Growth or Base Effect? What Europe’s Motorcycle Rebound Really Measures

by Francis Rozange | Sep 28, 2026 | 0 comments

On July 24, the association that represents Europe’s motorcycle manufacturers published a number that seemed to settle an argument. In the first six months of 2026, new motorcycle registrations in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom, five markets that together account for about 80 percent of registrations across the European Union and Britain, reached 636,490 units. That was 16.8 percent more than a year earlier. Germany rose 27.6 percent, Spain 23.6 percent, Britain 15.8 percent, Italy 13.2 percent and France 6.4 percent. The association, ACEM, added that registrations now stood 27 percent above the pre-pandemic level of 2019, calling it evidence of sustained expansion rather than a simple recovery.

Taken at face value, those figures describe a continent rediscovering the motorcycle. Yet the comparison year was no ordinary year. The first half of 2025 was a trough created largely by a change in European emissions rules, which pushed tens of thousands of registrations into the last weeks of 2024. Measured against the first half of 2024, the last clean period before that disruption, the five markets have grown by roughly 4 percent in two years. The task is to separate three forces folded into one headline: genuine demand, a base effect manufactured by the regulatory calendar, and a push of supply that registration data cannot distinguish from appetite.

A Rebound Measured Against a Hole

The arithmetic begins with ACEM’s own monthly tables. In the first half of 2024, the five markets registered 611,176 motorcycles, according to the association’s revised series. In the first half of 2025, the figure fell to 545,127, a decline of close to 11 percent. The 2026 total of 636,490 therefore represents a recovery of the lost ground plus a modest addition: about 25,000 units, or 4.1 percent, above the 2024 level. Spread over two years, that is growth of roughly 2 percent a year. Against the first half of 2023, which registered 600,810 units, the gain is 5.9 percent over three years.

None of this makes the 2026 result illusory. A market that climbs back above its previous high after a sharp contraction has shown resilience, and the five markets are at their highest first-half level since at least 2019, the starting point of the long-term comparison in ACEM’s current tables. But the difference between 16.8 percent and 4.1 percent is not a rounding matter. It is the difference between a boom and a market inching forward, and any production plan, dealer stocking decision or import forecast built on the first figure rather than the second risks carrying the error forward. The distortion also varies enormously by country, which is where the more interesting story lies.

The Regulation That Moved the Calendar

The disruption has a precise legal origin. Regulation (EU) 2019/129, amending the framework regulation for two- and three-wheel vehicles, set the dates for the second stage of on-board diagnostics, which detect failures in emission controls. For most road motorcycles, the full stage II requirements applied to new vehicle types from January 1, 2024, and to all new vehicles from January 1, 2025. The same amendment ended, on December 31, 2024, the so-called mathematical durability procedure, which the regulation’s own recitals describe as testing vehicles after only 100 kilometers of use. The industry calls the package Euro 5+. Britain’s retained version of the regulation carries the same January 2025 date.

The framework regulation does offer a softer landing. Its end-of-series provision, as adopted, allows vehicles built to a lapsed type approval to be registered for up to 24 months, but caps them at 10 percent of vehicles registered in the two preceding years, or 100 per member state if higher, and requires a request to each national authority. Given that ceiling and that paperwork, the data are consistent with much of the industry having taken the simpler route of registering compliant-until-December stock before the deadline. ACEM said as much in February 2025, acknowledging that a consistent part of 2024’s growth was linked to stock registrations ahead of the new standard and warning of a correction.

Eighty-Five Thousand Motorcycles Registered Early

The size of that pull-forward can be estimated from ACEM’s monthly data. In November and December 2023, the five markets registered 97,915 motorcycles. In the same two months of 2025, with no deadline in sight, they registered 100,333. In November and December 2024, they registered 183,041. December 2024 alone came in 172 percent above December 2023. The excess is roughly 85,000 units against the same months of 2023 and about 83,000 against 2025, figures that should be read as an order of magnitude rather than an audited count, since ordinary year-end demand also fluctuates. It is larger than the entire first-half shortfall of 2025, which was about 66,000 units against the first half of 2024.

Germany concentrated the effect. Its registrations in November and December 2024 totaled 49,315, against 10,686 in the same months of 2023 and 10,143 in 2025. The excess of roughly 38,600 motorcycles over 2023 is close to the amount by which German registrations in the first half of 2025 fell short of the first half of 2024, about 36,800 units. The symmetry is striking enough to suggest that most of the German collapse of early 2025 was not a loss of riders but a relocation of paperwork. Against the same months of 2023, Italy’s excess was about 18,700 units, while France and Spain each added roughly 10,500 and Britain about 6,500.

What the Used Market Reveals

If motorcycles were registered by dealers and manufacturers in December 2024 and sold to riders over the following months, those later sales would not appear as new registrations at all. They would surface as changes of ownership. Germany’s Kraftfahrt-Bundesamt, the federal motor transport authority, publishes exactly that series, and it fits the hypothesis. In 2025, as new motorcycle registrations fell 35.5 percent to 162,009, ownership transfers of motorcycles rose 5.1 percent to 492,599. In the first half of 2026, the pattern inverted: new registrations climbed 27.5 percent while ownership transfers fell 4.4 percent, and by the end of August transfers were still down 3.1 percent.

The same inversion appears elsewhere. In Spain, ANESDOR, the national industry association, reported that registrations of new motorcycles rose 32.6 percent in the first half of 2026 while transactions of used motorcycles fell 2.1 percent. In France, an observatory run by a motorcycle insurance broker and a registration-data firm, as reported in the insurance trade press, found new two-wheeler registrations up 6 percent and used transactions down 5 percent. Our working hypothesis, which the available data support but cannot prove, is that 2025’s new-registration figures understated what riders actually bought, and that 2026’s figures correspondingly overstate the acceleration of their appetite.

Quarter by Quarter, the Base Effect Fades

The quarterly profile of 2026 tells the same story in a different register. In the first quarter, ACEM reported growth of 21.1 percent across the five markets, and its secretary general said the figure showed that last year’s correction had been mainly technical in nature. Yet the first-quarter total, 250,787 units in ACEM’s revised figures, was 1.8 percent below the first quarter of 2024. In other words, the most spectacular growth rate of the year corresponded to a market that had not yet returned to its level of two years earlier. A growth rate computed on a depressed base flatters each market in proportion to the depth of its hole.

The second quarter is more encouraging. Registrations from April to June reached 385,703 units, 14.1 percent above the same months of 2025 and 8.4 percent above the second quarter of 2024. That is the first clear evidence in the series of volume that exceeds the pre-disruption base, and it arrived in the heart of the riding season, when purchases are least likely to be administrative. Even so, part of the gain reflects the calendar: ANESDOR noted that June 2026 in Spain had one more working day than June 2025. Monthly growth rates across the five markets have oscillated rather than accelerated, from 27.7 percent in March to 8.4 percent in May and 18.7 percent in June.

Germany: The Loudest Number, the Weakest Signal

Germany produced the most eye-catching headline of the half, a rise of 27.6 percent, and it is where the headline says least about demand. Its first-half registrations of 114,849 motorcycles were 9.4 percent below the first half of 2024 and 11.4 percent below the first half of 2023. Only one month, June, exceeded its 2024 counterpart. For the second quarter as a whole, German registrations were about 5.5 percent below the same period of 2024. Against the first half of 2019, Germany is up about 8 percent, a modest result for seven years, and one in which, on IVM’s figures, small machines play a growing part.

The German industry association IVM is candid about this. In its September commentary on the August figures, its head of technical affairs observed that the 27.1 percent rise in August sounded pleasing only in relation to the year after the Euro 5 transition, since August 2025 had been a surprisingly weak month even for a difficult year, and that the monthly volume still fell short of the level typical of recent years. The association estimates that the market could reach about 190,000 new vehicles in 2026 if current trends hold. By ACEM’s count, Germany registered 213,801 motorcycles in 2023 and 248,643 in 2024, though the two sources define their scope slightly differently.

Where German Growth Actually Comes From

The composition of Germany’s growth matters more than its size. According to IVM’s cumulative figures to the end of August, registrations of motorcycles above 125 cubic centimeters rose 17.5 percent, while light motorcycles of up to 125 cc rose 44.1 percent and light scooters 35.1 percent. Together, the two light classes grew by 39 percent and increased their share of the market from 28 percent to 31 percent. Scooters of all sizes, the association notes, have risen from 18 percent of the German market in 2016 to 26 percent today. The center of gravity is moving toward urban, practical and cheaper machines.

Licensing explains much of that shift. Under section 6b of Germany’s driving licence regulation, car-licence holders aged at least 25 who have held the licence for five years may, after a training course and without an examination, add key number 196, permitting them to ride machines of up to 125 cc and 11 kilowatts within Germany. IVM describes the scheme as a genuine pillar of the market and puts the resulting fleet at more than 350,000 vehicles. It also notes that the conference of state transport ministers postponed, in the spring, a decision on introducing a test for the entitlement. Whether that debate has prompted some riders to qualify early is a hypothesis, not a finding.

A Supply Push With a Chinese Accent

Registration data measure what is registered, not why. Some of the 2026 growth is being supplied, in the literal sense, by manufacturers new to Europe. IVM remarks, in its September bulletin, that Chinese makers pushing into the European market favor the high-volume naked and adventure segments. Its brand tables show one Chinese manufacturer lifting its German registrations of motorcycles above 125 cc from 746 units in the first eight months of 2025 to 5,593 in the same period of 2026, raising its share from under 1 percent to about 6 percent. That single company accounts for roughly 35 percent of the segment’s growth.

Among light motorcycles, three Chinese brands in IVM’s top ten together registered 3,364 units to the end of August, against 658 a year earlier, taking their combined share from about 4 percent to about 14.5 percent and accounting for 38 percent of the segment’s growth. An Austrian manufacturer’s big-bike registrations more than doubled, from a low 2025 base of 1,950 units to 5,183, a further quarter of the segment’s increase. Two companies, then, explain close to 60 percent of German big-bike growth. That is competitive research territory rather than demand analysis: share changing hands can lift registrations without any change in the number of people who want a motorcycle.

The Trade Data Behind the Showroom

European trade statistics show the scale of the supply push. According to Eurostat’s international trade database, imports into the European Union of piston-engined motorcycles above 50 cc from China were worth about 285 million euros in 2019, 689 million in 2024 and 957 million in 2025. That last figure represents an increase of 39 percent in a year when registrations in the five largest markets fell by 13 percent. In the first half of 2026, such imports reached about 654 million euros, a third more than a year earlier and nearly double the first half of 2024, while imports from all other non-EU origins rose less than 2 percent.

China’s share of the value of extra-EU imports in these categories has risen from about 11 percent in 2019 to about 27 percent in the first half of 2026. Two cautions apply. These are values, not units. And “made in China” is not the same as “Chinese brand,” since trade data record the origin of the goods, not the nationality of the company whose name is on the tank. But the direction is unambiguous. Stock flowed into Europe through a year of falling registrations, and in our reading a supplier with inventory to place and share to win has every reason to price aggressively, register demonstrators and support dealers, all of which show up as registrations.

Spain: The One Market That Never Corrected

Spain stands apart from every other large market in the series. Its registrations did jump at the end of 2024, but the following year brought no correction: first-half registrations rose 7.6 percent in 2025, and the full year grew 8.3 percent to 242,580 units by ACEM’s count, in what ANESDOR describes as the sector’s best year since 2008. The 23.6 percent growth of the first half of 2026 therefore sits on a base that was already rising. Against the first half of 2024, Spain is up 33 percent. Against the first half of 2019, it is up about 59 percent, a gain matched only by Italy.

ANESDOR’s segment detail shows the breadth of the expansion. In the first half of 2026, registrations of 125 cc motorcycles rose 38.3 percent, mid-sized machines between 125 cc and 750 cc 35.1 percent and those above 750 cc 26.9 percent, while scooters up to 125 cc rose 21.4 percent and the trail segment, favored for touring, climbed 53.8 percent. Across the wider light-vehicle sector, private buyers, who represent 87.7 percent of the market, increased their purchases by 27.7 percent. Growth that spans every displacement class and is driven by individuals rather than fleets is the closest thing in the European data to an unambiguous demand signal.

The Car Licence as a Market Maker

Spain’s structural advantage is written into its driving rules. Article 4 of the General Drivers Regulation allows holders of a category B car licence held for more than three years to ride, within Spanish territory, the motorcycles covered by the A1 category, that is, machines of up to 125 cc and 11 kilowatts, with no additional test. According to a report by the Directorate General of Traffic, the rule has been in force since 2004, and in 2022 some 25.2 million people held the entitlement. That year, 125 cc motorcycles accounted for 100,646 new registrations against 82,707 for larger machines, roughly 55 percent of the total.

That reservoir of eligible riders explains why Spain absorbs regulatory shocks better than its neighbors: demand rests on daily commuting by millions of car-licence holders rather than on discretionary leisure purchases. It does not mean, however, that every Spanish registration reflects a private purchase by a commuter. The rental channel, closely tied to tourism, rose 25.4 percent in the first half of 2026, according to ANESDOR, then fell 43.1 percent in August, a reminder that fleet timing can swing monthly figures sharply. And the used market’s 2.1 percent decline is consistent with the hypothesis, which the data cannot confirm, that some new-vehicle growth comes from buyers who would otherwise have bought second-hand.

Italy: Scooters Carry the Load

Italy is the largest of the five markets by ACEM’s definition, and its 13.2 percent first-half growth rests on scooters rather than motorcycles. ANCMA, the Italian industry association, reported that scooter registrations rose 17.0 percent in the first half of 2026 while motorcycles rose 7.9 percent. The divergence has persisted for more than a year. In 2025, scooters grew 5.6 percent while motorcycles fell 19.2 percent, and ANCMA’s president said at the time that the motorcycle decline appeared less traceable to an episodic phenomenon and required careful examination of its causes, a notably more cautious reading than the one offered at the European level.

The summer months have reinforced that caution. Italian motorcycle registrations fell 6.5 percent in July and 3.9 percent in August, leaving the cumulative gain for motorcycles at 5.0 percent by the end of August, against 15.6 percent for scooters. ANCMA attributed the July decline to an uncertain economic and geopolitical context and to a physiological normalization after four years of sustained growth, and it linked the strength of scooters to economic uncertainty and fuel prices. Against the first half of 2024, Italy’s total is up about 8 percent, and against 2019 about 59 percent, but that long-run gain is increasingly a scooter story.

France and Britain: Recovery Without Expansion

France posted the weakest growth of the five markets, 6.4 percent, and the comparison with earlier years is sobering. Its first-half registrations of 104,802 were 9.3 percent below the first half of 2024 and about 5 percent below the first half of 2019. May 2026 was below May 2025, the only monthly decline among the five markets in the first half. The first quarter was 13.6 percent below the same quarter of 2024 and the second 6.2 percent below. By any of these measures, France has not yet recovered its pre-Euro 5+ volume, and its level of registrations is lower than before the pandemic.

Britain shows a similar shape at a smaller scale. Its 15.8 percent rise brought first-half registrations to 54,962, which is 7 percent below the first half of 2024 and about 3 percent below 2019. The Motorcycle Industry Association reported cumulative growth of 15.2 percent for the wider L-category market at the end of June, with adventure motorcycles up 23.8 percent, and called for government support on rider licensing policy to sustain momentum. Taken together, France, Germany and Britain registered 274,613 motorcycles in the first half of 2026, almost exactly the same as in the first half of 2019 and about 9 percent fewer than in the first half of 2024.

Two Countries Carry the Continent

That observation reframes ACEM’s claim that registrations are 27 percent above 2019. The arithmetic is correct, but the growth is not European in any general sense. Using the monthly country tables ACEM published in 2020, which include 2019, the five markets registered about 136,000 more motorcycles in the first half of 2026 than in the first half of 2019. Spain and Italy account for about 134,000 of that increase, or roughly 99 percent; the remaining 2,000 or so reflect a gain in Germany largely offset by declines in France and Britain. The three northern and western markets, which in 2019 registered more motorcycles than Spain and Italy combined, are flat against 2019 and lower than in 2024.

The implication for manufacturers is uncomfortable. The European market that is growing is, disproportionately, a Mediterranean market of scooters and 125 cc machines bought by commuters, often on car licences. The mix matters: in Germany, motorcycles above 125 cc still make up about 58 percent of registrations, according to IVM, whereas in Italy scooters made up about 58 percent of the first half, according to ANCMA. The northern markets, where larger machines bought largely for leisure weigh most, are no bigger, on a first-half comparison, than they were seven years ago. That distinction is the central finding of this analysis, and a single five-market growth rate hides it.

Electric Motorcycles and Mopeds Beneath the Headline

ACEM’s tables also track electric models, which remain marginal. Electric motorcycle registrations in the five markets reached 18,202 in the first half, up 35.3 percent, but that is 2.9 percent of the total and below the 21,078 of the first half of 2022. The German figures show how fragile such growth can be: by the end of August, a single manufacturer that had registered no vehicles in Germany in the same period of 2025 accounted for 39 percent of German registrations of electric motorcycles and light motorcycles, according to IVM. A segment in which one company can supply two-fifths of a large country’s volume is not yet a mass market.

Mopeds, measured by ACEM across six markets, rose 4.7 percent to 72,076 units in the first half, the first first-half increase since 2022. Italy rose 18.2 percent, Spain 9.1 percent, Belgium 8.8 percent and Germany 3.9 percent, while the Netherlands fell 5.4 percent. ACEM’s press release gives 9.3 percent for Germany, but its own table, 8,658 units against 8,333, works out at 3.9 percent. The longer view is less reassuring. First-half moped registrations were 118,958 in 2019 and 84,974 in 2024, which puts the 2026 figure 39 percent below the former and 15 percent below the latter. ACEM has attributed part of the long decline to what it calls a continued shift from mopeds to motorcycles, which is consistent with the strength of the 125 cc classes in Germany and Spain.

A Method for Separating Signal From Noise

Disentangling the effects described here does not require exotic data, only discipline in how ordinary data are read. The first rule is to compare against a clean base: two-year and three-year comparisons, or comparisons with 2023, the approach ANCMA itself adopted when it noted that Italy’s 2025 market, down 7.5 percent on 2024, was up 2.2 percent on 2023. The second is to read new registrations alongside ownership transfers, since a vehicle registered by a dealer and sold months later changes category in the statistics. The third is to decompose growth by segment and channel, separating private buyers from rental fleets, and 125 cc commuters from leisure riders.

The fourth rule is to follow the goods as well as the paperwork. Trade statistics, brand-level registration tables and dealer stock levels reveal when a market is being supplied faster than it is buying. For CSM International, whose work spans motorcycle research and customer research, the gap between what is registered and what is chosen is often where the commercial insight lies. A registration spike driven by a new entrant’s demonstrator fleet and a spike driven by commuters abandoning public transport look identical in a monthly bulletin, yet they call for opposite responses in an established manufacturer’s pricing, product and dealer strategy.

What the Autumn Will Test

ACEM itself has counseled patience. In July, its secretary general said the trend would need to hold through the autumn before conclusions could be drawn about sustained momentum. The autumn will indeed be revealing, for a technical reason: the comparison base is now clean. Registrations in November and December 2025 were back to roughly the level of 2023, so growth rates in the final quarter of 2026 will be measured against a normal base rather than the hollowed-out months that followed the Euro 5+ deadline in early 2025. Any double-digit growth recorded then will say far more about demand than anything published so far this year.

Early signals from the summer point in different directions. Germany’s federal authority reported that motorcycle registrations rose 27.3 percent in August and 24.7 percent over the first eight months, but IVM’s own commentary placed August’s volume below a typical year. In Spain, ANESDOR reported cumulative growth of 21.2 percent for all motorcycles and light vehicles through August, with 125 cc scooters leading the August figures. In Italy, motorcycles have declined for two consecutive months while scooters continue to grow. Three variables deserve watching: the pace of Chinese imports and dealer inventories, rental fleet timing in Spain, and any change to Germany’s B196 entitlement.

Real Demand, Smaller Than the Headline

Europe’s motorcycle market is growing, but not at the rate its headline suggests, and not everywhere. Strip out the regulatory calendar and the five largest markets have added about 4 percent in two years, roughly 2 percent a year. Strip out Spain and Italy and there is essentially no growth against 2019. What remains is a genuine expansion in Mediterranean commuting, carried by 125 cc machines and scooters and by licensing rules that turn millions of motorists into potential riders, alongside a supply push from Chinese factories that, on the German evidence available, appears to be redistributing market share faster than it is creating new riders.

For an industry accustomed to reading its health in a single percentage published each quarter by its own association, the lesson of 2025 and 2026 is methodological as much as commercial. A regulation that moved roughly 85,000 registrations from one year into another has produced both a manufactured slump and a manufactured boom, and neither was quite what it appeared. The more useful questions are about who is buying, what they are buying, and at what price: questions that registration totals cannot answer on their own, and that will decide which manufacturers are still growing in Europe once the base effects have run their course.