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Motorcycle Industry Council

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Motorcycle sales in the United States have had a tumultuous year so far, starting Q1 off with a 9% sales decline from 2019. That figure didn’t tell the whole story though, as not all segments were reacting similarly to the coronavirus lockdown.

While street bike sales were down 23%, off-road bikes were up an astounding 30% (dual-sport sales split the difference, and were down 5% for the first quarter).

That dichotomy has continued onward as 2020 marched on, with the MIC now reporting that dirt bike sales continued to impress this year with a 50.3% gain, when tallying the first six months of the year.

Official data on the US motorcycle industry for 2019 isn’t out yet, but Asphalt & Rubber has seen preliminary numbers, encompassing the first 11 months of the year on new motorcycle sales, and those numbers show that the USA continues to have essentially zero growth.

According to the documents supplied to us by our Bothan spies, from January to November of 2019, the US motorcycle industry grew a whooping 0.1%, with most of the major brands posting moderate single-digit losses for the year on new bike sales.

The motorcycle industry in the United States needs to attract new riders. This is a well-established fact, and we have already begun to see manufacturers catching on to this idea – most notably, Harley-Davidson with its “More Roads” business plan.

Now, the Motorcycle Industry Council (MIC) is rallying the troops to the cause, announcing a new long-term initiative to bring in new riders.

While new-bike sales in the United States continue to plummet, the Motorcycle Industry Council is reporting that overall motorcycle ownership is up in the USA.

This is because the MIC has found that 8% of the US households in 2018 had a motorcycle, according to their polling data – the most ever recorded by the MIC in decades.

The results are a modest bump from the 6.94% recorded in 2014 (the last time that the MIC did a full survey of motorcycle ownership), with 2018 showing that 10,124,400 households in the USA having a bike.

With the United States Census Bureau estimating the number of US households at 126,224,000, the MIC’s numbers come out to be 8.02% of the households.

I often berate the Motorcycle Industry Council (MIC) for not doing enough to promote and protect motorcycle riding in the United States, but we also have to give credit where credit is due, and the MIC is due a little credit for a change.

Working in conjunction with the Congressional Motorcycle Caucus, the MIC hosted a briefing titled “Intelligent Transportation Systems and Automated Vehicle Applications Impacts on Motorcycle Safety,” which focused on vehicle-to-vehicle technologies, and how they apply to motorcycles.

The briefing featured a panel of industry and research experts on the issue: Sam Campbell, BMW Group; Gary Higgins, American Honda Motor Company, Inc.; Shane McLaughlin, Virginia Tech Transportation Institute; and Eric Teoh, Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. 

Asphalt & Rubber readers should be familiar with how attempts have been made to use the Digital Millennium Right Act (DMCA) as means of limiting how you can work on your vehicles, including your motorcycle.

These attempts first started in 2015, and were pushed heavily by John Deere and the automobile lobby. Thankfully, last year the the Librarian of Congress allowed exemptions for vehicles to be applied to the DMCA, which will be in effect for the next two years.

Now, the Motorcycle Industry Council (MIC) – a group that represents the interests of motorcycle manufacturers in the United States – is putting pressure on state legislatures and encouraging them to block “Right to Repair” bills that would codify the exemptions made to the DMCA. 

For many in the motorcycle industry, 2016 felt like an off year, and now we know that those feelings weren’t unsubstantiated.

Early leaks of the MIC’s industry sales figures for 2016 show that the US motorcycle market contracted 2.1% in 2016, erasing the modest gains made in 2015.

Meanwhile for our neighbors across the pond, things are going substantially better, with sales in the United Kingdom up 11.7% (128,644 registrations).

More and more women are riding motorcycles, according to the Motorcycle Industry Council’s (MIC) latest motorcycle ownership survey. The data from the survey shows that out of the 9.2 million motorcycle owners in the United States of America, 14% of them are women. Booyah!

This figure is a stark contrast to the 8% ownership rate for women that was found in 1998, though it shows that the motorcycle industry still has a great deal of ground to cover when it comes to appealing to both sexes equally.

Encouraging though is the fact that 30 million people in the USA swung a leg over a motorcycle, with over a quarter of those people being female (some presumably as passengers), which shows that the sport and industry is at least reaching out beyond the gender lines.

Interesting news, as the Motorcycle Industry Council (MIC), the American trade group that is comprised of most of the motorcycle manufacturers, has acquired the motorcycle group of Marketplace Events LLC. What this really means is that the MIC has bought the AIMExpo, America’s largest trade, consumer, and media event.

We say this news is interesting, because you don’t usually see trade groups like the MIC in the mergers and acquisition realm, though the acquisition makes sense from a promotional point-of-view.

For those who don’t know, the MIC serves the interests of the motorcycle industry as a whole in the United States, and thus there is a lot to be gained by the MIC also controlling arguably the most important expo event for the American motorcycle industry.

This likely means that we will see more US models debuting at the AIMExpo, giving the show a status similar to the EICMA show in Italy and the INTERMOT show in Germany.

The Motorcycle Industry Council has tallied the numbers from 2014, and is happy to report that the US motorcycle industry grew 3.8% last year. Participating motorcycle manufacturers reported that 483,526 two-wheelers were sold in 2014, with growth across all sectors except in scooter sales.

The off-road segment sold particularly well, seeing an almost 11% gain over 2013’s numbers, with 81,013 units going thru dealership doors. Dual-sport sales were up 3.6% with 34,497 units sold, while on-road sales were up a modest 3%, for 334,488 units sold.