereo, a 33.5 inch standard seat and a riding position built for standing up. Harley and Indian concentrate on the American bagger, where Indian pushed the Challenger directly at the Road Glide.
A useful provenance reminder, because it applies to every sales claim in this series: Harley, Indian and Honda publish no model-level unit sales, and BMW is the only one of the four that does.
Nobody can tell you how many Gold Wings sell
That reminder does real work here. There is no published figure for Gold Wing volume in any year covered by this series, so the argument in this post is categorical rather than commercial. The claim is not that the Gold Wing outsells its rivals. The claim is that in the full dress format, in the United States, it does not have many rivals to outsell. Those are different statements, and only one of them is supportable from public data.
That distinction gets flattened constantly by pages publishing confident unit numbers for models whose manufacturers never released any. We set out what the available data can and cannot support in what sales data cannot tell you. The Gold Wing is the clearest case of a strong category argument with no numerical one behind it.
What the owner record says the deciding factor really is
Owner reporting on this bike is unusually consistent, and it does not lead with the things the brochure leads with. The complaint that recurs most, and the one owners themselves say should decide the purchase, is weight at parking speed. The same riders who describe the mass disappearing once the bike is rolling are blunt that it reappears the moment they are pushing it backwards up a slope. Reverse is standard and the DCT adds a forward crawl, and owners rate both highly precisely because the underlying problem is real.
The second recurring complaint is the audio. Owners report they cannot hear the stereo at highway speed and cite the 45 watt figure as the reason, and the near universal workaround is to give up on the speakers and move to in helmet audio. The third is the side cases, which the 2021 trunk fix did not address. We collected the full pattern in Gold Wing owner reports.
Read together, those complaints describe a motorcycle under no real pressure to fix its remaining weaknesses. A 45 watt stereo owners cannot hear survives model year after model year because nothing in the showroom next door forces the issue.
What this means for a buyer today
Stop comparing a Gold Wing to a bagger and start deciding which category you are buying. If you ride alone and want the American touring format, the bagger side of the room has several credible answers, including a Street Glide that got substantially better in 2024. If you ride two up for long days and want a top box, integrated audio and reverse as standard, the field narrows fast, and the price ceilings say why. For what that budget buys across brands, what $25,000 bought between 2020 and 2025 covers the same ground from the money side.
On the Gold Wing specifically, the used decision is unusually clean. A 2021 or later bike buys you the 61 litre trunk and Android Auto, and a pre-2021 bike is the same motorcycle underneath for less money. The transmission choice is permanent, so ride both. And do the test nobody does on a dealer lot: with the engine off, walk it backwards up the mildest slope you can find, because that is the situation every owner complaint about weight is actually describing.
One gear note, since a full fairing changes what you need. Gold Wing hands take far less wind and weather than they would on a naked bike, so the deciding factor in a glove is usually not waterproofing but how it fits after a few thousand miles. Owners of these bikes keep gear for years, which makes break in behaviour matter more than showroom fit. Legendary USA has a straightforward explanation of how leather gloves stretch and break in that is worth reading before you size a pair.
The short version
The Gold Wing holds a category rather than winning a contest. Honda updated the luggage and the phone integration in 2021 and left everything else alone, which is what a manufacturer does when the format has no direct rival. The American baggers are excellent and they are not the same purchase. And since no public figure for Gold Wing volume exists, this has to be stated as a categorical argument, not a sales one.
Cover photo: "Honda GOLD WING in the Honda Collection Hall" by Rainmaker47, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
