2024 is the year the argument stops being interesting. Harley rebuilt the Street Glide from the ground up, put the Milwaukee-Eight 117 in it as standard, took weight out, and dropped the base price by about $2,000 against the bike it replaced. Then the company said in its own annual release that the new touring machines drove its US Touring market share to 74.5%. One line on sourcing, because it carries less weight this year than in any other. Harley still does not publish model level units, so this is still a consensus pick rather than a measured result. What changed is that the company attached its own name to a claim about these specific motorcycles, which is closer to corroboration than anything available for 2020 through 2023. The pick is the same kind of pick. It is simply much better supported. The 2024 Street Glide First, the naming. For MY2024 Harley collapsed the Street Glide and the Street Glide Special into a single model, so from this year the answer is just the Street Glide. There is no Special to distinguish it from. Milwaukee-Eight 117, 1923cc, 130 lb-ft at 3,250 rpm and 105 hp. Weight 811 lb, down from 827. Seat 26.1 inches laden and 28.1 unladen. A 12.3 inch TFT display running Skyline OS, four ride modes, rear suspension travel up to 3 inches, and a claimed 60% average reduction in helmet buffeting. Base price in Vivid Black $25,999, excluding freight of around $850. Harley described the work as the most comprehensive product development in the touring platform in well over 10 years. Set the specs against the 2023 Special and the phrase holds up: 55cc more displacement, 12 lb-ft more torque, 16 lb less weight, and an entirely new dash and electronics architecture. A redesign that arrived with a price cut The unusual part is the money. More engine, more torque, less weight and a new electronics platform, and the base price went from $27,999 to $25,999. Manufacturers rarely do all four of those in the same model year, and almost never do the first three and the fourth together. The freight caveat does not rescue the comparison either. The $25,999 excludes roughly $850 of it, and the $27,999 it replaced excluded freight on the same basis, so the gap survives intact. It is a reduction on the sticker rather than an accounting rearrangement, which is the part that makes it unusual. Harley's own claim on the result: the launch of the new Street Glide and Road Glide touring motorcycles contributed to nearly 5% growth in the US Touring segment and drove the company's market share to 74.5%. That sentence is why 2024 is the strongest year in this series. It is not a model level sales figure, but it is the manufacturer naming these two motorcycles and attaching a measured share outcome to them. The shipment table shows what was happening around that success. Total shipments were 148,862, well down from 179,984 in 2023. Grand American Touring took 85,757 of it, which is 57.6% of everything Harley shipped worldwide. Cruiser took 46,235, Sport and Lightweight 12,335, Adventure Touring 4,535. Read those two facts together and the picture is precise. Touring did not grow in absolute terms; it shipped fewer units than in 2023. It grew as a share of a smaller company, and it grew inside the specific US segment Harley chose to measure and report. Both things are true, and only one of them is the headline. For how that looked against the rest of the industry, see our best selling motorcycles of 2024 roundup. What it means if you are buying one used A 2024 is the first model year of a redesigned motorcycle, which normally argues for waiting. The counterweight here is the price. $25,999 was the cheapest way into a 117 powered Street Glide, and the number went back up the following year, so the usual first year discount logic runs backward: the launch year is the cheap one. If you are cross shopping a late M8 114 Special against a 2024, the differences are not cosmetic. Different engine, 55cc more displacement, 130 lb-ft against 118, 16 lb less to hold up at a stop light, an unladen seat an inch taller at 28.1 inches, and a 12.3 inch screen where there used to be gauges. Those are different motorcycles that share a silhouette. The parts of the 2024 that are hardest to judge from a spec sheet are the ones that are new rather than bigger: Skyline OS, the four ride modes, and how the redesigned fairing behaves once it has a few winters on it. That is what owner reports on living with the Street Glide are for, and it is the check we would run before signing for an early build. For the four brand comparison, see Harley vs Indian vs Honda vs BMW, 2024. 2024 is the year Harley made the answer easy. It is also the only year the company came close to saying it out loud. Cover photo: "Harley-Davidson Street Glide parked at Hogs for Hospice, Leamington, Ontario, 2025-08-02 04" by Chris Woodrich, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The Street Glide led Harley's lineup again in 2025, in a year that was hard on the company and hard on the bike's own case. Global retail sales fell 12% and North America fell 13%. Harley itself flagged weakness in the Touring category in the first half of the year, as customer traffic declined and affordability became more of a focus. The Street Glide's base price went up $1,750. Sourcing got worse this year, and that is worth saying up front. Harley publishes shipments by family and no model level units, so this was always going to be a consensus pick. What changed in 2025 is that the annual release names no models at all. The company statement that backed the 2024 answer has no 2025 equivalent, and the 74.5% US Touring share figure belongs to 2024 and should not be carried forward into this year by anyone, including us. The 2025 Street Glide Mechanically this is the 2024 motorcycle. Milwaukee-Eight 117, 1923cc, 130 lb-ft at 3,250 rpm, 811 lb, seat 26.1 inches laden and 28.1 unladen. What changed is the price: $25,999 became $27,749. Around it, the range widened at the top. A Street Glide Ultra joined at $30,749. Four CVOs were on sale: CVO Street Glide and CVO Road Glide at $45,999, CVO Road Glide ST at $44,999, and a CVO Pan America at $29,249. Elsewhere Harley added a Pan America 1250 ST at $19,999, and the Sportster S gained 60% more rear travel at $15,999. Jochen Zeitz, who ran the restructuring that opens this series back in 2020, announced his retirement in April 2025. The period that began with The Rewire and ended with a $27,749 Street Glide is, in leadership terms, one continuous stretch. The year the price and the market moved in opposite directions Put Harley's own description of the year next to its own price list and the tension is obvious. The company said customer traffic declined and affordability became more of a focus. The best selling motorcycle in its lineup went up $1,750, taking back all but $250 of the $2,000 the 2024 redesign had knocked off. The numbers around that: 124,477 units shipped, down from 148,862. Grand American Touring 69,252, Cruiser 41,172, Sport and Lightweight 9,638, Adventure Touring 4,415. Global retail 132,535, down 12%. North America 89,132, down 13%. Every family fell. The lineup additions pointed the same direction. A Street Glide Ultra at $30,749 and four CVOs between $29,249 and $45,999 widened the range upward in the year Harley said affordability had become more of a focus. The clearest move the other way, a Sportster S at $15,999 with 60% more rear travel, landed in the segment that had already fallen to 9,638 units. So 2025 is a mirror of 2024. Same motorcycle, more money, into a market Harley had publicly described as more price sensitive than the year before. Whether the price rise caused any of the decline is not something the public data can answer, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. What it does establish is that the affordability argument and the pricing decision were happening in the same building at the same time. For the industry wide picture that year, see our best selling motorcycles of 2025 roundup. How to read a win in a down year Best seller is a relative measure, and 2025 is the year to remember that. The Street Glide leading the lineup does not mean it sold more than it did in 2024. On the family numbers it almost certainly sold fewer: Grand American Touring shipped 69,252 against 85,757 the year before. Leading a category that shrank is still leading, and it is still the correct answer to the question asked, but it describes position rather than momentum. The practical version for a buyer is simpler than the corporate version. The 2024 and the 2025 are the same motorcycle. Same engine, same torque, same weight, same seat height, same screen. The 2024 launched $1,750 cheaper. That leaves the 2025's case resting on condition, mileage, color and whatever warranty is left, rather than on anything mechanical, which is an unusual position for the newer of two model years to be in. If you are weighing a used 2024 against a used 2025, the specification sheet will not separate them, so the separation has to come from how these bikes behave once they have miles on them. That is the ground covered in owner reports on living with the Street Glide. For where Harley sat against Indian, Honda and BMW as the market turned, see Harley vs Indian vs Honda vs BMW, 2025. Six years, one answer, and a $27,749 version of the bike that started the run at $27,699. The Street Glide never lost the lineup. It just stopped being cheap to be the one that wins. Cover photo: "Harley-Davidson Street Glide parked at Hogs for Hospice, Leamington, Ontario, 2025-08-02 04" by Chris Woodrich, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

2021 was the year Harley's shipments went from 145,246 to 188,494, and the year almost nobody was writing about the Street Glide. The attention belonged to the Pan America in February and the Sportster S in July, two new platforms built on a new engine. The bagger won the year anyway, quietly, while the coverage went elsewhere. A word on how this answer is reached, because it is the same every year. There is no Harley document, in any year, that lists motorcycles sold by model. The strongest public evidence is the shipment table in the company's own filings, and that table stops at family level. Add Harley's own marketing language and you get a consensus pick, which is what the Street Glide Special is here. It is not a number waiting to be looked up. The 2021 Street Glide Special Milwaukee-Eight 114, 1868cc, 118 lb-ft at 3,250 rpm. Seat height 26.1 inches laden and 27.2 unladen. 827 lb. Base price in Vivid Black, excluding freight, was $27,099. That torque figure is the one worth pinning down. Harley's published number for the same M8 114 in 2020 was around 122 to 123 lb-ft at roughly 3,000 rpm, and from MY2021 it became 118 lb-ft at 3,250. Nothing was taken out of the engine. The way the figure was published changed. MY2021 is where the number people quote for the rest of the 114 era starts. Note also that the price went down. $27,699 in 2020, $27,099 in 2021, a $600 reduction on the base Vivid Black bike in the year demand came back. That is the cheapest the M8 114 Special gets across the four years it was sold in this form, and it is worth remembering when the 2025 pricing arrives later in this series. The trim caveat still applies. Street Glide and Street Glide Special were separate SKUs through MY2023, with the Special the likelier individual winner, and the Road Glide sells close enough that no public data separates the two. The rebound, and where the attention went February 2021 brought the Pan America 1250, Harley's first adventure motorcycle, on the new Revolution Max 1250. July brought the Sportster S on the Revolution Max 1250T. Two genuinely new machines in one year, both liquid cooled, neither of them a bagger, and both of them a public argument that Harley was no longer only a cruiser and touring company. The shipment table tells a different story about where the money came from. Of 188,494 units shipped, Grand American Touring accounted for 93,961. Cruiser took 59,494. Sportster and Street took 25,123. Adventure Touring, the reporting category that existed because the Pan America now existed, took 9,916. Grand American Touring shipped nearly ten times what Adventure Touring did, in the year Adventure Touring was the story. That is the whole shape of 2021 in one comparison. The new bikes changed what Harley was allowed to be described as. The touring platform paid for the year. The reporting category itself is a tell. Adventure Touring did not exist as a Harley line item before there was an adventure Harley to put in it, and 9,916 units in a first year is a real result for a platform that had not previously existed. It is also less than eleven percent of what Grand American Touring shipped across the same twelve months. It also explains why 2021 is a stronger evidence year than 2020 despite getting less coverage. In 2020, Touring led Cruiser by 838 units. In 2021, Grand American Touring led Cruiser by more than 34,000. The gap the Street Glide Special sits inside got much wider, and it did so in a year with no production shutdown and no inventory purge distorting the mix. For the industry wide view, see our best selling motorcycles of 2021 roundup. What that gap is worth to a used buyer now 2021 Street Glide Specials are common on the used market, and mechanically they are the same motorcycle as 2022 and 2023: M8 114, 118 lb-ft at 3,250, 827 lb, 26.1 inch laden seat. What separates the three years is price and paint, and 2021 is the cheapest of them at $27,099 new. Set that against the bikes that got the headlines. The Pan America and the Sportster S from the same year are rarer, and both were first year machines on an engine family that had not existed twelve months earlier. First year bikes on new platforms are interesting. They are not usually the low risk purchase. The volume bike from 2021 is the one with the deepest pool of parts, service history and people who have already found the problems. That is the practical case for the boring answer, and it is the same case Harley's own accountants were making. We looked at how the four major brands stacked up against each other that year in Harley vs Indian vs Honda vs BMW, 2021. The Street Glide Special won 2021 without being the story of 2021. Those are two different things, and the gap between them is most of what makes the year interesting. Cover photo: "Harley-Davidson Street Glide parked at Hogs for Hospice, Leamington, Ontario, 2025-08-02 04" by Chris Woodrich, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

By 2023 the Scout family had reached its widest point: seven SKUs under a single name, sharing one engine and one frame. The same year, Polaris was telling investors that Indian's North American market share had climbed above 13 percent, up from 2 percent in 2014. Those two facts are related, but not in the direct way most write-ups imply. How we know what we know: Indian's parent company publishes no per-model unit numbers, which puts the Scout's ranking in the category of well-supported opinion rather than fact on a page. The claim is also about the platform, and in 2023 that platform is seven distinct motorcycles. Nothing public splits them. If you want a specific Scout named as the winner, no honest source can give you one. The Scout in 2023 Unchanged mechanically, again. The 1133cc liquid-cooled 60 degree V-twin held at 100 hp and 72 lb-ft, seat height at 25.6 inches. The Scout Bobber listed at $12,249 and the base Scout at $13,249. Weight we continue to omit, because the published wet and dry figures for this generation cannot be reconciled. The real 2023 story on the spec sheet is the breadth. Seven SKUs meant Bobber and base Scout variants, Rogue variants, and Sixty versions of several of them, spread across a range that ran from the Bobber's $12,249 upward, with essentially identical mechanicals underneath. One engine, one chassis, seven answers to what a rider wants the bike to look and sit like. That is a specific and deliberate product strategy, and it is a large part of why the platform kept winning. A buyer who bounced off the Bobber's stance had somewhere else to go without leaving the family or the price band. It is also, from a manufacturing standpoint, the cheapest possible way to grow a lineup. Seven SKUs from one engine and one frame means one set of emissions certifications, one service procedure and one parts inventory, with the variation loaded into bodywork and ergonomics. That is how a company with Indian's volume can offer choice that would otherwise only be available from a much larger manufacturer. The 13 Percent Number, and What It Does Not Mean Polaris cited Indian North American market share above 13 percent in this period, against 2 percent in 2014. As a measure of what Indian built in a decade from a standing start, it is a genuinely large number and the most quotable thing the company said about itself in these years. It is also brand-level, and the distinction matters more than it might seem. That figure covers every Indian model sold in North America. It is not a Scout number, it is not a segment number, and it says nothing about how any individual Indian model performed against any individual competitor. A post that quotes it in a paragraph about the Scout, without saying so, is letting readers draw a conclusion the number does not support. It is also worth being clear that the figure came from Polaris rather than from an independent registrar, which is normal for this kind of investor-facing statistic and still worth stating. Companies choose which slice of a market to measure and when to mention it. That does not make the number wrong. It does mean it should be read as the company's own framing of its own progress. Specifically, it does not mean Indian outsold Harley-Davidson in any segment. Share above 13 percent in North America is share of a market in which Harley remained by far the larger American brand by volume. The correct reading is that Indian went from marginal to substantial in roughly ten years, and the Scout platform was the biggest single contributor to that. The incorrect reading is that a share figure settles a head-to-head. What a Seven-SKU Lineup Does to the Used Market The practical consequence of the widest year shows up now, on the used listings. 2023 Scouts appear under a lot of different names, and those names describe cosmetic and ergonomic packages rather than mechanical differences. A Rogue and a Bobber are the same motorcycle in the ways that determine maintenance cost and reliability, and different in the ways that determine whether you enjoy sitting on it. That is good news for a buyer with a clear preference and a trap for one without. Shop by seat, bar position, fairing and wheel size, because the engine argument is already settled: they all have the same one. Cross-shopping a Bobber against a Rogue on horsepower is wasted effort. It is also the last full year of the 1133 platform at its most developed, before the transitional 2024 and the replacement in 2025. See the 2023 best sellers roundup for how the other three brands' leaders were positioned in the same year. 2023 is the year to point at when someone asks how Indian built a modern business, as long as the brand-level share figure and the platform-level sales claim are kept in separate boxes. Our 2023 four-brand comparison runs the four category leaders side by side. Cover photo: "Indian Scout (20938880732)" by Bob Adams from Amanzimtoti, South Africa, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

2022 gave Indian two headline platform moves in a single model year. The Chief arrived as an entirely new motorcycle, and the FTR was rebuilt around a different set of wheels and tires. Neither one outsold the midsize cruiser that had been carrying over largely unchanged for years. The usual disclosure applies and it is not boilerplate. Polaris reports no unit figures by model for Indian, so the Scout's position here is consensus rather than arithmetic. It is also a platform claim: the Scout name covered five to seven SKUs depending on the year, and no source separates them. Anyone who tells you which specific Scout led 2022 is guessing. The 2022 case is somewhat firmer than 2020 or 2021, but it is still a call, not a count. The Scout in 2022 The 1133cc liquid-cooled 60 degree V-twin carried over at 100 hp and 72 lb-ft, with the 25.6 inch seat unchanged. Pricing is where we have to hedge: our figure for the 2022 Scout Bobber is roughly $12,249, and that number is soft. It may reflect later-cycle pricing rather than the price on the window sticker in early 2022. Treat it as an approximation, not a quote. The lineup did widen. The Scout Rogue and Rogue Sixty joined for 2022 at $11,499 and $9,999, adding a quarter fairing and a different bar and seat treatment to the family. That matters more than it sounds: it is the platform absorbing another two SKUs and covering more of the price ladder without a new engine or frame. Weight is again omitted. The figures published for this generation of Bobber, 552 lb wet and 533 lb dry, are not reconcilable, and printing either one as the spec would be false precision. Two New Platforms, and Neither One Won The all-new Chief was a 2022 model. It is worth stating that clearly, because it was revealed in February 2021 and gets called the 2021 Chief constantly. It is not. The bike went on sale as a MY2022 motorcycle, built on a new steel-tube frame with a round headlight and a four-inch round TFT display, powered by the Thunderstroke 111 at 1811cc and 108 lb-ft or the Thunderstroke 116 at 1890cc and 120 lb-ft. Seat height 26 inches, 670 lb in base form, and six variants spanning $14,499 to $20,999. The FTR changed in a less visible but more consequential way. For 2022 Indian pulled the 19 inch front and 18 inch rear wire wheels and replaced them with 17 inch cast wheels on sportbike rubber. That is not a styling refresh. It changes what tires the bike can run, what it steers like and who the bike is for, and it moved the FTR decisively away from its flat-track costume toward being a street naked. So Indian entered 2022 having rebuilt its heritage cruiser from the frame up and re-aimed its performance model at a different rider. Both were substantial engineering commitments. The platform that led volume was the one that got two new trim variants and a price adjustment. The Chief's own spec sheet shows how far it sat from the Scout's territory. Two engine choices, six variants, a 26 inch seat and 670 lb in base form put it in a different weight class and a different conversation entirely, even before the price ladder starting at $14,499 is considered. The two bikes were never really competing for the same buyer, which is exactly why Indian could launch one without denting the other. How to Weigh a Platform Win Against Two New Platforms The reflex is to read this as the new bikes failing. That is the wrong conclusion. A new Chief in its first model year is competing against a Scout family with years of dealer familiarity behind it, a lower price and a lower seat, and first-year volume for a heritage cruiser starting at $14,499 was never going to match a platform whose Rogue Sixty opened at $9,999. The more useful read is about where a brand's volume actually lives versus where its identity lives. Indian's identity in 2022 was the Chief, a bike explicitly about the company's own history. Indian's volume was a liquid-cooled midsize cruiser that looks almost nothing like the rest of the catalog. Both things were true at once, and the company was clearly comfortable with that. For a used shopper, 2022 is the year the Scout family got wide enough that you should decide which Scout you want before you start looking. Bobber, base, Rogue and the Sixty variants ride and sit differently despite sharing an engine. Our 2022 best sellers roundup covers how the rest of the market looked that year. 2022 is the clearest illustration in this series that new does not mean top-selling. Two significant platform moves, and the volume stayed where it had been. The 2022 four-brand comparison puts that alongside what Harley, Honda and BMW were doing in the same twelve months. Cover photo: "Indian Scout (20938880732)" by Bob Adams from Amanzimtoti, South Africa, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

For one year, Harley published something close to a model level number, and the Street Glide Special was in it. The 120th anniversary limited editions came with stated build counts, and that allocation is the nearest thing to a per model figure the company put on paper anywhere between 2020 and 2025. 2023 was also the last year the Special existed as its own SKU. State the limits plainly before the numbers arrive. None of what follows is model level sales. Harley reports shipments by family and nothing finer, and a build count for a limited edition is an allocation decision made in advance, not a sales result recorded afterward. The Street Glide Special as 2023's best seller remains a consensus pick, and the Road Glide remains close enough that nobody should describe the gap as measured. The 2023 Street Glide Special Milwaukee-Eight 114, 1868cc, 118 lb-ft at 3,250 rpm. Seat 26.1 inches laden, 27.2 unladen. 827 lb. Base Vivid Black price $27,999, excluding freight. Look at the pricing across the three carryover years and the direction is consistent: $27,099 in 2021, $27,449 in 2022, $27,999 in 2023. Nearly $1,000 added to a motorcycle whose engine, weight and seat height did not change. 2023 is the top of that curve and the end of the line for this version of the bike. It is the final year of the M8 114 Street Glide Special and the final year Street Glide and Street Glide Special were sold as separate models. Everything after this is a single Street Glide with a different engine. What the anniversary allocation actually shows Harley built seven 120th anniversary limited editions and published a build count for each: Fat Boy 114 at 3,000, Heritage Classic at 1,700, Street Glide Special at 1,600, Road Glide Special at 1,600, CVO Road Glide Limited at 1,500, Ultra Limited at 1,300 and Tri Glide at 1,100. Read it carefully, because it is not a sales ranking. The largest run went to the Fat Boy 114, which is a cruiser, so anyone using this list as a straight volume table gets the wrong answer immediately. What it does show is where Harley was willing to commit inventory at a premium price, and five of the seven runs went to machines from the touring and trike end of the range. The detail that matters most is that the Street Glide Special and the Road Glide Special were allocated exactly the same number, 1,600 each. That is a neat, self contained illustration of why nobody should assert that one outsold the other. The company with the actual data split the anniversary allocation between them down the middle. The seven runs total 11,800 motorcycles. Set against 179,984 shipped worldwide that year, the entire anniversary program is about 6.6% of Harley's volume. That proportion is a useful reminder of what a build count is: a marketing allocation sitting on top of an ordinary production year, not a measurement of one. The family shipment numbers for the year: 179,984 total, Grand American Touring 92,683 and up 3.2%, Cruiser 63,945, Sport and Lightweight 18,228, Adventure Touring 5,128. The Sport and Lightweight figure is the air cooled Sportster discontinuation from the end of 2022 landing in the accounts. The touring platform grew while the segment below it fell by nearly half. For the same year across every brand, see our best selling motorcycles of 2023 roundup. A soft signal, and where it stops Build counts are worth something. They tell you where a manufacturer believes it can sell 1,600 special edition motorcycles at a premium, and that belief is informed by real sales data Harley holds and the public does not. It is a signal about where the volume sits, and in a period with no model level reporting at all, a signal is not nothing. It is still not a sales figure, and it should not be dressed up as one. An allocation can be wrong. A limited edition can sell out because it was under built or sit because it was over built, and Harley has never published which of those happened to any of the seven. The other limit is scope. Counts were published for the anniversary editions only, so there is no equivalent figure for the standard Street Glide Special that made up the overwhelming majority of the ones actually sold. The 1,600 describes a special version of the bike. It does not describe the bike. So the honest version of 2023 is this: the touring platform grew while everything else shrank, Harley spent more than half its anniversary allocation on touring machines, and the Street Glide Special and Road Glide Special were treated as equals in that allocation. That is as close as this period gets to a model level statement, and it is still an inference. How the other three brands were positioned that year is in Harley vs Indian vs Honda vs BMW, 2023. 2023 gave the Street Glide Special a number of its own for the first and only time. It just was not the number anyone actually wanted. Cover photo: "Harley-Davidson Street Glide parked at Hogs for Hospice, Leamington, Ontario, 2025-08-02 04" by Chris Woodrich, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

2021 was the largest year Indian Motorcycle had in this six-year window. The brand's global volume passed 30,000 units, and it did not do so again through 2025. The Scout platform carried that peak, which makes 2021 the most flattering year in the series for it and, awkwardly, one of the two least documented. About the sourcing. Neither Polaris nor Indian releases unit sales by model, so this is a judgment call rather than a published fact, and it applies to the Scout as a platform of five to seven SKUs rather than to any one bike in it. Nothing in the public record shows which individual Scout sold best in 2021. The platform call itself is retroactive: it is built by reading a 2024 Indian statement backward onto a year the company said nothing specific about at the time. We would rather say that plainly than dress it up. The Scout in 2021 Mechanically the 2021 Scout was the 2020 Scout. The 1133cc liquid-cooled 60 degree V-twin was unchanged at 100 hp and 72 lb-ft at 6,000 rpm, and seat height stayed at 25.6 inches. The Scout Bobber held its $10,999 price, and the base Scout listed at $11,499. Weight is the one number we will not print for this generation. The available figures, 552 lb wet against 533 lb dry, come from incompatible measuring conventions and cannot be reconciled into a single honest spec. We leave it blank rather than guess. A carryover year is not a criticism. The Scout's proposition was a low seat, a willing high-revving twin and a price of $10,999, and none of those needed fixing in 2021. What is interesting about the year is not the motorcycle. It is the number the motorcycle helped produce. The step from the Bobber's $10,999 to the base Scout's $11,499 is worth noticing, because it is close to the only decision the 2021 range asked of a buyer. Both bikes ran identical engines. What separated them was fender coverage, bar height and general posture, and that pattern of charging a small premium for a different look on identical mechanicals is how the family grew in every later year. The Year Indian Passed 30,000 Indian's global volume crossed 30,000 units in 2021 for the first and only time between 2020 and 2025. That is a brand-level figure covering every model Indian sold worldwide, from the Scout up through the Chieftain and the Challenger, and it is worth being precise about what it does and does not say. It does not say how many Scouts were sold. It does not break out any model. What it establishes is scale: 2021 is the high-water mark against which every later Indian year in this series gets measured, and by 2024 the same measure had fallen to 25,792. Knowing that the peak was 2021 changes how you read everything after it. There is a tension here that is worth naming rather than smoothing over. 2021 is simultaneously Indian's strongest year in the window and one of the two years where the Scout call is weakest. A big brand number and a thin model-level record are not the same kind of evidence, and stacking them together to imply the Scout personally delivered 30,000 units would be a misreading of both. The honest version is narrower: Indian had its best year, and the Scout was the platform most likely to have led it. It is also worth resisting the urge to explain the peak. 2021 was an unusual year across the whole motorcycle market, and any tidy story about why Indian crossed 30,000 exactly then would be a story we cannot source. What we can say is where the line was highest, and that it never got that high again in this window. What a Peak Year Is Worth to a Used Buyer Practically, a peak production year means supply. More 2021 Scouts were built than 2020 or 2024 Scouts, which shows up years later as more listings, more colors, more trim variety and slightly softer asking prices than a scarce model year commands. If you are shopping the 1133 generation on the used market, 2021 is one of the deeper pools you can fish in. It also means a bike built well into a settled production run rather than at the start of a new one. The 1133 platform had years of market history behind it by 2021, with no engine or frame change pending until the 2025 redesign. Buyers who care about avoiding first-year quirks generally like that profile. What a peak year does not tell you is anything about condition, and volume years produce plenty of neglected examples alongside good ones. Our 2021 best sellers roundup covers what the other three brands were leading with while Indian was setting its record. 2021 belongs in this series as the peak, with the caveat that the peak is a brand fact and the Scout is a platform inference. Reading those two claims at their correct strengths is most of the work. Our 2021 four-brand comparison sets the Scout against the year's other category leaders. Cover photo: "Indian Scout (20938880732)" by Bob Adams from Amanzimtoti, South Africa, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

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.

The same four bikes led their categories again in 2021: Harley-Davidson's Street Glide family, Indian's Scout platform, Honda's Rebel 500, and BMW's R 1250 GS with its Adventure sibling. What changed was the volume underneath them. 2021 is the year the numbers came back. A Note on Where These Numbers Come From Harley-Davidson publishes no model-level unit sales. Polaris publishes none for Indian. Honda publishes none for the US market. BMW Motorrad is the only one of these four that puts model-level figures in public, and even BMW only split individual models out for the first time in its 2025 report. That means three of these four are consensus picks, resting on the family-level shipment data the companies do publish and on the companies' own marketing language about their own products. It is a defensible call. It is not a sales chart, and we will not invent a unit number to make it look like one. 2021 is a better-evidenced year than 2020 on both the Harley and Indian side, and BMW actually gives us a figure for the GS pair. Where a number is rounded, combined across models, or brand-level rather than model-level, we say so in the sentence rather than burying it. Harley-Davidson: the Street Glide Family Harley shipped 188,494 motorcycles in 2021, up from 145,246 the year before. Grand American Touring took 93,961 of them, Cruiser 59,494, Sportster and Street 25,123, and the newly created Adventure Touring category 9,916. Touring was half the company. The Street Glide is the bike most people mean when they say touring. The trim caveat still applies. Through model year 2023 the Street Glide and the Street Glide Special were separate SKUs, and the Special was the likelier individual winner, so read this as the Street Glide family and most likely the Special. That bike ran the Milwaukee-Eight 114, 1,868cc, quoted at 118 lb-ft at 3,250 rpm, on a 26.1 inch laden seat, 827 lb, at $27,099. A note on that torque figure, because it trips people up. Harley's published number for the same M8 114 moved from roughly 123 lb-ft at 3,000 rpm to 118 lb-ft at 3,250 rpm from model year 2021. The engine did not get weaker. The published measurement changed. Anyone selling you a story about a detuned 2021 Street Glide is reading a spec sheet revision as an engineering decision. And the Road Glide still sells in the same ballpark, with nothing public separating the two. We are not going to pretend that gap has been measured. The interesting Harley news in 2021 was elsewhere. The Pan America 1250 arrived in February, the company's first adventure bike, on the new Revolution Max 1250. The Sportster S followed in July on the Revolution Max 1250T. Those two bikes are why an Adventure Touring line exists in the shipment table at all. Neither came close to the Street Glide on volume, and neither was supposed to. They were Harley proving it could still build something that was not a bagger. Indian: the Scout Platform Scout is a platform, not a model. It spanned several SKUs, and no public source establishes which individual Scout led in any year, so the sourceable claim is the platform. Indian's own April 2024 release put it this way: "As our top-selling platform, Scout has long been a staple in our lineup." The Star Tribune, sourced from Polaris the same month, called Scout "the best selling model in the Indian lineup" at roughly 100,000 sold globally and cumulatively across 2014 to 2024. Cumulatively. That is a decade of sales, not a year of them. Pricing in 2021 was the strongest argument the platform had: $10,999 for the Scout Bobber, $11,499 for the base Scout. Underneath, the 1,133cc liquid-cooled V-twin made 100 hp and 72 lb-ft at 6,000 rpm on a 25.6 inch seat. We are leaving curb weight out, because the published figures conflict and do not reconcile. 2021 was Indian's high-water mark in this window. Global volume passed 30,000 units for the first and only time across these six years, per motorcyclesdata. That is a brand figure, not a model figure, and it is worth being precise about the difference: it tells you Indian had a very good year, not how many Scouts left showrooms. Honda: the Rebel 500 The Rebel 500 carried on mechanically unchanged: 471cc liquid-cooled parallel twin, 27.2 inch seat, 408 lb, 414 lb with ABS, at $6,299, $6,599 with ABS, and $6,799 for the new ABS SE trim. Honda US publishes no torque figure for this bike in any year, and the European number is not verified for MY2021, so there is none here. The Rebel's actual 2021 story is the model that appeared above it. The Rebel 1100 launched using the Africa Twin's 1,084cc parallel twin, at $9,299 for the manual and $9,999 for the DCT version, with a 27.5 inch seat, 509 lb in DCT form, and three ride modes. That DCT bike is the first genuine automatic in a mainstream US cruiser, and it is a considerably more interesting piece of engineering than anything on the Street Glide's spec sheet that year. Honda also reworked the Gold Wing: trunk up 11 litres to 61, enough for two full-face helmets, Android Auto added, 45 watt speakers, priced from $23,900 to $32,600. Two things we will not claim. The ranking between the Rebel 500 and the Rebel 300 is not established anywhere; Honda almost always claims them as a pair. And the Rebel 500 against the Grom is a genuine open question, which is why "Honda's best-selling street bike" is a phrase we avoid. The supportable claim is the small-displacement cruiser one, and it is Honda's own. BMW: the R 1250 GS This is where 2021 gets a real number. BMW published "over 60,000" for the R 1250 GS and R 1250 GS Adventure combined. Combined, and rounded, and global. There is no US model-level breakout and never has been. But it is a published figure from the manufacturer, which is more than the other three brands offer in any year of this series. It sat inside a record company year: 194,261 motorcycles, up 14.8 percent. Boxers were roughly half of everything BMW sold. For scale on the rest of the range, the S 1000 R managed 4,796 units and the M 1000 RR 1,070. The GS pair was not leading by a nose. The bike was unchanged: 1,254cc ShiftCam boxer, 136 hp at 7,750 rpm, 105 lb-ft at 6,250 rpm, 33.5 inch seat, 549 lb, $17,995, or $20,345 for the Adventure. BMW's global release gives the torque peak at 6,250 rpm while BMW USA says 6,500. We use the global figure and flag the disagreement. What 2021 Was Actually About Recovery, and what companies chose to do with it. Harley added 43,000 shipments over 2020 and spent its attention on two bikes that were not baggers. BMW set a company record and sold roughly half of it as boxers. Indian hit a volume peak it would not see again in this window. Honda launched a 1,100cc automatic cruiser into a segment that had never had one. What none of that changed was which bike led each brand. The four winners of 2021 are the four winners of 2020. The new machinery went into adjacent categories, or above the leader in the range, or into segments the brand did not previously contest. Nobody launched a direct replacement for their own best seller, which tells you those four models were not seen as problems that needed solving. The price spread is worth a second look too: $6,299 at the bottom and $27,099 at the top, with a 408 lb beginner twin and an 827 lb bagger both leading their categories in the same twelve months. Whatever decides these outcomes, it is not price and it is not size. 2021 reads like a normal year that happened to be surrounded by strange ones. Demand came back, factories ran, and the interesting product was interesting rather than urgent. The result was four category leaders repeating themselves without much drama, which is boring to report and probably the single most useful thing this series has to say: these bikes were not winning because of a moment. They kept winning after the moment passed. Cover photo: "Harley-Davidson Museum May 2024 06 (The AMF Years--1981 Nova Touring non-functional prototype--OHV V-Four)" by Michael Barera, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

A burnout spins the rear wheel against a held front brake so the tire smokes in place. It rapidly destroys rear tire tread, heats the clutch and drivetrain, and on public roads it is generally illegal, treated as reckless or exhibition driving. Legal burnouts happen on private property with permission and at sanctioned events. This is part two of Wheelies and Burnouts, the MotoGearRater series covering stunt riding as a sport. As always: this is sport journalism, not instruction. We have not performed or tested these stunts, and this post is about what a burnout is and what it costs, not how to do one. What Is a Burnout? A burnout is the simplest stunt to describe: the rear tire spins while the motorcycle stays put, friction turns rubber into heat and smoke, and the crowd reacts. In stunt competition and at V twin events it has evolved into its own discipline, with riders walking the bike in circles, drifting the rear under smoke, or holding long stationary burnouts as a finale. At contests like The Brawl, an invite only V twin stunt competition running since 2017, burnouts are a core part of how riders build a run. What Does a Burnout Do to Your Tire? Nothing good, and that is the point. A spinning tire against stationary pavement grinds away tread rubber far faster than any riding can. The heat also matters: tire compounds are engineered for a working temperature range, and a long burnout pushes the surface well past it, leaving greasy, chunked, or blistered rubber behind. Stunt riders and show riders treat rear tires as pure consumables, often running worn takeoff tires for practice because a fresh tire would be wasted. A tire that has been smoked down toward its cords is done, full stop. It is not a tire to ride home on, which is another reason this belongs at an event with a trailer, not on a street. What Does a Burnout Do to the Rest of the Bike? Clutch: getting a bike spinning in place means slipping the clutch under load. Repeated burnouts accelerate clutch plate wear and glazing, which is why clutch packs are one of the most replaced parts in stunt riding. Cooling: a stationary bike at high rpm gets no airflow. Extended burnouts push coolant and oil temperatures up fast, and air cooled V twins feel it even sooner. Chain and sprockets: shock loading and heat shorten drivetrain life, and molten rubber ends up everywhere, including packed into the chain. Everything nearby: rubber spray coats the swingarm, fender, exhaust, and shock. Show teams budget cleaning time after every smoke session. We go deeper on the wear side of the sport in our upcoming maintenance post in this series. When Are Burnouts Legal? On a public road, essentially never. Depending on where you live, a burnout can be cited as reckless or careless driving, exhibition of speed, or a specific stunting offense, and the consequences commonly stack up: fines, license points or suspension, vehicle impound in some jurisdictions, and insurance trouble afterward. Laws vary by state and country, so treat that as the general pattern rather than legal advice. Where burnouts are legal is just as clear: private property with the owner's permission, closed courses, and sanctioned events. Motorcycle rallies have long featured organized burnout contests and stunt shows, from dealership lot events to arenas like the stunt shows at Arizona Bike Week, and competitions such as The Brawl build burnouts into judged runs. The sport did not disappear when it left the street. It got organized. Does Gear Matter for Burnouts? More than people think. Riders doing walking burnouts and drift circles fall, and they fall on pavement. Armored gloves from brands like Alpinestars, Icon, and Fox, real boots, a helmet, and abrasion resistant layers are the standard at sanctioned events. Classic unarmored leather gloves, like the deerskin and goatskin work gloves sold by heritage brands such as Legendary USA, are honest everyday leather, but they are not stunt protection and we would not choose them for a stunt lot. Save the nice leather for the ride, not the smoke show. FAQ How much tire does one burnout use up? There is no fixed number, but the direction is obvious: a long smoke session can chew through more rubber than thousands of miles of normal riding. Show riders can take a tire to the cords in a single extended burnout. Do burnouts damage the engine? A brief burnout on a healthy bike is mostly a clutch and tire event. The engine risk comes from heat: no airflow, high rpm, and long duration. That combination is why extended burnouts are a show act performed on bikes that are maintained as working equipment. Is a burnout illegal even in my own driveway? Private property with the owner's permission is generally outside traffic law, though local noise and nuisance rules can still apply. The legal problems attach to public roads and to other people's property. Why do V twin events love burnouts so much? Torque and theater. Big V twins make smoke easily and sound enormous doing it, which is why burnout pits and V twin stunt contests are rally staples, and why events like The Brawl exist specifically for Harley-Davidson based stunt bikes. Can a burnout be part of a judged competition run? Yes. Modern stunt contests score overall impression, and smoke work, drift circles, and burnout transitions are standard elements riders use to fill and flavor a run. Keep Reading on MotoGearRater Start the series with Wheelies Explained. If torque monsters are your thing, see our Harley Street Bob rating and Yamaha MT-09 rating. Sources The Brawl, V twin stunt competition: https://rideanddestroy.com/thebrawl/ Arizona Bike Week stunt arena shows: https://azbikeweek.com/stunt-arena/ StuntGP world championship background: http://stuntgp.eu/ Last updated: August 7, 2026. MotoGearRater is independent. We cover stunt riding as sport journalism, we have not performed or tested these stunts, and we never recommend stunting on public roads.

The four category leaders of 2022 were the ones you already know: Harley-Davidson's Street Glide family, Indian's Scout platform, Honda's Rebel 500, and BMW's R 1250 GS with its Adventure sibling. Third year running, same four names. What makes 2022 worth writing about is not the result. It is what each of these companies quietly started doing to the platforms sitting next to their best sellers. A Note on Where These Numbers Come From Harley-Davidson publishes no model-level unit sales. Polaris publishes none for Indian. Honda publishes none for the US market. BMW Motorrad is the only one of the four that puts model-level figures in public, and even BMW only broke out individual models for the first time in its 2025 report. So three of these four are consensus picks. They rest on the family-level shipment data the companies do publish, plus the companies' own claims about their own products. That is a reasonable basis for naming a leader. It is not a sales chart, and we are not going to print a unit number we do not have. For 2022 the Harley and Indian evidence is moderate rather than thin, which is an improvement on 2020. BMW gives a real figure, rounded and combined across two models. Honda gives a segment claim about a pair of bikes. We will keep flagging which is which as we go, because the difference matters more than the conclusion. Harley-Davidson: the Street Glide Family Grand American Touring accounted for 89,849 shipments in 2022. Cruiser took 59,010, Sport and Lightweight 33,894, and Adventure Touring 10,774. Touring remained the centre of the company, and the Street Glide remained the centre of touring. The trim caveat holds for one more year. Street Glide and Street Glide Special were still separate SKUs through model year 2023, and the Special was the likelier individual winner, so read this as the family and most likely the Special. That bike: Milwaukee-Eight 114, 1,868cc, 118 lb-ft at 3,250 rpm, 26.1 inch laden seat, 827 lb, $27,449. And the Road Glide continued to sell in the same ballpark with nothing public separating them, which is a caveat we will keep repeating because it keeps being true. Here is the quiet part. In January 2022 Harley launched the Street Glide ST and the Road Glide ST, and those were the first time the Milwaukee-Eight 117 appeared outside a CVO. The big engine stopped being a limited-edition halo and started being something you could order on a regular touring bike. Two model years later that engine would be standard across the redesigned Street Glide. 2022 is where that path becomes visible. The other 2022 move was the Nightster in April, on the Revolution Max 975T. And at the end of the year, in Harley's own words in its FY2023 release, the legacy air-cooled Sportster 883 and 1200 were discontinued in North America. A model line that had run for decades ended, and the company barely paused on it. Indian: the Scout Platform Scout stayed the top-selling platform, and platform is the operative word: several SKUs, no public source establishing which individual one led. Indian's own April 2024 wording is the cleanest support available, "As our top-selling platform, Scout has long been a staple in our lineup," alongside a Polaris-sourced Star Tribune figure of roughly 100,000 sold globally and cumulatively across 2014 to 2024. Cumulative, over a decade. The 1,133cc liquid-cooled V-twin was unchanged: 100 hp, 72 lb-ft at 6,000 rpm, 25.6 inch seat. Two new entries widened the platform at the bottom, the Scout Rogue at $11,499 and the Rogue Sixty at $9,999. On the Scout Bobber's 2022 price we have seen roughly $12,249, but we hold that one loosely; it may reflect a later point in the model cycle rather than the launch figure. Weight we are leaving out entirely, because the published numbers for this generation conflict and do not reconcile. Indian's headline act was the all-new Chief, and it arrived as a model year 2022 bike. It was revealed in February 2021, which is why you will see it called a 2021 Chief in places. It is not. The Chief brought a steel tube frame, a round headlight, a four inch round TFT, and a choice of Thunderstroke 111 at 1,811cc and 108 lb-ft or Thunderstroke 116 at 1,890cc and 120 lb-ft. Seat height 26 inches, 670 lb in base form, six variants from $14,499 to $20,999. The FTR was also reworked for model year 2022, and not gently: the 19 and 18 inch wire wheels were replaced by 17 inch cast wheels wearing sportbike rubber. Indian took its flat-track-styled bike and pointed it at the road. Whatever you think of that decision, it is the company admitting what people were actually doing with it. Honda: the Rebel 500 Mechanical carryover. 471cc liquid-cooled parallel twin, 31.9 lb-ft at 6,000 rpm per Honda Europe's verified figure, 27.2 inch seat, 408 lb, 414 lb with ABS and with the SE, at $6,399, $6,699 and $6,899. Honda US still publishes no torque number for this bike, which is why the European figure is the one we quote and why we say where it comes from. Honda's 2022 marketing language is worth reading closely, because it tells you which claims the company is willing to make. It called the CRF300L "the motorcycle industry's top-selling dual-sport model" and the Grom "one of the powersports industry's most popular motorcycle models." Note the precision of the first and the vagueness of the second. Honda will name a segment leader when it has one. On the Rebel it names the pair, 300 and 500 together, which is exactly why the ranking between those two is not established and why we do not claim the Rebel 500 beats the Grom for Honda's best-selling US street bike. Nobody has published anything that settles it. BMW: the R 1250 GS BMW published "almost 60,000" for the R 1250 GS and GS Adventure combined in 2022, against "over 60,000" the year before. Rounded, combined, global. Read against a company that was growing, that is a mild drift rather than a decline, and the pair still accounted for roughly 30 percent of BMW's global volume. Two model designations, nearly a third of the company. 2022 was BMW Motorrad's first year over 200,000 motorcycles, at 202,895, up 4.4 percent and another record. US sales were 17,690. The S 1000 RR passed 10,000 units. The GS itself was untouched: 1,254cc ShiftCam boxer, 105 lb-ft at 6,250 rpm per BMW's global release, 33.5 inch seat, 549 lb, $17,995, or $20,345 for the Adventure. BMW USA lists that torque peak at 6,500 rpm; we use the global figure and note the disagreement rather than picking one silently. What 2022 Was Actually About Every one of these four companies spent 2022 working on something other than its best seller, and in three cases the work pointed at the platform underneath it. Harley let the 117 out of CVO jail and killed the air-cooled Sportster. Indian replaced the Chief outright and rebuilt the FTR's wheels and tyres around what owners were actually riding. BMW crossed 200,000 while its flagship pair softened slightly against a growing total. Honda changed nothing at all on the Rebel and kept the segment claim. None of that shows up in the 2022 result. All of it shows up later. The 117 becomes the standard Street Glide engine in 2024. The Scout gets an entirely new engine in 2025. The GS gets replaced and then watches its Adventure variant overtake it. If you want the year the six-year run stopped being a straight line, it is this one, and you would not have known it from the leaderboard. The leaderboard itself, meanwhile, still spans $6,399 to $27,449 and 408 lb to 827 lb. Three years in, that spread is the most durable fact in this series. 2022 is a year that rewards reading the product announcements more than the shipment tables. The shipment tables say nothing changed. The announcements say every one of these companies had already decided what it was going to do next, and had started doing it in public, next to a best seller nobody was touching yet. Cover photo: "Harley-Davidson Museum May 2024 06 (The AMF Years--1981 Nova Touring non-functional prototype--OHV V-Four)" by Michael Barera, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The 2025 category leaders were the Harley-Davidson Street Glide, the Indian Scout, the Honda Rebel 500 and the BMW R 1300 GS Adventure. Same four names for a sixth straight year, but for the first time in this run two of the four companies shipped fewer motorcycles than the year before, and BMW's winner was not the bike that had won every year prior. A Note on Where These Numbers Come From The standard disclosure, with one genuine improvement this year. Harley-Davidson publishes no model-level unit sales. Polaris publishes none for Indian. American Honda publishes none for the US. Those three report shipments by product family, brand-level share, and claims scoped to segments they define themselves. BMW Motorrad is the exception, and 2025 is the year it got better. This is the first report in which BMW split individual models rather than reporting the GS and GS Adventure as a combined pair. That is why the BMW section below contains two hard numbers and the other three sections contain none. So the Harley, Indian and Honda picks remain consensus rather than measurement: supported by family-level shipment data and the manufacturers' own marketing language, not by a count anyone outside those companies has seen. One further caution specific to this year. Harley's FY2025 release names no models at all, so the US touring share figure the company published for 2024 does not carry forward. We are not going to reuse it here. Harley-Davidson: The Street Glide, In a Bad Year Mechanically the Street Glide was unchanged from its 2024 redesign: Milwaukee-Eight 117 at 1,923cc, 130 lb-ft at 3,250 rpm, 811 lb, laden seat at 26.1 inches. The price went the other way. Base MSRP rose to $27,749, up $1,750 on the year, which erased most of the cut that had made the redesigned bike so notable. That is worth sitting with, because of what Harley said in the same period. The company flagged weakness in the Touring category in the first half of the year, as customer traffic declined and affordability became more of a focus. Then it raised the price of its touring volume model by $1,750. Those two facts belong next to each other. The lineup expanded upward regardless. A Street Glide Ultra arrived at $30,749, and four CVOs were on sale, topping out with the CVO Street Glide and CVO Road Glide at $45,999. A Pan America 1250 ST joined at $19,999, and the Sportster S got 60% more rear travel at $15,999. Jochen Zeitz announced his retirement in April. The shipment data is the story. Harley shipped 124,477 motorcycles worldwide in 2025, down from 148,862. Grand American Touring fell to 69,252, Cruiser to 41,172, Sport and Lightweight to 9,638, Adventure Touring to 4,415. Global retail was 132,535, down 12%, with North America at 89,132, down 13%. The Street Glide is still the pick, and we would still make it. But our confidence is softer this year than last, because Harley published nothing at model level and the segment it dominates was the one it identified as weak. Indian: The Scout, Finally New Indian's redesigned Scout reached buyers as a model year 2025 machine, and it is a genuine ground-up job: new steel-tube frame, new engine, new bodywork. The SpeedPlus 1250 displaces 1,250cc and makes 105 hp at 6,300 rpm and 82 lb-ft at 6,300, which Indian puts at 11% more power and 14% more torque than the 1,133 it replaced. The Scout Bobber is $12,999 and 522 lb as shipped, with the 25.6-inch seat carried over. Indian claims the lowest seat height in the industry. The range is now five models, each offered in Standard, Limited and Limited with Tech, running from the Scout Bobber up through the Super Scout at $16,499 and the 111 hp 101 Scout at $16,999. Below all of it sits a new Scout Sixty family on a 999cc SpeedPlus, three variants starting at $9,999. Scout remains a platform claim, not a model claim. Indian's own language is about the platform, and nothing public establishes which individual Scout leads. Our confidence that the family is Indian's best seller is high. Our confidence about which SKU inside it is zero, and we would rather say that than pick one. One structural note that will matter more than any spec here: Polaris has agreed to sell a majority stake in Indian to Carolwood LP, spinning the brand into a standalone company. Honda: The Rebel 500, Still Doing Nothing Honda's changes to the Rebel 500 for 2025 amounted to a revised seat and handlebar position. Ergonomics. The 471cc parallel twin, the 27.2-inch seat and the $6,499 base price all carried over, with $6,799 for ABS and $6,999 for the SE, and curb weights of 408, 414 and 419 lb. The Rebel 1100 line was updated alongside it. This is the year the sales evidence for the Rebel 500 becomes the strongest of any bike on this list, but the quote comes from a document dated after the year in question. Honda's 2026 release calls the Rebel 500 the industry's best-selling cruiser, singling out the 500 rather than claiming it as a pair with the 300, which Honda had done every previous year. That is the clearest single-model statement any of these four manufacturers has made. It is also retrospective, and we are flagging it as such rather than pretending it was published in 2025. One thing we still cannot tell you: whether the Rebel 500 outsells the Grom, and therefore whether it is Honda's best-selling US street bike at all. No public source resolves it. For 2026 Honda drops the non-ABS Rebel 500 entirely, making ABS standard at $6,799, and puts its E-Clutch automated clutch on the Rebel 300. BMW: The R 1300 GS Adventure Overtakes the GS Here are real numbers, for the first time in this series. The R 1300 GS Adventure sold 33,570 units globally against 32,555 for the base R 1300 GS. That is the first year the Adventure variant has outsold the standard GS, after more than a decade of the standard bike leading. The Adventure is the bigger, more expensive, less accessible bike. It weighs 593 lb against the standard bike's 523. Base seat height is 34.3 to 35.0 inches, with the full options range spanning 31.0 to 36.0. It costs $22,745 plus $695 destination, against $19,495 for the base GS. Both share the 1,300cc boxer, 145 hp and 110 lb-ft. Buyers paid roughly $3,000 more for a bike that is 70 lb heavier and taller, and enough of them did it to change the order. BMW Motorrad's global total was 202,563, down from 2024's record 210,408. US volume was 14,869. This is the first year in this six-year window that BMW's total fell. 2025 in Context: The First Year the Music Stopped For five years the pattern was growth or at least stability. In 2025 it broke in two places at once. Harley's shipments fell to 124,477 with global retail down 12%, and BMW came off an all-time record. Neither collapsed, but both went backwards, and Harley named the cause in its own filings: declining traffic and affordability pressure in exactly the category it depends on. The responses tell you what each company believes. Harley raised prices and added a $30,749 Street Glide Ultra and a $45,999 CVO. Indian delivered a genuinely new midsize cruiser and put a $9,999 Scout Sixty underneath it, which is the only meaningful move toward affordability anyone on this list made. BMW watched its buyers migrate to the heavier, pricier version of its best seller. Honda revised a seat. The other 2025 development is easy to miss because it happens above the model level: Kawasaki passed both Honda and Harley-Davidson to become the US number one. The brand hierarchy that had held through this entire period moved while everyone was arguing about touring share. Six years, four winners, no changes to the list. That is either remarkable stability or a market that stopped generating new answers, and 2025 makes the second reading harder to dismiss. The bikes that won this year were an 811 lb bagger that cost $1,750 more than it had, a cruiser platform whose parent company is being sold, a 408 lb twin that got a new seat, and an adventure bike nobody expected to lead. The names did not change. Almost everything underneath them did. Cover photo: "Harley-Davidson Museum May 2024 06 (The AMF Years--1981 Nova Touring non-functional prototype--OHV V-Four)" by Michael Barera, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.