Are Italy and France really outliers?
The past two years have been a rollercoaster where analysing the market's new model registration statistics are concerned.
Ever since the first signs of an impending Euro 5+ pre-registrations drama started to impact some of the national trade association market performance numbers in October 2024, it was clear that we were in for a self-inflicted wound that would take a long while to heal.
It would seem that ever since Covid started to rock the world in January 2020 there has been an ever more turbulent business environment, one characterised by instability, uncertainty and the sense that a major downturn was just one more war, one more capital crisis or one more collapse in consumer confidence away.
In early 2025 it became clear just how bad the Euro 5+ pre-registration cycle had been, how deep it went this time. As the national motorcycle industry trade association statistics started to be published in January 2025 it started to become clear just how many unsold but pre-registered 'carry-over' motorcycles and scooters most be crowding dealership showrooms and storage facilities.
Then the crazy and hugely misleading Q4 2024 statistics for Europe's 'Big Five' markets (Italy, France, Spain, Germany and the UK) were revealed in ACEM's quarterly 'major market' report at the end of January 2025.
At that point it became apparent just how futile the best endeavours of us here at International Dealer News and many others around Europe to attempt 'real world' sales number estimates were going to be.
Whilst common sense dictated that yes, dealerships were selling more 'new' machines than the monthly and quarterly 2025 statistics suggested, the culture of gloom that descended on the market in Europe became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Especially once the equally deep trauma that KTM was suffering started to become apparent, and the early-stage effects of the November 2024 election in America started to become apparent – not least through tariffs.
This year has continued to see the uncertainties multiply - why have two wars going on when five will do.
However, so far, and remarkably, while the reports of economic health in developed markets can only be described as 'fragile' at best, the widespread expectation that the United States and Europe (especially) were on the precipice of another major recessionary shock have proven to be less imminent than we were being told.
The toxic mix of economic and political instability, high interest rates, high inflation, softening housing markets, declining labour pools and the massive impacts on energy markets and resulting consumer and commercial energy prices have not yet translated into wholesale job losses. Like so many international orthodoxies, the conventional cycles of economic cause and effect appear to have stalled - though at this stage all we can say with any degree of certainty is that we have a reprieve rather than a cure.
In this context, how do we therefore judge the apparently robust new motorcycle registration statistics through the first half of 2026? There's no question that the 'pre-reg' saga is still casting a shadow on the numbers (all be it a diminishing shadow) but even making an adjustment for the remaining 'pre-reg' impacts, far from a potential downturn the statistics are now starting to point to genuine, and genuinely healthy market growth.
For once the performance of the Italian market at a 'mere' +5.57% (103,354 units) through July 2026 is an outlier in lower growth terms than being the 'puller up of trees' that we had often seen before Q4 of 2024.
Elsewhere, the results for the first seven month of this year are dramatically stronger with the UK now reporting +16.12% (64,760) units, Germany at +17.60% (82,334 units) and the ever-remarkable Spanish market racing ahead at +21.19% (171,178 units).
Per the table on the front cover of this edition of International Dealer News The ACEM statistics for the first half of 2026 in Europe's 'Big Five' (which account for some 80% of new registrations) show France at +6.4% (another market that isn't as strong s the median of the results elsewhere at -6.4%/104,802 units) and the total of the 'Big Five' of +16.8% at 636,490 units suggests an 'All Markets' H1 of more than 760,000 new units in total receiving a first registration in Europe for the January to June 2026 period.
That in turn suggests a 2026 full year market for all European markets of somewhere in the region of 1,102,000 units.
That will represent real growth of 40,000 units compared to a 2025 estimate of totals that include the 'pre-reg' unit numbers that were sold from dealership showrooms that did not appear in the official 2025 registration numbers (estimates vary but 60,000 appears to be a consensus of estimates), and in the region of market parity with the 'real' market performance of 2024 (maybe a 10,000 unit genuine growth) when the theoretical 2024 total of 1,150,852 registrations is similarly adjusted for the (theoretically 60,000) 'pre-reg' units from Q4 of 2024 that didn't find owners until the following year (mostly H1, 2025).
So, the outcome of the 2024-2026 three-year cycle will likely result in modest growth (+10,000 to + 30,000 units?) since the end of 2023.
In the context of the multiple headwinds of the last three years that will have to be regarded as satisfactory.
Either way, there is no underlying collapse in consumer demand, but neither are the presently reported 15% and up growth numbers to be too relied on. Indeed, maybe Italy and France aren't such outliers after all, but rather, exemplars of a 'real market' demand that has proven itself to be stable.
The inescapable conclusion has to be that the performance of motorcycles and scooters as urban mobility and recreational vehicles of choice remains durable in the face of all but the most corrosive to economic negatives.
In this context the forecast that the present global PTW market of around 50 million units a year to something like 60 million by 2030 is not as far-fetched as many have suggested.
That is the forecast on which Honda is basing its ambitious eventual 50%/30 million unit global market share ambition on.
60 million global PTW sales by 2030?
