Nobody can manufacture time
It feels like we have been living in febrile and unstable times for nearly a decade now. Living and, above all, working with uncertainty and instability at least since the global pandemic fell on us in February 2020.
There has been one portfolio of business issues after another each one adding new clouds to our horizon, adding to an ever more complex matrix of motorcycle industry issues that are not unique to our own market, of course, but it seems that every time the wheel turns there is the inherent jeopardy that it will turn backwards for our world, setting us back again and further.
I'm seeing the world this way because as I sit down to write this column, I think back to the days when there was always a range of subjects to choose from, a smorgasbord of writing choice. But as I approach this month's topic I am painfully aware that variety is in the rear-view mirror and that, yet again, I am unable to tear myself away from the lens of motorcycle industry statistics as being the primary field of vision.
This edition has its usual crop of statistical updates - the big picture quarterly analysis of new motorcycle registrations, and the latest data from most of the market's 'Big Five' major market national trade associations.
Those 'Big Five' (Italy, Germany, Spain, UK and France) provide some 80% of the new model sales and registrations so it is through the market performance in Italy, Germany, Spain and the UK principally that we see our trends play out.
In the past two years the agenda has been dominated by the self-inflicted harm done to our market by the manufacturer's response to the Euro 5+ regulatory transition at the start of last year.
The Q4, 2024 rush to pre-register unsold Euro 5 inventory triggered a drama (the 'pre-regs') that closed a lot of dealerships in some markets and played a not insubstantial role in the near-death domino effect experience of one particular of our major manufacturers.
failed to prepare
The Stage II tranche of Euro 5 regulatory upgrades largely came about, as I understand it, because (at least to some significant part) the industry had managed to postpone some of it saw as the more serious impacts of the Stage I Euro 5 regs when they became law.
They then largely failed to adequately prepare for the well-publicised Stage II as corporate execs continued to be governed not by the smooth running of their industry and dealer networks but by the quarterly bonuses with which their pathway to the proverbial corner office is paved.
One way or another, if it walks, smells and quacks like an artificially created exercise in self-harm, then the chances are that it absolutely has been an artificially created exercise in self-harm.
We are finally coming to the end of the primary period of Euro 5+ 'pre reg' impacts. As the latest slew of new registrations data (see page 6 &7) start to show a return to some semblance of market stability and growth remember two things.
First, even though we are now lapping the H1 2025 stats, that doesn't mean that the present reported sales and registrations are not still supressed by the 2024 Q4 melodrama - don't be fooled, they are.
Second, to the (not insubstantial) extent that we are seeing a return to growth, it still is not really what one could call "genuine growth". It is relative growth, and in this context that means relative to a market that, some countries, lost nearly a third of its 2025-year end new bike park annual growth.
It would take at least two, maybe three years for the market to have stood still against where it was at thee and of 2024, and even longer to recover the lost growth.
While the Euro 5+ transition has cost us all money, has cost our aftermarket 'miles' and cost our service workshops consumables and replacement component income, what it has really cost is something much of valuable than money, something that is in much more limited supply than cash - it has cost us time. Probably around three years of R.o.T (Return on Time).
For the first five months 2026 (January to May) that 'quasi-growth' includes a much needed turnaround in Germany of +21.03%/57,063 units year-to-date (though the German market was down by - 36.02% in 2025); a mojo recovery of sorts in Italy, where the market was up by +7.91% year-to-date, having been -19.22% in 2025; a remarkable performance in the remarkable Spanish market where +23.16% year-to-date follows +7.93% in 2025; and an excellent comeback for the UK where +16.55% year-to-date represents a massive turnaround on the -19.42% seen in 2025.
For France, which is the one of the 'Big Five' where, outside of France, access to regular monthly market data is "problematic", we rely on ACEM's 'Big Five' quarterly data (see page 48) and that has France at +10.2% (42,058 units) for the period January, February and March - in a market that saw a -16.4% decline in 2025 to 179,225 units from 214,405 in 2024.
On a pro-rata basis it is still likely that France will be missing some 20,000 or more new registrations by the end of 2026 just to have allowed the market to stand still for 24 months - though some 8,000 or so of the registrations recorded for Q4, 2024 will actually have been sold on an 'extra-data' basis in H1 2025 - which is a perfect exemplar of what, in effect, remains broken and will do until we get at least three more years of good unit growth (approx. 12% a year) for at least three more year - through to the end of 2028.
Until or unless that happens, then the disadvantages of what happened with how the motorcycle manufacturers first engineered and then handles the Euro 5+ 'pre-reg' farrago will remain baked into our market's statistical DNA for longer still.
Remember - lost registrations equate to lost time and while we are good at manufacturing plenty more hard parts and accessories, as far as I am aware nobody has managed to mill days, weeks and years from a CNC lathe. The uncomfortable truth is that we are still carrying something like a quarter of the 2008-2012 recession with us to this day.
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