The motorcycle industry across the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union is contracting unevenly. Harley-Davidson reported a thirteen-per-cent fall in North American retail sales for 2025 and an eleven-per-cent fall across EMEA, the latter accelerating sharply through the year to a twenty-four-per-cent decline in the fourth quarter alone [1]. The company’s global unit sales now sit roughly thirty-two per cent below their 2021 peak; fourth-quarter revenue fell by twenty-eight per cent year on year to $496 million; and the full-year 2025 operating result swung to a loss of $29 million from an operating income of $278 million in 2024 [2].
The pattern extends beyond Harley-Davidson. BMW Motorrad sales in the United States fell by 10.8 per cent across 2025, and Honda by 8 per cent. The wider United States market fell by approximately 7.6 per cent over the year, with the first half worse still at minus 9.2 per cent against the comparable twelve-month period [3][4]. Kawasaki displaced Harley-Davidson as the unit-sales leader in the United States, and approximately one hundred and twenty American motorcycle dealerships closed during the year, including the century-old Dudley Perkins Harley-Davidson in San Francisco [5]. Together with the structural challenges of floor-plan financing in a contracting market documented by Powersports Business, these closures suggest a structural rather than cyclical problem. Across the established Western markets the picture is one of measurable retreat.
The most striking exception, within those same markets, is Royal Enfield. The Indian manufacturer reported double-digit growth in North America during 2024, with regional sales up by approximately 11.6 per cent year on year, and continued strong international growth into 2025, with exports rising by roughly thirty-six per cent overall [6][7]. Specific United Kingdom and European Union unit figures are not broken out cleanly in the public reporting, but the export trajectory is the relevant proxy, and Royal Enfield Media UK confirmed the same record-breaking annual sales picture for the British operation. Its commercial proposition is straightforward: well-built, retro-styled single- and twin-cylinder motorcycles in the 350–650 cc range, with list prices materially below the equivalent American, German, or Japanese offerings — the Hunter 350, Classic 350, Meteor 350, and Continental GT 650 typically retail in the United Kingdom for between approximately £3,500 and £7,500, and in North America for between approximately $4,500 and $7,500, against entry-level Harley-Davidson and Indian motorcycles starting at around $10,000. The Royal Enfield case suggests that the broader decline in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union is not principally a problem of demand for motorcycles as such; it is a problem of demand at the prevailing price points of the legacy Western and Japanese manufacturers, in a market where interest rates sit at their highest sustained level in over fifteen years and average motorcycle list prices have risen by roughly forty per cent since 2020 [5].
The economic numbers are necessary context, but they are not the whole story. Two underlying shifts complicate the picture. The first is the fragmentation of motorcycle culture from a broadly coherent mass practice into a federation of demographically narrower sub-tribes — a development I take up later in the piece using Michel Maffesoli’s notion of neo-tribal social organisation. The second is the steady ageing and demographic narrowing of the active rider base across all three markets, a process that the regulatory environment described in the next several sections cannot, on its own, reverse. The remainder of this article therefore surveys the international regulatory environment that riders in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union now encounter — covering training, protective equipment, and periodic safety inspection — before turning to the demographic and cultural conversation against which those regulations have to be read.
In the United Kingdom, anyone wishing to ride a motorcycle on the public road must first complete Compulsory Basic Training, a one-day course covering machine handling, observation, and on-road riding, valid for two years and renewable thereafter until a full licence is obtained [8]. The European Union operates a tiered progressive-access licensing system across AM, A1, A2, and A categories, with unrestricted access available at twenty-four through direct testing, or at twenty after two years of A2 experience [9]. Thirty-six training programmes in eleven European member states have been certified under the European Motorcycle Training Quality Label initiative, which applies a common quality framework to provider accreditation [10]. The United States operates a state patchwork in which the Motorcycle Safety Foundation’s Basic RiderCourse, typically a weekend in length, substitutes for the skills test in jurisdictions that recognise it, and in which several states require no formal training at all.
Mandatory protective-clothing requirements remain limited internationally, but the exceptions repay attention. France has, since November 2016, required both rider and passenger to wear CE-certified gloves at all times when operating a motorcycle; failure to comply attracts a fine of up to €450 and the loss of a point from the driving licence. The obligation sits in Article R431-1-2 of the French Code de la route, introduced by Décret n° 2016-1232 of 19 September 2016 [11][12]. Across the European Union more broadly, motorcycle protective garments sold commercially must conform to Regulation (EU) 2016/425, which classifies them as Category II Personal Protective Equipment, and to the EN 17092 standard for jackets, trousers, and one-piece suits, with armour required at specified impact points [13]. CE certification is required to sell rather than to wear, but the practical effect is that non-compliant new gear is difficult to obtain in member-state markets. The United States has no equivalent regime; protective clothing remains a matter of individual rider preference.
Annual or biennial periodic technical inspection has been routine in Europe for decades, but until recently it tended to exclude motorcycles. That position is changing. Germany requires the Hauptuntersuchung — usually abbreviated to TÜV after its largest provider — every two years for motorcycles, under §29 of the Straßenverkehrs-Zulassungs-Ordnung (StVZO), with the same level of rigour applied to cars: brakes, lights, tyres, frame, emissions, and the legality of any modifications [14]. France introduced a compulsory contrôle technique for motorcycles in April 2024, with the first inspection required at four-and-a-half years after first registration and a triennial renewal cycle thereafter; the legal foundation is the Arrêté du 23 octobre 2023 published in the Journal Officiel [15][16]. The United Kingdom continues to require an annual MOT test from a motorcycle’s third birthday onwards. The United States, again, varies by state, and the majority of states require no periodic safety inspection of motorcycles at all.
The demographic data make the structural character of the problem explicit. The Motorcycle Industry Council’s owner survey shows the median age of an American motorcyclist crossing fifty for the first time in 2018, having risen from thirty-two in 1990 [17]. The under-eighteen share of ownership fell from eight per cent to two over the same period, and the eighteen-to-twenty-four share from sixteen per cent to six [17]. The average age of a Harley-Davidson buyer is now reported to be approximately fifty-seven. Female ownership has risen meaningfully — to around nineteen per cent in 2018, and higher within younger cohorts — but the central tendency of American motorcycle ownership remains older, male, and predominantly white [17].
The crash and fatality data are the necessary complement to the demographic picture. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s most recent Traffic Safety Facts publication for motorcycles records 6,335 motorcyclist fatalities in 2023, accounting for fifteen per cent of all traffic deaths in the United States. Twenty-six per cent of motorcyclists killed in fatal crashes were alcohol-impaired — a higher proportion than for any other class of motor vehicle — and in single-vehicle fatal motorcycle crashes the alcohol-impaired share rises to forty-one per cent [18]. NHTSA also records that helmet use among alcohol-impaired motorcyclists killed in 2023 was fifty-five per cent, against seventy per cent for those with no measurable alcohol [18].
Here in California, where I ride, the picture is somewhat better. California maintains a universal helmet law and a comparatively developed rider-training infrastructure through the California Motorcyclist Safety Program. The CMSP curriculum is nevertheless rudimentary by international standards: none of the CHP-administered training takes place on public highways, and its primary purpose is the acquisition of basic vehicle-control skills sufficient to qualify for the licence-test waiver that completion of the course confers — a meaningfully lower bar than the United Kingdom’s Compulsory Basic Training, which is itself only the entry point to a tiered progressive-access framework. The state recorded 583 motorcyclist fatalities in 2023, a decrease of 10.2 per cent from 634 in 2022, even as the national figure rose marginally [19]. Motorcyclists nonetheless accounted for fourteen per cent of all California motor-vehicle fatalities in 2023. Male riders made up approximately ninety-five per cent of fatally injured motorcyclists in the state, and the most over-represented age band was twenty-five to thirty-four. Unsafe speed was the leading primary crash factor at 28.2 per cent, followed by improper turning and right-of-way violations by other vehicles. Broadside crashes — the type in which another vehicle turns across the rider’s path and strikes the motorcycle’s flank — were the single most common collision configuration [19].
I will declare an interest before going further. I am a fifty-one-year-old white male and I rode through the writing of a doctorate on motorcycle culture. I am, by most plausible definitions, the precise demographic the analysis that follows describes, and I am writing this from inside the practice rather than from outside it. I find a meaningful portion of the American riding scene actively repellent — particularly its integration of alcohol consumption into the practice of riding itself, and the way certain brand-aligned subcultures align themselves with political positions I do not share. I record this here because the demographic and cultural problems set out below are easier to discuss honestly when the writer’s position within them is not concealed.
An honest account of American motorcycle culture has to acknowledge that brand choice carries meaningful demographic and, increasingly, political signal. The core Harley-Davidson buyer is middle-aged or older, predominantly white, predominantly male, and overlaps to a meaningful degree with the political demographic that produced the present national administration, although the wider rider population is, on the available survey evidence, more politically mixed [20]. The riding subculture surrounding the brand — large public rallies, certain motorcycle-club affiliations, and a visible alignment with particular cultural signifiers — carries connotations that prospective new riders, especially younger ones, women, and people of colour, may reasonably find unwelcoming. This is a real effect, and it interacts with the affordability and licensing barriers above to help explain why the under-twenty-five demographic has substantially exited motorcycling over three decades.
The academic literature on this intersection, it should be acknowledged, is less developed than the question deserves. The peer-reviewed International Journal of Motorcycle Studies has long published on the politics of riding and the construction of rider identity [21], but the specific empirical claim that the core Harley-Davidson buyer overlaps with a particular American political demographic remains more journalistic than scholarly, and the work that exists has tended to focus on outlaw clubs and on the theoretical politics of the motorcycle as object rather than on quantitative buyer demographics.
The drink-driving comparison is the most useful frame for the alcohol point. Driving a passenger car under the influence of alcohol has been socially unsanctioned in most of the developed world since roughly the 1990s; it was a comedic trope in the 1970s and a moral default by the time the present median-age American rider was learning to drive. The equivalent transformation has not happened within American motorcycle culture, and the NHTSA data above suggest that it needs to. The harder question is why drinking and riding remains socially acceptable, even ritually celebrated, within American motorcycle culture, at the same time as drinking and driving has been so successfully discredited within American car culture. I do not have a complete answer. Part of it, I suspect, is that motorcycling has been so thoroughly framed as recreational rather than transport that alcohol becomes part of the experience rather than an evident safety failure. Part of it is that the institutional pressure that pushed against drink-driving in cars — insurers, legislators, advocacy groups, manufacturers — has not been brought to bear with equivalent force on motorcycling.
The manufacturer-funded advocacy organisations whose conflicts of interest I described in last month’s post sit awkwardly within all of this. Their primary corporate funders are losing sales at a rate the pricing and financing environment alone cannot fully explain. The reforms most plausibly capable of arresting the long-run demographic decline — graduated licensing, training of substantive duration, restored helmet laws, periodic safety inspection, and a serious cultural intervention against drinking-and-riding — are also the reforms that those organisations have, for several decades, opposed. The strategy of resisting the regulatory and cultural framework that produces lasting market expansion in other jurisdictions is, on the present numerical evidence, not working.
It was not always this way. Between approximately 2010 and 2018, a transatlantic café-racer revival — anchored commercially by Triumph’s Bonneville and Thruxton models, BMW’s R nineT (2014) and R nineT Racer (2016), Royal Enfield’s Continental GT 535 (2013) and Continental GT 650 (2018), Ducati’s Scrambler line (2015), and an enormous parallel custom-build culture documented on Instagram, BikeEXIF, and Return of the Café Racers — succeeded in re-coding motorcycling as something cool for an audience of younger, urban, design-literate riders [22][23]. Adjacent clothing brands such as Belstaff, Vanson, and Aether, alongside events including the Bike Shed Moto Show (2013-on) and Wheels and Waves (2009-on), cultivated the aesthetic actively. The retro-modern visual language was decisive: it was tasteful, designed, and accessible to riders without prior subcultural affiliation. The brands invested. The audience responded. Somewhere between roughly 2018 and 2022, the broader cultural momentum dissipated. The publications still post. The models are still in showrooms. The cultural moment they sat inside has passed.
The question, properly stated, is whether motorcycling — as a practice, as an industry, as a culture — is still cool in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union, and whether the present trajectory is recoverable. I do not have a fully satisfying answer. Translating an honest acknowledgement of risk, of preventable death, and of the alcohol problem into something culturally attractive is a hard problem in cultural design. The demographic groups currently most invested in the practice are also the groups least inclined to reform it. The demographic groups that might reform it have largely declined to participate in the first place. And the institutions that might bridge the gap — manufacturers, advocacy organisations, regulators — are, for the various reasons described above, either unable or unwilling to do so.
What I can say with reasonable confidence is that the present trajectory is not sustainable. Falling sales in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union; ageing riders; no successor to the café-racer cultural moment; advocacy organisations unwilling to confront the cultural and legislative problems; and rider fatalities continuing to rise are, together, the description of a practice in slow contraction. Something gives within the next decade. The question is whether the industry and the riding community drive that change themselves, or whether it is driven for them — by regulation, by insurance pricing, by generational replacement, and by an uninterrupted contraction in the number of people who conclude that buying a motorcycle is a sensible use of fifteen thousand dollars in 2026. The Royal Enfield case suggests that demand at the right price point still exists; the harder cultural problem is whether the practice itself can be made attractive to new participants on terms that do not depend on the existing subcultural identity of the legacy American brands.
There is, at the margin, a possible source of optimism. The use of electric bicycles among American and British teenagers has expanded over the past three or four years from a niche activity into something close to a default mode of independent transport for a meaningful share of the under-eighteen population. That cohort is still close to a decade away from the age at which the present market expects a motorcycle buyer to appear, and the policy framework into which they will eventually graduate is likely to look quite different from today’s — both in motorcycle licensing, which I anticipate will tighten further in response to continued fatality data, and in product availability, where electric motorcycle range, price, and supporting infrastructure will be far closer to internal-combustion equivalence by the mid-2030s than they are at present. When today’s teenage e-bike users are old enough to buy a motorcycle, the choice between an internal-combustion machine and an electric one will be a substantively different decision from the one prospective buyers face now, and the environmental considerations that already shape this cohort’s purchasing behaviour will weigh visibly in the outcome. Their sensitivities to broader brand affiliation, as observed above, are keenly honed.
As for the present, American and British motorcycle culture is not a single coherent practice; it is a federation of distinct tribes — sport-bike riders, adventure riders, the cruiser community organised around Harley-Davidson and Indian, the touring community, the off-road and motocross communities, the urban café-racer cohort already discussed, and several others. Michel Maffesoli’s The Time of the Tribes (1996) offers a useful theoretical frame for this configuration: a postmodern social condition in which mass culture fragments into emotionally cohesive micro-communities organised around shared aesthetic, ritual, and affective preferences rather than around traditional class, occupational, or political identities [24]. On that reading, the broad transatlantic café-racer surge of approximately 2010–2018 may have been the last large-scale dominant cultural moment within motorcycling, and the more likely future is a continued proliferation of smaller, ritually intense groups that use motorcycle practice as a means of in-person bonding and identity construction — partly as a reaction against the social disconnection produced by online platforms that perform the appearance of sociality without delivering its substance.
If that prediction is broadly correct, motorcycling as a leisure practice in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union faces a particular kind of challenge: it must negotiate its way through an increasing volume of safety legislation and, if fatalities continue at present rates, a likely set of punitive licensing measures — graduated licensing applied more strictly than at present, periodic testing, mandatory PPE, and other interventions — while sustaining the small-group cultural intensity that may be the practice’s most durable future appeal. Those two demands are not obviously compatible. Reconciling them is, I suspect, the real work of the coming decade.
One implication is worth flagging for anyone operating inside the motorcycle industry. The temptation to mine subcultural style in pursuit of sales is perennial, but the operation is, in a deeper sense, self-defeating. Subcultural style is by its nature in continuous evolution: to identify a particular mode of cultural identity for commercial extraction is first to strip it of its original significance, and then, almost by reflex, to provoke the underlying community to move on into something different. The transatlantic café-racer revival is, on this reading, a textbook case — an aesthetic that became commercially legible from approximately 2010 onwards was systematically picked up by the major manufacturers and adjacent clothing brands, whose involvement gradually thinned the style of its underlying meaning while moving cultural attention elsewhere. Fellow Santa Barbara resident Dick Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style remains the foundational account of this cycle [25]. Two chapters of my own doctoral thesis examined exactly this transition in the specific case of 1960s British motorcycle subculture and its absorption into the luxury clothing brands that emerged from it in the subsequent decades; the finding, repeatedly, was that the cultural meaning that inspired the brand steadily became detached from the contemporaneous culture. Any industry actor planning to engineer the next café-racer moment will probably get something else — and probably not what was anticipated.
One thing is sure: anyone thinking that they know what’s next for motorcycle culture is likely to be surprised – let’s hope sufficient interested academics are able to investigate it.
References
- Harley-Davidson Delivers Fourth Quarter and Full Year Financial Results and 2026 Outlook — Harley-Davidson Investor Relations. Link
- Harley-Davidson ‘Taking Deliberate Actions to Stabilize Business’ Following Massive Sales Decline — RideApart. Link
- U.S. motorcycle sales dropped 7.6% in 2025 — RevZilla / Common Tread. Link
- The American Motorcycle Market Decline: What the 9.2% Drop Reveals About Consumer Sentiment — CSM Research. Link
- Kawasaki surges to No. 1 in the U.S. market as Harley falls to third — Powersports Business. Link
- Royal Enfield Posted Seriously Impressive Growth, But Let’s Look Beyond The Numbers — RideApart (North America +11.6% 2024 detail). Link
- Royal Enfield clocks its highest-ever 1 million annual sales milestone in a record-breaking year — Royal Enfield Media UK (official company release for the UK market). Link
- Compulsory Basic Training (CBT) — overview — UK Government (GOV.UK). Link
- European driving licence — A1 / A2 / A categories — Federation of European Motorcyclists’ Associations (FEMA). Link
- The Safe Ride to the Future — European Motorcycle Training Quality Label — ACEM (Association of European Motorcycle Manufacturers). Link
- Équipements obligatoires pour conduire une moto — Service-Public.gouv.fr (République française, official information page). Link
- Décret n° 2016-1232 du 19 septembre 2016 relatif à l’obligation de porter des gants pour les conducteurs et les passagers de motocyclette… — Légifrance (official legal text). Link
- Regulation (EU) 2016/425 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 9 March 2016 on personal protective equipment — EUR-Lex (official EU legal text). Link
- § 29 Untersuchung der Fahrzeuge — Straßenverkehrs-Zulassungs-Ordnung (StVZO), gesetze-im-internet.de (official German federal legal information portal). Link
- Le contrôle technique pour les deux-roues mis en place à partir du 15 avril 2024 — Service-Public.gouv.fr (République française, official information page). Link
- Arrêté du 23 octobre 2023 relatif au contrôle technique des véhicules motorisés à deux ou trois roues et quadricycles à moteur — Légifrance (official legal text). Link
- Today’s Motorcyclists Revealed by Latest MIC Owner Survey — Motorcycle Industry Council, via PRNewswire. Link
- Traffic Safety Facts: 2023 Data — Motorcycles (DOT HS 813 732) — National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), U.S. Department of Transportation. Link
- 2025 SafeTREC Traffic Safety Facts: Motorcycle Safety — Safe Transportation Research and Education Center, University of California Berkeley (Transportation Injury Mapping System, TIMS). Link
- Harley-Davidson Riders Are as Politically Divided as Rest of U.S. — Fortune. Link
- International Journal of Motorcycle Studies — peer-reviewed journal on motorcycle culture. Link
- Bonneville Café Racers 2001–2016 — Return of the Café Racers (long-established custom-motorcycle publication). Link
- BikeEXIF — long-established custom-motorcycle publication, archive on the modern café-racer revival. Link
- Michel Maffesoli, The Time of the Tribes: The Decline of Individualism in Mass Society (London: Sage, 1996). Originally published as Le Temps des tribus: Le déclin de l’individualisme dans les sociétés postmodernes (Paris: Méridiens Klincksieck, 1988).
- Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Methuen, 1979).