Europe's Motorcycle Sales Are Going Really Well So Far, It's Definitely Not All Doom And Gloom

As of the end of September 2026, we hit the three-quarter mark on getting through the year. Overall, how's the motorcycle industry doing? While some individual brands are having a more difficult time than others (hello LiveWire), if you're in Europe at least, the overall picture is actually looking pretty good, according to the industry advocates at ACEM.

"Pretty good" is a nebulous term without numbers, though, right? So here are some of those to illustrate what "pretty good" means, in this case. Across five of Europe's biggest motorcycle markets (the UK, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain), total reported motorcycle sales rose 14.6 percent year-on-year over the same reporting period in 2025.

Breaking it down by country, some countries saw greater percentage rises than others; Germany, for example, saw a 24.1 percent rise for the first nine months of the year. France, by comparison, only saw a 4.8 percent rise. It's still upward momentum, though! Moped sales throughout the region also increased by a more modest 7 percent year-on-year.

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In real numbers, this means that 944,129 new motorcycles sold across those five major European markets in the first nine months of 2026, along with 118,544 mopeds across the top six markets (the same five as above, and also Belgium).

In a press release about these statistics, ACEM secretary general Antonio Perlot categorized this activity as being "well above the levels recorded for the same period since 2019." That's worth noting because, even though it may not exactly feel like it to you, 2019 was an entire eight years ago.

If we're rounding up, that's closer to 10 years than it is to five years. Seeing sustained growth in the industry in a particular region for nearly a decade is something to celebrate, and even moreso when you consider that 2019 was just a year after the last global financial crisis, and 2020 is when the global COVID-19 pandemic kicked off. While it's true that motorbikes saw a massive spike in popularity worldwide as people sought ways to let off some steam and still maintain good social distancing practices, these past eight years have been a pretty wild time to be alive, let alone to ride motorcycles.

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