Motorcycle brands, A to Z

Most lists of motorcycle brands are someone's opinion, a forum thread or a gear company's blog post. This one comes from the official registration data of the registers that record motorcycles by model (Australia, Spain, Finland, the UK, Israel, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Thailand and Ukraine, plus the Swiss canton of Thurgau): every make that has a motorcycle on the road there, with how many models it has and how many of them people actually register.

That's 166 motorcycle brands, out of 288 motorcycle makes and 6,391 models in VehiclesDB (the rest are makes with one or two rarely registered models, and a few register entries that are not brands). Below you'll find the brands with the most registered bikes, the full A to Z, the big names grouped by country, and the moped and scooter makers.

The most registered motorcycle brands

"Best" is personal. What we can measure is which brands people actually buy and keep on the road. For every model, the registers give us a popularity decile: 1 means the model sits in the top 10% most registered motorcycles, 10 the bottom 10%. Count how many of a brand's models are in the top 10%, and you get a fair picture of which brands dominate real roads:

By registrations, Honda leads with 136 of its 888 models in the top 10%, then Yamaha with 96 and Suzuki with 55.

A note on what this measures: popularity here is about how often a model appears in registration data, not about quality or reliability. Learner-legal 125cc bikes and scooters register in large numbers, and that's visible in the table.

Every model of a brand, current and past: Yamaha motorcycle models BMW motorcycle models Ducati motorcycle models Triumph motorcycle models

Motorcycle brands by country

The big names, grouped by where the brand comes from:

• Japan: Honda, Yamaha, Kawasaki, Suzuki
• Italy: Ducati, Aprilia, Moto Guzzi, MV Agusta, Benelli, Piaggio, Vespa, Bimota, Gilera, Laverda, Moto Morini
• Germany and Austria: BMW, KTM, Husqvarna (Swedish by origin, now built by KTM's group), Zundapp, NSU, MZ
• United Kingdom: Triumph, Norton, BSA, Royal Enfield (British by origin, Indian today), Ariel, Matchless, AJS, Velocette, CCM, Lexmoto
• United States: Harley-Davidson, Indian, Buell, Victory, Zero Motorcycles, Livewire
• Spain: Gas Gas, Rieju, Bultaco, Montesa, OSSA, Derbi
• China: CFMoto, Zontes, Voge, QJMotor, Lifan, Keeway
• Taiwan: Kymco, SYM, PGO
• India: Royal Enfield, Bajaj
• Czech Republic: Jawa, ČZ

Every motorcycle brand, A to Z

Moped and scooter brands

Mopeds (the small-engine class most countries register separately, often 50cc) have their own list: 326 moped makes and 1,509 models. The moped makers with the most models in the top two deciles are SYM, Peugeot, Tomos, La Souris (every one of its models is in the Dutch register), Honda, Kymco, Yamaha and Aprilia, and the electric maker Niu has moped models in that band too. The full list is on the mopeds page.

Many brands build both, so you'll find Honda, Yamaha, Peugeot and Piaggio on both lists. Whether a particular scooter counts as a moped or a motorcycle depends on its engine and on how each country's register classifies it. For what sets a cruiser, a naked bike or an adventure bike apart, see the types of motorcycles.

Where this list comes from

Every make here appears in official vehicle registration data, and a model only makes it into the catalog when at least two independent official sources agree it exists. For motorcycles, that evidence comes from the registers that record motorcycles by make and model: Spain, Finland, the United Kingdom, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Thailand and Ukraine. The US and German sources we use cover cars, not motorcycles, so a brand sold only in the US may be missing, and we'd rather say so than pad the list.

Motorcycle names are also messier than car names in registration data (registers often record engine codes or trim names as if they were models), so model counts per brand run higher than a brochure would suggest. We publish our measured error rate, motorcycles included.

Motorcycle data for developers

If you're building something for riders (an insurance quote, a parts shop, a marketplace) and need this list in code, it's the same data behind one API call:

curl "https://vehiclesdb.com/api/v1/makes?kind=motorcycle&order=popular&limit=10" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer vdb_pk_YOUR_KEY"

Most vehicle APIs only cover cars; this one covers motorcycles and mopeds from the same registers, with the same ids. The make and model dropdown turns it into a motorcycle picker with kind: "motorcycle", the whole dataset is a free download, and the car API page has the details.