A few days before I wrote this column in late May, Honda announced it had built its 500 millionth motorcycle. Yes, half a billion bikes. That’s five followed by eight zeros, with a bunch of commas in between. On an annual basis, that means Honda sells about five times as many powered two-wheelers as it does cars. Do some more basic math, and all those zeros work out to more than 6.5 million bikes sold each and every year since the company’s seminal Dream was introduced in 1949.

But that still doesn’t do Honda’s incredible journey justice. For instance, it took the company almost 20 years (until 1968) to sell its first 10 million bikes; 30 more (1997) to hit its first 100 million and then just 10 more (until 2008) to double that. Since then, it’s added another 100 million or more units every five or six years. By the company’s own reckoning, it sells more than 40 per cent of motorcycles sold worldwide annually.

Now, by “motorcycle,” the company means anything with two wheels and some form of engine or motor. The 500 millionth bike, for instance, was a scooter. Ditto the 100 millionth bike, unsurprisingly a Super Cub — with the slogan of “you meet the nicest people on a Honda” — that, well, put a whole heckuva lot of nice people on Hondas. 

The 300 millionth of one of its production lines, on the other hand, was a Gold Wing. Honda’s emphasis in 2014 on grown-up large-displacement motorcycles as the company looked to the West for market expansion. But, in a true Back to the Future moment, the recent 500 millionth is, again, a scooter, signalling a return to the company’s small-displacement roots. 

That scooter, a 125-cc Activa, was just one of more than six million motorcycles Honda Motor Company manufacturers in India. Honda sells 2.5 million Activas alone in India and expects the country’s sales to grow to 50 million units in the next five years, making the country the world’s largest motorcycle market. 

In fact, the subcontinent — again, with India as a focal point — is also the company’s focal point for two-wheeled electrification. Honda Canada recently suffered all manner of negative headlines over its recent decision to pause development on the Ontario plant scheduled to become its largest EV hub in North America. Contrast that with India, where the government’s continuing push for electrification — with an emphasis, unlike here, on bikes as much as cars — the company is opening a large-capacity manufacturing plant dedicated to electrified two-wheelers. 

Honda has also taken the wraps off numerous electric scooters, most notably the CUV e and Active e, both with the company’s novel interchangeable power units that allow quick-as-a-bunny battery swaps. Compare that with the dearth of all-new large-
displacement motorcycles in our market and lament how little 800-cc and larger bikes matter to the decision makers back in Japan.

Nor is Honda the only one. Suzuki, as I’ve contended before, is focussed mostly on Asian markets and their seemingly unquenchable appetite for scooters and small-displacement motorcycles. It, too, is opening a new plant in India with a production capacity of 750,000. By Suzuki’s own reckoning, large displacement motorcycles are a miniscule part of its business. 

In 2021, for instance, the Hayabusa’s global sales were around 2,000 units. Ditto for the Katana 1100. The company, on the other hand, moved almost half a million Access 125 scooters, which, you guessed it, isn’t sold in North America. 

Yamaha, the world’s third-largest motorcycle maker, no longer makes a 1,000-cc superbike, though, for some reason, it continues to campaign its R1 in WSBK. Kawasaki, the outlier amongst Japanese manufacturers, continues to develop novel large motorcycles — witness the hydrogen-fuelled H2 HySE and the Ninja 7 Hybrid. But its sales are down and it sells fewer than 500,000 bikes a year. Add it all up and the Japanese motorcycle industry’s future would seem to lie elsewhere than in large displacement motorcycles.

The big question — or, at least the biggest question for a North American motorcycle magazine — is whether we can embrace this tectonic shift in focus by the Japanese manufacturers. On one hand, some biking futurists claim that the electric revolution that is resulting in an increase in smaller, battery-powered motocross lookalikes is a sign that we North Americans are looking beyond the touring behemoths and monster-motored superbikes that sustained us during the Boomer years. On the other, they may be just enjoying a moment in the sun because they are, in many jurisdictions, available to those under 16 and are allowed on many of the same paths previously exclusive to bicycles and foot traffic.

More important still is the fact that, in the countries where scooter sales are booming — as I mentioned, many in Southeast Asia but also in South America and Africa — scooters and small-displacement bikes are a market unto themselves. Their need for cheap personal transportation means that scooters and other smaller-displacement motorcycles are, for many, their only choice for getting around. 

There is virtually no such market here. In North America, a scooter’s primary purpose is a precursor to a larger, more profitable motorcycle. If, as many have claimed, Gen Y and Z have less interest in motorcycling than we did as youth, then that entry-level market — be they a scooter, a small-displacement motorcycle or, as in my day, some Tecumseh-motored abomination with big, fat ATV-like tires — is probably a non-starter here in North America. 

Honda, for its part, says that, by 2031, it wants 50 per cent of the global motorcycle market. The vast majority of those, I suspect, will be scooters. The world’s largest motorcycle manufacturer would seem to be returning to its roots.