WHILE sales figures always give an indication as to what’s popular with new bike buyers at any particular time, it’s not necessarily the best way to get an indication of what people are actually riding.
Fortunately, the mechanism exists to find out exactly that, thanks to government figures that show exactly what’s taxed – and therefore MOT’d and insured – at one particular time.
Since the figures for the second quarter of 2015 have just been released, we thought we’d have a look at what the most popular bikes on the road, in terms of sheer numbers, really are.
These figures are based on ‘generic models’ rather than a precise breakdown (that’s something that’s also available, but only annually, not quarterly), but in many ways that’s better than a more detailed version, which would, for instance, separate a Bonneville T100 from a Bonneville, or an R1200GS Adventure from an R1200GS.
One proviso is that many of the largest figures on the official documents are listed as “model missing”. Those figures just lump together all the bikes that don’t have their model names or designations correctly filled out on their registration documents, and so cover a huge number of disparate models. We’ve eliminated all the ‘model missing’ figures from our list, since they’re unlikely to make an impact on the overall ranking of the correctly-named bikes in this top 10.
As well as proving popularity, the list could also give a bit of insight into which models are bearing up to use better than others – if they’re on the road rather than scrapped or SORN, that presumably means they’re still working.