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The debut of the Harley-Davidson Pan America 1250 was the headline event from 2021 - with the Bar & Shield brand offering its first motorcycle that truly deviated from the company's cruiser lineup.

An integral part of Harley-Davidson's "Hardwire" plan to restructure the company for the future, the Pan America 1250 is a conquest bike for the American bike-maker, with an eye on scooping up some sales from rival European brands.

Was it a success? That depends on whom you ask. American publications certainly seemed to think so, with the Pan America 1250 taking top honors in several of their shootouts last year. Meanwhile, the European press was less-enthused.

We will let you decide if home-team bias, on both sides of the pond, are at play there. For our money, we'd put the Ducati Multistrada V4 S in our garage before the Harley-Davidson Pan America 1250, but reasonable minds can easily disagree on this thought.

Shootouts don't balance the account's books however, and for the bean-counters, the true measure of a motorcycle's success is on the showroom floor.

To that end, Harley-Davidson sold just over 2,500 units of its Pan America lineup in the USA last year, according to our Bothan spies.

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The house of brands under KTM’s management had a very, very good year in 2021, with their parent company Pierer Mobility reporting a 23% increase in motorcycle sales over 2020’s dismal figures.

The preliminary report doesn’t break-out sales by each motorcycle brand (KTM, Husqvarna, & GasGas), but it does separate out the firm’s bicycle and e-bike figures, which have been used in the past to buoy the marketing team’s efforts.

As such, we can rest assured that today’s announcement and positive progress is real, and not the spin we were getting in 2020, which saw the Austrian outfit taking a first-time dip in sales results in the past decade.

Ducati is the first OEM to brag about its 2021 sales results, and it is quite the brag from the Italian brand – with 59,447 units sold last year.

That sum is an all-time record for Ducati Motor Holding, and marks a 12% gain over the total sales from 2019, and a 24% gain over 2020’s results.

Helping take Ducati to that level was double-digit growth in all of the motorcycle-maker’s key markets, including the United States, where sales were up a staggering 33.5%.

That growth was surely fueled by the Ducati Multistrada V4 adventure bike, which accounted for nearly 1 in 5 Ducati’s sold in 2021.

“Harley-Davidson delivered a solid third quarter and we have seen many of our Hardwire strategic initiatives perform well, providing encouraging initial proof points of our five-year strategy,” said Jochen Zeitz, chairman, president and CEO, Harley-Davidson.

That is how the Bar & Shield brand’s press release about its Q3 2021 sales starts out. The company goes on to acclaim its sales progress for this year, citing relevant metrics back to this time period in 2020.

For the motorcycle industry, 2021 is turning into a banner year, as motorcycle sales are booming across all segments. So, it shouldn’t surprise us too much to hear of record sales and standout quarters from motorcycle sales reports.

Here’s an interesting one for you though: Ducati sold more motorcycles in the first nine months of 2021 than it did in all of 2020 (which was 48,042 units).

Now granted, 2020 was an abysmal year for selling motorcycles, but even compared to 2019’s figures, the Italian brand is firing on all of its desmodromic valves.

Harley-Davidson has released its Q2 2021 earnings report, and the results are a bit mixed for the American brand. Compared to 2020’s numbers, Harley-Davidson is showing some unsurprising gains.

As such, the North American market is up 43% compared to last year, while worldwide results bounced to a 24% gain over 2020’s figures.

The story is the same for the first six months of sales for the Bar & Shield brand, with North America up 38% compared to last year, and worldwide sales getting an 18% increase.

All of this is to be expected, of course, not only because sales were down across the board in 2020, but also because the motorcycle industry is booming in 2021. In this regard, the bar of measurement for the Bar & Shield brand is rather low.

Big sales growth numbers are going to be all the rage this year, as the motorcycle industry recoups lost sales during the pandemic, and we see a resurgence of people getting outside on two wheels.

So while the headline that Ducati is boasting a 43% increase in sales for the first six months of 2021, compared to the same time period as last year, sounds pretty impressive, the bar is pretty low.

If a motorcycle company doesn’t post double-digit sales figures for Q1 or Q2, now that is something worth talking about.