ACEM — The Motorcycle Industry in Europe Market Data

The official registration ledger of the European powered-two-wheeler market, published each quarter by ACEM, the European Association of Motorcycle Manufacturers. Every new motorcycle and moped registered in the continent's five largest markets — Italy, France, Germany, Spain and the UK — lands in this panel, together accounting for roughly 80% of all EU+UK registrations. The moped tables widen the net to six countries by adding Belgium and the Netherlands.

Each release period ships a statistical workbook plus a press release, and the archive reaches back to 2017. Inside a single file you get four parallel panels — motorcycles ICE-plus-electric, mopeds ICE-plus-electric, motorcycles electric-only, mopeds electric-only — plus a long-term trends sheet, all laid out as a monthly grid with year-over-year change columns beside every country.

The headline numbers show why this panel matters. H1 2026 recorded 636,490 motorcycle registrations across the five markets, up 16.8% year over year. May 2026 alone saw Italy take 220,776 units against the UK's 54,962 — a four-to-one spread between Europe's biggest and smallest of the big five. And the March-to-April 2020 cliff, where Italian registrations fell from 8,522 to 811, sits in the same table as today's recovery curve. One schema holds the boom, the bust and the bounce. Get a sample cut to the markets you cover.

One row per country-month within each segment sheet. Three verified observations ship with the record — two from the peak-season 2026 recovery, one from the pandemic floor:

# Motorcycles (ICE & Electrics) - monthly registration panel
Period        2026 - May
France        104802
Germany       114849
Italy         220776
Spain         141101
UK             54962
H1-2026 Total 636490   (+16.8% vs H1 2025)

Period        2020 - March
France        10371
Germany       23074
Italy          8522
Spain          8100
UK            12565

Period        2020 - April
France         3654
Germany       17763
Italy           811
Spain           817
UK             1480

# Motorcycles (Electrics) - first month of the electric-only sheets
Period        2020 - January
France          172
Germany          70
Italy           135
Spain           155
UK               36

Every country column is followed by its own percent-change-versus-same-month-previous-year column — stored as a decimal fraction (0.1676 reads as +16.76%) — so growth arithmetic arrives pre-computed rather than reconstructed. The 2020 pair above is the dataset's most cited feature: the same grid that shows the collapse lets you measure exactly how long each market took to climb out of it.

Eight documented fields per data sheet, verified cell-by-cell against the January-June 2026 release during research — field-definition confidence rated verified, the top mark on our rubric. Five carry absolute registration counts (one per covered market), one carries the month label, one carries the pre-computed year-over-year rate, and Total closes each period with the cross-market sum. The layout never moves between releases: a pipeline written against the June file reads the January file unchanged, and the electric-only sheets reuse the identical column order from their first appearance in 2020.

• Geography: motorcycles across Italy, France, Germany, Spain and the UK — about 80% of the EU+UK market; mopeds across France, Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Belgium and Spain. No other countries appear in the public files.
• Temporal: monthly series inside every release, running back to January 2017 in early-format files and to January 2020 in the current-format electric sheets; a complete quarterly/cumulative archive spans 2017 through 2026.
• Granularity: country x segment (motorcycle/moped x ICE/electric) x month. No sub-national regions, no engine-size bands, no brand or model splits — public detail stops at the national border.
• Scale: an archive of 21+ workbooks with matching press releases, six sheets per workbook, roughly 60-90 monthly rows per data sheet.

On Datadory's 0-10 quality rubric this record scores 8, against a 7.81 average across the 1,744 cataloged datasets — association-published panels score well because the layout is disciplined and the definitions hold steady year over year. Full ranking sits on the motorcycle manufacturers data hub.

API, files, or your warehouse. Daily, weekly, or hourly.

You choose the channel and the cadence; the eight-field dictionary travels intact across all three. Flat cuts land spreadsheet-ready for analysts who live in Excel, tabular loads suit warehouse ingestion, and structured payloads feed event-driven pipelines. Because the schema has not moved since 2017, switching cadence later is a settings conversation rather than a re-integration project — and the percent-change columns stay typed as decimals either way.

• Market sizing and forecasting - the five-market total with its year-over-year columns is the base case for any European powersports TAM model; monthly grain means forecasts can be validated against actuals within weeks rather than years.
• Electrification tracking - paired ICE-plus-electric and electric-only sheets make EV share computable per country without assumptions; the 2020-onward electric series is the longest consistent electrification record for European two-wheelers.
• Competitive intelligence - national demand curves reveal which OEM home markets are expanding and which are stalling before it shows up in anyone's annual report.
• Dealer and distributor planning - the monthly seasonal curve drives stocking decisions; the 2020-2024 window supplies both a disruption scenario and a recovery template.
• Policy and academic research - registration deltas align neatly with urban access restrictions, subsidy schemes and license-law changes, giving economists a clean treatment-and-control panel.
• Journalism - official association figures carry attribution weight that scraped marketplace listings cannot match.

See the market researchers use cases, data scientists use cases and journalists & academics use cases pages for role-specific workflows.

Market researchers and consultants rank highest: an official five-market panel with pre-computed growth rates is citation-grade material for industry reports (market researchers). Investors and quants get a monthly demand signal for listed powersports names, with the electrification split serving as a ready-made thematic factor (investors & quants). Data scientists inherit one unchanging schema spanning a decade, so features built once keep reading new quarters (data scientists). Competitive-intel product teams wire the country-month key into dashboards that track share-of-market momentum (competitive intel teams). Journalists and academics cite attributed figures with a 2017-2026 runway long enough to show COVID, recovery and the electric ramp happening in the numbers (journalists & academics).

• Public detail stops at the border - no brand, model, engine-size or regional breakdown exists in these files; brand-level figures live only inside the manufacturer-member CIACEM program. We deliver exactly the country-segment-month panel and label it as such.
• Percent-change columns are decimals - 0.1676 means +16.76%, and naive parsers that read them as percentages produce growth rates off by two orders of magnitude. We type them correctly on arrival.
• Filename conventions drifted over the years - older releases use different naming patterns than current ones, so naive archive walks miss the earliest vintages; we map the variants so the 2017-2019 history stays reachable.
• Moped geography differs from motorcycle geography - the moped sheets trade the UK for Belgium and the Netherlands, and whether L1e-A powered cycles appear varies by national administrative practice. Joins across segments should expect the mismatch rather than assume it away.
• Electric sheets start in 2020 - any pre-2020 electrification claim needs a separate source; we flag the seam explicitly in delivered extracts.

The card rail below gathers the natural companions:

• UK Vehicle Licensing Statistics (DfT / DVLA) - the British counterpart with vehicle-taxation-level detail; read the full head-to-head against this dataset.
• JAMA motorcycle statistics - Japan's production and shipment picture, completing the supply side behind European demand.
• MIC US statistics - the American retail and registration view for transatlantic comparisons.
• BikeZ motorcycle catalog - 42,574 models of specification detail to enrich the demand panel with product attributes.
• NHTSA recalls by manufacturer - safety-event context for the US portion of the global fleet.

Browse the whole vertical on the Motorcycle Manufacturers data hub or the ranked best motorcycle manufacturers datasets. Glossary background: how vehicle registration statistics are compiled and why they differ from production or export counts.