Ask which motorcycle is the best full dress tourer and the question runs into trouble before anyone answers it. In the United States that format has essentially one serious entrant, and the bikes buyers line up against it are built to answer a different question. This post is about what happens to a category when almost nobody else enters it. Disclosure: MotoGearRater and Legendary USA have the same owner. Links to legendaryusa.com in this article go to our owner’s store, and are marked as sponsored. How we make money A full dresser and a bagger are not the same purchase The distinction sounds like enthusiast pedantry and it is not. A bagger carries a fairing and hard saddlebags and stops there. A full dresser adds a top box, a passenger backrest and passenger accommodation built for hours rather than errands, and treats audio, navigation and weather protection as structural rather than bolted on. Harley's 2024 Street Glide is a bagger. It runs the Milwaukee-Eight 117 at 130 lb-ft at 3,250 rpm, weighs 811 lb, carries a 12.3 inch TFT display and four ride modes, and launched at $25,999. That is an enormous and highly capable motorcycle, and it is not organised around the passenger. When Harley wanted a full dress bike in that same family for 2025 it added one, the Street Glide Ultra, at $30,749. The gap between those two prices is the gap between the categories, stated by the manufacturer itself. Which is why the comparison buyers reach for first, Gold Wing against Street Glide, is usually not a comparison at all. Anyone weighing those two has not finished narrowing the decision, because the bikes answer different questions. The bagger question is what a rider wants under them on a long solo weekend. The full dresser question is what a passenger will still sit on at hour six. What Honda changed in 2021, and what it deliberately did not The 2021 update is the line that matters when you read a used listing. The trunk grew by 11 litres to 61 litres, which Honda described the way owners actually measure it: two full face helmets. Android Auto was added alongside the CarPlay already fitted. Speaker output was quoted at 45 watts. The range ran from $23,900 to $32,600 depending on trim. Almost nothing else changed, and that is the interesting part. No new engine, no new frame, no repositioning. Honda fixed the two complaints that had followed the previous redesign, luggage volume and phone compatibility, then left the motorcycle alone. Prices have drifted upward since without the bike being reinvented, which is how a manufacturer behaves when no rival product is applying pressure. Compare that with the rest of this series between 2020 and 2025. Harley redesigned the Street Glide and cut the base price. Indian replaced the Scout's engine. BMW replaced the GS and then watched the Adventure variant overtake the standard bike. Honda changed the Gold Wing's luggage and its phone integration. The competitive field, or the absence of one The other three manufacturers answer touring, they just answer it in other formats. BMW's touring volume sits in adventure touring, where the GS pair alone accounted for roughly 30 percent of BMW Motorrad's global sales in 2022. People cross continents on a GS and it is still not a full dresser: no trunk as standard, no integrated stereo, a 33.5 inch standard seat and a riding position built for standing up. Harley and Indian concentrate on the American bagger, where Indian pushed the Challenger directly at the Road Glide. A useful provenance reminder, because it applies to every sales claim in this series: Harley, Indian and Honda publish no model-level unit sales, and BMW is the only one of the four that does. Nobody can tell you how many Gold Wings sell That reminder does real work here. There is no published figure for Gold Wing volume in any year covered by this series, so the argument in this post is categorical rather than commercial. The claim is not that the Gold Wing outsells its rivals. The claim is that in the full dress format, in the United States, it does not have many rivals to outsell. Those are different statements, and only one of them is supportable from public data. That distinction gets flattened constantly by pages publishing confident unit numbers for models whose manufacturers never released any. We set out what the available data can and cannot support in what sales data cannot tell you. The Gold Wing is the clearest case of a strong category argument with no numerical one behind it. What the owner record says the deciding factor really is Owner reporting on this bike is unusually consistent, and it does not lead with the things the brochure leads with. The complaint that recurs most, and the one owners themselves say should decide the purchase, is weight at parking speed. The same riders who describe the mass disappearing once the bike is rolling are blunt that it reappears the moment they are pushing it backwards up a slope. Reverse is standard and the DCT adds a forward crawl, and owners rate both highly precisely because the underlying problem is real. The second recurring complaint is the audio. Owners report they cannot hear the stereo at highway speed and cite the 45 watt figure as the reason, and the near universal workaround is to give up on the speakers and move to in helmet audio. The third is the side cases, which the 2021 trunk fix did not address. We collected the full pattern in Gold Wing owner reports. Read together, those complaints describe a motorcycle under no real pressure to fix its remaining weaknesses. A 45 watt stereo owners cannot hear survives model year after model year because nothing in the showroom next door forces the issue. What this means for a buyer today Stop comparing a Gold Wing to a bagger and start deciding which category you are buying. If you ride alone and want the American touring format, the bagger side of the room has several credible answers, including a Street Glide that got substantially better in 2024. If you ride two up for long days and want a top box, integrated audio and reverse as standard, the field narrows fast, and the price ceilings say why. For what that budget buys across brands, what $25,000 bought between 2020 and 2025 covers the same ground from the money side. On the Gold Wing specifically, the used decision is unusually clean. A 2021 or later bike buys you the 61 litre trunk and Android Auto, and a pre-2021 bike is the same motorcycle underneath for less money. The transmission choice is permanent, so ride both. And do the test nobody does on a dealer lot: with the engine off, walk it backwards up the mildest slope you can find, because that is the situation every owner complaint about weight is actually describing. One gear note, since a full fairing changes what you need. Gold Wing hands take far less wind and weather than they would on a naked bike, so the deciding factor in a glove is usually not waterproofing but how it fits after a few thousand miles. Owners of these bikes keep gear for years, which makes break in behaviour matter more than showroom fit. Legendary USA has a straightforward explanation of how leather gloves stretch and break in that is worth reading before you size a pair. The short version The Gold Wing holds a category rather than winning a contest. Honda updated the luggage and the phone integration in 2021 and left everything else alone, which is what a manufacturer does when the format has no direct rival. The American baggers are excellent and they are not the same purchase. And since no public figure for Gold Wing volume exists, this has to be stated as a categorical argument, not a sales one. Cover photo: "Honda GOLD WING in the Honda Collection Hall" by Rainmaker47, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Disclosure: MotoGearRater and Legendary USA have the same owner. Links to legendaryusa.com in this article go to our owner’s store, and are marked as sponsored. How we make money For a cafe racer leather jacket you intend to ride in, the pick is the BECK 666 Distressed Horsehide Cafe Racer, priced from $815, because it is cut as a riding jacket first and a style piece second. BECK is Northeaster Flying Togs, a separate American maker founded in 1928 that Legendary USA carries as an authorized dealer, and the 666 is built from the same 1.3mm front-quarter horsehide as the rest of that line. The hide is most of the reason the price looks like it does, and it is also the reason these jackets turn up on second owners twenty years later still holding their shape. The question is harder than it looks because the words cafe racer stopped being a riding term and became a rack label. Search the phrase and most of what comes back is thin lambskin with a snap collar, a light coil zipper, and a body cut for standing still. The silhouette is easy to copy. The construction is not. One thing to be plain about before the list: none of the leather in this roundup is armored or CE certified, so none of it should be sold to you as crash protection. It is abrasion-minded clothing, not safety equipment. How These Were Ranked I weighted four things: the hide and its weight, how the jacket is put together at the seams and the zipper, how it sits on a bike rather than on a hanger, and what owners report after five or ten years of wearing one. Price mattered only in the sense of what you get for it. A $400 jacket that dies in two seasons is more expensive than an $815 one that outlasts the bike. The scores are editorial. They come from riding in this gear and from handling how it is built, not from lab results. We run no abrasion tests and no destructive testing of any kind, and a number here does not predict what happens to you in a crash. Prices verified August 2026. 1. BECK 666 Distressed Horsehide Cafe Racer, Best Overall The BECK 666 is the cafe racer in the BECK range, and it is the one I point people at when they say they want the minimal look but do not want a costume. Short body, clean front, none of the belt-and-epaulet furniture that turns a jacket into a photo prop. The 1.3mm front-quarter horsehide is stiff enough on day one that new owners sometimes think it was a mistake, and then somewhere around the third month it stops fighting and starts fitting only you. Distressed finish means it arrives already looking lived in, which suits a style built on the idea of a jacket with miles on it. It is unlined for protection purposes, meaning no armor, so ride it accordingly. Price: from $815 Score: 9.1 out of 10 Best for: riders who want the true cafe silhouette in a hide that will outlive the trend 2. Vanson Leathers, Best If You Want Armor Pockets We do not sell Vanson and we cannot link you to it, but leaving it off a cafe racer list would be dishonest. Vanson has been building competition-weight leather in Massachusetts for decades, they build to order, and they will fit a jacket to your measurements rather than to a size chart. The thing they genuinely do better than anything else here is impact protection: a Vanson can be specified with pockets for CE armor at the shoulders, elbows and back, and none of the American heritage jackets in this roundup can say that. If your priority is a cafe silhouette that still takes armor, buy the Vanson and stop reading. The tradeoffs are lead time and a house cut that runs closer to race fit than street fit. Price: sold direct by Vanson, we do not carry it Score: 8.8 out of 10 Best for: riders who will not buy a jacket without armor pockets 3. BECK 732 Northeaster Horsehide Jacket, Best Traditional Alternative Plenty of people ask for a cafe racer and actually want the older asymmetric silhouette, and the BECK 732 Northeaster is where I send them. Same 1.3mm front-quarter horsehide, same American shop, traditional cut instead of the minimal one, and the same starting price of $815. It covers more of you and it reads as a motorcycle jacket from across a parking lot in a way the 666 deliberately does not. Also available in chestnut brown if black feels too on the nose. If you are torn, try both cuts on with a t-shirt and then again with a hoodie, because that is the decision the extra room actually makes for you. Price: from $815 Score: 8.9 out of 10 Best for: riders who want the classic silhouette in the same hide 4. Legendary Black Hills Leather Jacket, Best Lower Entry Price The Legendary Black Hills starts at $675, which is not cheap in the abstract but is the lowest real entry point in this list to a full-weight American-cut leather jacket. It is a house Legendary piece rather than a BECK, the leather is not the horsehide the BECK line uses, and I would not pretend otherwise. What it gets you is a jacket you can wear hard without wincing about the price of the first scuff, which matters more than people admit on a first leather jacket. Like everything else here it is unarmored and carries no CE rating, so treat it as clothing that resists a scrape, not as protection. Price: from $675 Score: 8.2 out of 10 Best for: a first serious leather jacket without a four figure decision 5. BECK 999 Horsehide Motorcycle Jacket, Best Top of the Range The BECK 999 sits at the top of the traditional side of the BECK line at a starting price of $845, and it is the one long-term owners get sentimental about. Same hide, same shop, a silhouette that has not needed updating since before most of us were riding. It lands fifth here only because this is a cafe racer roundup and the 999 is not a cafe racer. On a list of jackets to own for thirty years it would be at or near the top. If you are buying once and you do not care whether the cut is currently fashionable, this is the one to look at. Price: from $845 Score: 8.7 out of 10 Best for: a buy-once jacket in the traditional cut What to Check Before You Buy One Schott is usually the first name people raise, and the Perfecto genuinely is an icon of American clothing. It is a fashion benchmark now more than a riders' benchmark, and if you are buying leather to ride in rather than to wear out, BECK, Vanson and Aero Leather are the more serious conversation. Beyond the badge, here is the short checklist. Hide and weight. Ask for a thickness in millimetres. Riding-weight leather sits around 1.0mm to 1.4mm. Fashion lambskin is often half that and feels lovely in a shop. Sleeve pitch. Hold your arms out as if you were on the bars. If the jacket pulls across the back or the cuffs climb your forearms, the sleeves were cut for standing up. Zipper and hardware. The main zip is the part that gets used ten times a day for twenty years. Heavy metal, not a light coil. Armor. If you want impact protection, buy a jacket with armor pockets or wear an armored shirt underneath. The Bohn armored gear we carry is a separate brand and is the only CE-rated thing on our shelves. Length and break-in. A cafe cut is short by design. Sit on your own bike in it before you decide the hem is wrong, and give heavy horsehide a month before judging. Common Questions Cafe racer leather motorcycle jacket recommendations? Start with the BECK 666 at from $815 if you want the real thing in horsehide, and Vanson if you need armor pockets in that silhouette. Below that price, most of what is marketed as a cafe racer is lambskin fashion outerwear with a motorcycle name on it. If your budget is closer to $675, the Legendary Black Hills is a full-weight leather jacket, just not a cafe cut. Is a cafe racer jacket safe to ride in? Heavy leather resists abrasion better than a hoodie, and that is the honest limit of the claim. None of the leather jackets we sell are armored or CE certified, so they do nothing for impact at the shoulder, elbow or spine. Riders who want both looks and protection wear an armored shirt underneath or choose a jacket built with armor pockets. Is horsehide better than cowhide? Horsehide is denser and tighter grained, so it starts stiffer and then holds a shape once it has learned yours. Good heavy steerhide is not a downgrade, it just breaks in softer and drapes more. The bigger variable is thickness and how the jacket is sewn, not the animal it came from. The Short Answer Buy the BECK 666 Distressed Horsehide Cafe Racer at from $815. It is the only jacket on this list that is a genuine cafe cut in genuine riding-weight hide from a shop that has been doing it since 1928. The runner-up depends on what you are optimising for: Vanson if armor pockets are non-negotiable, and the BECK 732 Northeaster if you decide the traditional silhouette suits you better once you have both on. If you want to compare the rest of the range side by side, the American-made jackets collection has the full BECK and Legendary lineup with current sizing. Try the cut before you commit to the style, because a cafe racer that fits badly is just a short jacket.

Indian's share of the North American motorcycle market went from 2 percent in 2014 to above 13 percent in 2023, on Polaris's own figures, and that number gets used to argue Indian is closing on Harley-Davidson. This post asks what the six years from 2020 to 2025 actually establish at brand level, and what they do not. The answer is narrower than either company's marketing and considerably more useful. Disclosure: MotoGearRater and Legendary USA have the same owner. Links to legendaryusa.com in this article go to our owner’s store, and are marked as sponsored. How we make money The Two Numbers Everyone Puts Side by Side On one side, Indian's North American share, 2 percent in 2014 to above 13 percent in 2023, cited by Polaris. On the other, Harley's worldwide shipments: 145,246 in 2020, a peak of 188,494 in 2021, 179,984 in 2023, 148,862 in 2024 and 124,477 in 2025. Those two figures cannot be set against each other. One is a percentage of a regional market, the other a count of motorcycles shipped worldwide. Different denominators, different geographies, different units. Any argument that moves from the first to a claim about the second has skipped the step that mattered. Harley-Davidson publishes no model-level unit sales, and neither does Polaris for Indian or Honda for the US market; BMW Motorrad is the only one of the four that does. Growth From a Small Base Is Not the Same as Outselling This is the point the share figure hides. A brand can multiply its share several times over and still ship a fraction of what the incumbent ships, because the base was small. Indian's global volume passed 30,000 for the first and only time in this window, in 2021. Harley shipped 188,494 worldwide that same year. Both are real and neither cancels the other. A share chart that starts at 2 percent will always look more dramatic than a shipment chart that starts at six figures, and that is a property of the chart rather than of the market. Both Brands Peaked in the Same Year, Then Fell Together The most interesting thing in the six year window is that the two lines move in the same direction. Indian's high point was 2021 at above 30,000 units globally. Harley's high point was 2021 at 188,494. Indian's global volume was 25,792 in 2024 with the US down around 15 percent. Harley shipped 124,477 in 2025, with global retail of 132,535 down 12 percent and North American retail of 89,132 down 13 percent. That is not the shape of one brand taking customers from the other. It is the shape of a category contracting with both of its American players inside it. Harley-Davidson publishes no model-level unit sales, and neither does Polaris for Indian or Honda for the US market; BMW Motorrad is the only one of the four that does. Nothing in those brand totals attributes a single lost sale to the other manufacturer. Our post on what motorcycle sales data cannot tell you goes through why that attribution step is the one almost every roundup gets wrong. Where the Fight Was Actually Fought Indian went at Harley directly once, and it was a product move rather than a data one. The Challenger arrived in 2020 as the flagship with the liquid-cooled PowerPlus 108, 1770cc, 122 hp, 128 lb-ft, a 26.5 inch seat, 796 lb wet and a $21,999 price, and Indian ran an explicit Challenger Challenge campaign against the Harley Road Glide Special. That is the closest thing to a named head-to-head this rivalry produced. Harley's response was not a counter-model. It was a rebuild of the segment it already led. For MY2024 the Street Glide and Road Glide were redesigned from the ground up, with the Milwaukee-Eight 117 standard at 130 lb-ft, a 12.3-inch display and a base price about $2,000 below the outgoing Special. Harley's own FY2024 release credits that launch with driving its US Touring market share to 74.5 percent. Treat that 74.5 percent carefully. It is Harley's own figure, segment-level rather than model-level, and Harley's FY2025 release names no models at all, so it should not be carried into 2025. Detail on that redesign sits in our 2025 Harley best seller post. No Public Data Lets Anyone Claim Indian Beat Harley in Any US Segment This deserves saying flatly, because the internet is full of the opposite. Harley-Davidson publishes no model-level unit sales, and neither does Polaris for Indian or Honda for the US market; BMW Motorrad is the only one of the four that does. There is no published head-to-head between these two brands in any year of this window. Indian's most specific public claim is that the Scout is its top-selling platform, with roughly 100,000 units sold globally and cumulatively between 2014 and 2024. That is a ten year running total across a family of five to seven SKUs, and converting it to an annual rate would be an invention. Harley's most specific claim is the 74.5 percent Touring share. Neither is a comparison with the other company, and anyone presenting a segment win for either side has filled the gap themselves. Two Companies, Two Opposite Strategies What the six years do show is that the two brands answered the same market in opposite ways. Harley narrowed. The Rewire in 2020 cut the planned model count by around 30 percent, exited 39 markets, cut roughly 160 dealers and reduced year-end dealer inventory by 59 percent, and the lineup that followed leaned harder on touring. Indian widened. The all-new Chief platform arrived for MY2022 across six variants from $14,499 to $20,999, the Scout family reached its widest at seven SKUs in 2023, and for MY2025 the Scout was replaced outright with a new frame and the SpeedPlus 1250 engine while the Scout Sixty family opened the lineup at $9,999. One company cut to defend a profitable core; the other spent to cover more ground. A Note on What Riders in Both Camps Actually Wear One thing this rivalry does not divide is kit. Vests are the common outer layer on both sides of the badge, and the useful distinction is not the brand on the patch but whether the garment was built to be ridden in at all. Legendary USA's range of US-made motorcycle vests is a reasonable reference point for what construction and weight look like when a vest is made for riding rather than for a parking lot. What This Means for a Buyer Today Share arguments should not decide a purchase. Lineup breadth and dealer reach where you live should. Indian's entry point is a $9,999 Scout Sixty and its range spans that to a $21,999 Challenger. Harley's volume is concentrated in touring, where its own segment claim is strongest and where the MY2024 redesign put the newest engineering. The falling volume on both sides is the part with practical consequences. Fewer new units shipped means a thinner used pipeline a few years out, and Harley's own 2020 experience shows how fast a dealer network can be cut. Ask what the nearest dealer looks like for the brand you are considering, because that question has an answer, unlike who is winning. Year by year context sits in our 2021 best-selling motorcycles post. The Window Is About to Close Polaris has agreed to sell a majority stake in Indian to Carolwood LP, spinning the brand into a standalone company. The practical effect on this question is direct: Polaris investor commentary is where the 2 percent to 13 percent share figure came from, and it will not be a source for future years. So the evidence base for this rivalry is getting thinner rather than richer, which is a reason to be more careful with the numbers that already exist. Six years produced two brand-level shipment lines, one share percentage, one segment claim and one cumulative platform total. They did not produce a winner, and no honest reading can manufacture one. Cover photo: "Harley-Davidson Street Glide parked at Hogs for Hospice, Leamington, Ontario, 2025-08-02 04" by Chris Woodrich, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Disclosure: MotoGearRater and Legendary USA have the same owner. Links to legendaryusa.com in this article go to our owner’s store, and are marked as sponsored. How we make money For a first leather motorcycle jacket, buy the Legendary Flying Fortress Vintaged A-2 at $415, because it is real goatskin at a price a new rider can justify in the same year they bought the bike, insurance, helmet and boots. It is a flight jacket pattern rather than a purpose-cut motorcycle jacket, which is a real tradeoff and I will explain it below, but it beats the alternative most new riders actually choose, which is a $120 fashion jacket that falls apart at the first seam. Now the part a lot of first-jacket articles skip. Leather is abrasion clothing. It slides instead of tearing, which is worth a great deal in a low speed get-off, and it does nothing at all for impact. None of the leather jackets we sell are armored or CE certified. If your honest priority as a new rider is protection rather than looks, the right answer is an armored textile jacket from a technical brand, and I have put one on this list even though we do not sell it. Pick the failure you are actually trying to avoid, then buy for that. How These Were Judged For a first jacket the weighting is different than for a lifetime purchase. I looked at price against what you actually get, how forgiving the fit is when you are still figuring out your riding position, whether it survives being treated carelessly, and whether it is a jacket you keep wearing after the novelty of being a new rider wears off. A first jacket that lives in the closet was a waste of money at any price. The scores below are editorial judgments from wearing this gear and inspecting the construction. They are not lab results and we do not run destructive tests. No score here predicts crash outcomes, and none of these jackets carries a safety certification. Prices verified August 2026. 1. Legendary Flying Fortress Vintaged A-2, Best First Leather Jacket At $415 the Flying Fortress is the cheapest jacket on this list that I would call real leather without qualifying it. Goatskin, vintaged finish, A-2 pattern with knit cuffs and waistband. The knits matter more than they sound: they seal wind at the wrists and hem, which is most of what makes a cool morning bearable at 55mph. The tradeoff is honest. A flight jacket is shorter in the body than a motorcycle cut, so it can ride up when you lean forward, and goatskin is lighter than horsehide. For a first season on a standard or a cruiser it is a good, correctly priced choice. Price: $415 Score: 8.4 out of 10 Best for: a first real leather jacket that does not eat the whole gear budget 2. Alpinestars Armored Textile, Best If Protection Comes First We do not sell Alpinestars and there is nothing here to click, but a first-jacket article that pretends armor does not exist is doing new riders a disservice. An armored textile jacket from Alpinestars arrives with CE-rated shoulder and elbow armor in it, usually a pocket for a back protector, and it costs less than most of the leather on this page. That is the genuine advantage: certified impact protection at the joints, out of the box, at a lower price. What you give up is the look, the longevity and the way leather ages. If you are commuting daily in traffic and you have room for exactly one jacket, buy the armored one and buy leather later. Price: sold by technical gear retailers, we do not carry it Score: 8.7 out of 10 Best for: new riders who want CE armor included rather than added 3. Legendary Black Hills Leather Jacket, Best Step Up If your budget stretches, the Legendary Black Hills at from $675 is a purpose-cut motorcycle jacket rather than a flight jacket, which means length in the back, a collar that closes at speed, and sleeves pitched for the bars. That pattern difference is what you are paying the extra couple of hundred for, and on longer rides you feel it. It is a Legendary house jacket, not a BECK, and it is not front-quarter horsehide. Still unarmored, still uncertified. For a new rider who knows they are going to keep riding, this is the jacket that skips a purchase. Price: from $675 Score: 8.3 out of 10 Best for: a first jacket you will not replace in two years 4. BECK 732 Northeaster Horsehide Jacket, Best Buy Once and Stop The BECK 732 Northeaster at from $815 is on a new rider list for one reason: some people would rather buy the last jacket first. BECK is Northeaster Flying Togs, a separate American maker founded in 1928 that Legendary USA carries as an authorized dealer, and the line is cut from 1.3mm front-quarter horsehide. It arrives stiff and takes a month of wear to soften, which is a strange experience if you have never owned heavy leather. Buy it if you already know you are in this for the long run. If you are three weeks into riding and still deciding, do not start here. Price: from $815 Score: 9.1 out of 10 Best for: committed new riders who want to buy one jacket for good What to Get Right on a First Jacket Almost every regret I hear from new riders comes from one of five mistakes, and none of them are about brand. Schott will come up in every forum thread you read, and the Perfecto earned its place in American clothing, but it is a fashion benchmark more than a riding one. Focus on the list instead. Fit in a riding position, not standing. Lean forward onto imaginary bars in the changing room. Watch the cuffs and the back hem. Do not buy a size up for layers you have not bought yet. A loose jacket flaps at speed and moves in a slide. Decide about armor before you decide about looks. If you want impact protection with leather, wear a CE-rated layer under it. The Bohn armored gear we carry is a separate brand and the only certified product on our shelves. Budget the whole kit, not just the jacket. Helmet, boots and proper gloves matter at least as much as what is on your torso, and hands hit the ground first. Check the return policy before ordering online, and try it on in the house with the tags on before you commit. Common Questions Best first leather motorcycle jacket for new riders? The Legendary Flying Fortress A-2 at $415 is the pick if you want real leather at a sane first-year price. Step up to the Legendary Black Hills at from $675 if you want a true motorcycle cut. If protection matters more to you than material, an armored textile jacket from a brand like Alpinestars is the more honest choice and we do not sell those. How much should a new rider spend on a jacket? Somewhere between $400 and $700 buys a jacket that is genuinely good and does not distort the rest of your gear budget. Below about $250 you are usually buying thin, corrected-grain leather that will not last. Above $800 you are buying a jacket for the next twenty years, which is a fine decision but not a beginner requirement. Is leather or textile better for a beginner? Textile is better if you want armor included and you ride in mixed weather. Leather is better for abrasion resistance and it lasts far longer. Many riders end up owning both, and starting with whichever one you will actually wear every ride is a better decision than agonising over the comparison. If You Only Buy One Start with the Flying Fortress at $415. It is real leather, correctly priced for a first year, and it will still be worth owning when you upgrade. The runner-up is the Legendary Black Hills at from $675 if you can stretch, because a proper motorcycle cut is worth the difference on any ride over an hour. Whichever you pick, be clear with yourself about what it is. Leather is abrasion clothing, not safety equipment, and no jacket in this roundup carries a certification. If you want both, wear an armored layer underneath. The full range with current sizing is in the American-made jackets collection if you want to compare cuts before ordering.

Nobody at MotoGearRater rode a Challenger for this article. What follows is a synthesis of owner reporting: themes that recur across Indian owner communities, model-specific rider forums, and ownership threads on general motorcycle boards. Where the record is thin, or where owners disagree with each other, we say so rather than smoothing it over. Disclosure: MotoGearRater and Legendary USA have the same owner. Links to legendaryusa.com in this article go to our owner’s store, and are marked as sponsored. How we make money What the Challenger is The Challenger is Indian's frame-mounted-fairing bagger, and the bike that broke the segment's air-cooled convention. It arrived for 2020 as the flagship with the liquid-cooled PowerPlus 108: 1770cc, 122 hp, 128 lb-ft, a 26.5-inch seat, 796 lb wet, and a $21,999 launch price. Indian ran an explicit Challenger Challenge campaign against the Harley Road Glide Special, which tells you who it was aimed at. Liquid cooling is the structural difference. Most of what owners say about this bike, positive and negative, traces back to that one decision, and to the fact that Indian is a much smaller retail network than the brand it was aimed at. Polaris publishes no model-level unit numbers for Indian, so nothing here should be read as a sales figure. At brand level, Indian's global volume passed 30,000 for the first and only time in 2021 and was 25,792 in 2024, with the US down roughly 15 percent. Polaris has since agreed to sell a majority stake in Indian to Carolwood LP, spinning it into a standalone company, which bears on one of the complaints below. For the brand's position around the Challenger's launch, see our look at Indian's best seller of 2020. What owners consistently praise The engine draws the most consistent praise, and specifically its willingness to rev. Owners who have run air-cooled big twins describe those engines as wanting to be short-shifted and the PowerPlus as encouraging the opposite. Riders who moved across from air-cooled Indians and from Harley touring bikes name the performance difference as the reason they switched, and a recurring line in owner threads is that they see no reason to modify the exhaust or intake at all, which is unusual in this class. Heat is the second theme and it is a comparative one. Owners who came from air-cooled Thunderstroke bikes describe the difference as large rather than marginal. Adjustable lower fairing vents get repeated credit for directing hot air past the feet, and owners report that footwear and trouser choice matter more than they expected. Chassis behaviour comes up often. Owners describe the suspension as more communicative than the fork-faired Thunderstroke models, and the frame-mounted fairing gives the same lighter steering that Road Glide owners report. Owners moving up from lighter bikes repeatedly say the weight disappears once the bike is moving. Two practical points recur. Owners cite the short maintenance list, and the single-fluid setup in particular, as a reason for choosing it. And there are owner reports of bikes at 20,000, 40,000 and 60,000 miles with nothing beyond scheduled service, which is the kind of report that carries weight because it is boring. What owners consistently complain about The dealer network is the loudest and most consistent complaint, and it has been getting worse rather than better. Owners report dealerships dropping the Indian franchise with little notice, in one case leaving a buyer more than four hours from the nearest remaining dealer weeks after purchase, and Indian corporate apparently unaware the dealer had gone. Owners in several regions report closures over the same period. The practical pinch point is warranty work, because an independent shop can service the bike but cannot process a warranty claim. Reports on direction are genuinely mixed: some owners say their dealer leaned in after the Carolwood announcement and is expanding. But the underlying complaint, that support after the sale is thin, recurs across years rather than months. Heat is reduced, not solved, and owners are clear about this. The bike still gets hot at stops and in slow traffic, the right side more than the left, and owners treat the fairing vents and their choice of boots as part of the solution rather than an afterthought. There are also outlier reports of severe right-side heat on PowerPlus baggers, bad enough to mark a rider's leg, which other owners in the same threads treat as a fault to be diagnosed rather than normal behaviour. Owners also note that the cylinder deactivation at idle produces sounds new owners routinely mistake for a problem. First-year bikes are a named weak spot. Owners, including at least one former dealer employee, report the 2020 Challenger as electrically finicky, 2021 as noticeably better, and the platform as settled from 2022. Anyone shopping used should treat model year as material rather than cosmetic. Owners who bought 2020 bikes and had no trouble also post, so this is a risk profile rather than a verdict. Ride Command draws steady complaints. The recurring one is Apple CarPlay dropping and reconnecting, reported both before and after software updates, with some owners reporting an update made it worse. Navigation is described as poor by multiple owners even where they find the map useful, and pairing a headset and a phone at the same time is described as fiddly. Separately, more than one owner has traced a display that cuts out and back on to a phone plugged into the bike's USB port, which is a useful thing to know before paying for a diagnosis. A few components come up often enough to name: power windshield motors, starters, and weak batteries on bikes that have sat. Owners are notably fond of the power windshield as a feature and still describe the motor as a wear item. Low-speed handling divides new owners. The frame-mounted fairing produces light steering, and riders coming from fork-faired or lighter bikes report the bars feeling sensitive and wanting to wander at parking speed. Most report it passing within a few hundred miles. The weight itself is less forgiving: owners report low-speed drops in parking lots and on gravel, and describe the margin for technique errors at a standstill as small. Finally, breadth of support. Aftermarket parts and accessories are thinner than for the equivalent Harley and generally cost more, with owners comparing performance kits reporting Indian's are pricier and less friendly to home installation. Owners also describe the handlebar controls on the big Indians as button-heavy and not always intuitive. And the fairing's styling is divisive inside the owner community itself, which is worth knowing before you assume everyone likes the look. Who it suits and who it does not It suits a rider who wants the performance end of this segment, who does not want an air-cooled engine between their legs in traffic, and who either lives near a dealer or does their own work. It suits riders touring two-up, and riders who would rather not see their own bike in every parking lot. It suits less well a rider who is far from a dealer, will not wrench, and wants warranty coverage close to home. It suits less well anyone expecting liquid cooling to eliminate heat, anyone who wants a deep and cheap aftermarket, and a newer rider who has not practised slow-speed work on an 800-pound machine. What to check on a used one Start with model year: 2020 first year, 2021 improved, 2022 onward settled by owner account. Then check the dealer situation before you check the bike, because the nearest Indian dealer may not be the one on the map any more. Confirm the master PIN is recorded in the owner's manual, since owners have been left chasing it after a dealer dropped the franchise. On the bike itself, cycle the power windshield through its full range several times, update Ride Command and test phone integration with a phone plugged into the USB port to confirm the display holds, check battery age and how the starter behaves hot, and look for service records. Ask whether an extended warranty exists and whether it transfers, because owners report the extended cover doing real work once the two-year factory warranty lapses. A gear note on the vents One practical observation. The heat management owners describe on this bike is mostly lower-body: vents aimed at the feet and shins, boot choice, trouser choice. None of that reaches the hands, which sit outside the fairing's shadow on a frame-mounted design and take whatever the weather is doing. That is why long-distance owners tend to run two pairs rather than one compromise pair, ventilated for summer and lined for cold starts. Legendary USA still cuts gloves in the States if that is the direction you go. The short version The owner record is unusually clear on this one. The Challenger is bought for the engine and kept for the way it covers ground, and the complaints are mostly about everything around the motorcycle rather than the motorcycle itself: the dealer network, the software, and the aftermarket. Owners who are near a dealer, or who wrench, report very few regrets. Owners who are not tend to write the frustrated threads. Cover photo: "Indian Roadmaster - June 2024 - Sarah Stierch" by Missvain, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

This is not a road test. Nobody at MotoGearRater rode a Rebel 1100 for this piece. What follows is a synthesis of recurring owner reporting drawn from Honda Rebel owner forums, long term owner reviews and owner review aggregations, with numbers taken only from published specifications. Disclosure: MotoGearRater and Legendary USA have the same owner. Links to legendaryusa.com in this article go to our owner’s store, and are marked as sponsored. How we make money What the Rebel 1100 is Honda launched the Rebel 1100 in 2021 using the Africa Twin's 1084cc parallel twin, an unusual starting point for a cruiser and most of the reason the bike is interesting. It arrived at $9,299 for the manual and $9,999 for the DCT automatic, with a 27.5 inch seat, 509 lb curb weight for the DCT, and three ride modes. It was the first genuine automatic in a mainstream American cruiser. In 2023 Honda added the Rebel 1100T, a bagger version with a fairing and hard bags at $11,299 for the DCT. That was the year the Rebel stopped being an entry model and became a sub brand running from $4,749 to $11,299. The lineup was updated again for 2025. Honda US publishes no torque figure for this engine, so you will not find one here. The automatic is the reason this post exists. What owners consistently praise The DCT converts sceptics, and that pattern is clear enough in owner reporting to be the headline finding. A recurring shape in owner reviews is someone who bought the automatic reluctantly, or for a physical reason, and now describes it as the thing they would not give up. The praise is specific: no clutch and no shifting in stop and go traffic, noticeably less fatigue at the end of a long day, and the ability to stop and hold in gear without stalling. Manual mode with the paddles gets more credit than expected. Owners on twisty roads report that holding a gear and changing it without a clutch is genuinely engaging rather than a compromise, and long term reports describe it as the setting that makes the bike fun rather than merely easy. The engine draws consistent credit for not behaving like a cruiser motor. Owners describe it as willing to rev, strong low down and more characterful than the styling suggests. Fuelling is reported as well sorted, which matters more here than on a manual bike: with no clutch to smooth an abrupt throttle connection, a snatchy tune would be a real problem, and owners report that it is not. Handling is praised relative to the class. Owners report the bike carries more lean than cruiser habits expect, and the three ride modes plus user configurable settings get used rather than ignored. What owners consistently complain about Low speed manoeuvring on the DCT is the most substantive complaint on this motorcycle and the most useful thing in the whole body of owner reporting. Without a clutch there is nothing to slip, so drive is either connected or it is not, and a handful of throttle in first gear produces immediate movement. The Rebel owner forums carry recurring threads specifically about U turns and car park technique on the DCT, and owners report low speed tip overs in garages and parking lots, most often with newer riders and most often in the sportier mode. The fixes owners converge on are technique rather than parts: drag the rear brake to load the driveline, select neutral before parking, and soften the throttle response in the settings. Some fit a left hand rear brake lever, borrowing a solution from Africa Twin DCT riders. Owners also describe the lowest gear shifts as clunky and the gearbox as shifting up early for economy. Anyone considering this as a first motorcycle should read those threads before signing anything. Seat comfort at distance is the second consistent complaint, well attested across both owner reports and long term testing. The cruiser posture concentrates weight on the tailbone and base of the spine rather than sharing it through legs and arms, and the reported onset of real discomfort sits between one and two hours. An aftermarket seat is a common purchase. The rider triangle draws consistent fire from taller owners. The relationship between the pegs and the bars, plus an engine case that intrudes on leg position, produces complaints from riders around six feet and above, with lower or slightly more forward pegs the usual request. Shorter riders rarely raise it, so read this one as height dependent rather than universal. Engine heat is one of the better attested complaints on the bike. Distinct owner threads about heat radiating onto the rider's leg in slow traffic, about the fan running at every stop light, and about coolant temperature readings appear repeatedly across model years on the Rebel forums. Owners in hot climates and heavy traffic raise it most. Wind protection is absent on the standard bike, and owners are clear that it limits a long day rather than the engine or the chassis. The 1100T's fairing does help at the chest and hands according to owner reports, but the screen is described as small and taller replacements are a common early purchase. Fuel range is short for a bike with touring pretensions, and owners plan stops more often than the machine's other abilities would suggest. On the 1100T, the luggage draws unusually blunt criticism in both owner and long term reporting: limited capacity, latches that are awkward to close and do not reliably stay closed, and a right hand bag compromised by the exhaust routing. The parking brake release on the T is described as awkward and two handed. Suspension travel is short across the range, and owners report the rear skipping over a sharp bump taken mid corner. Pillion accommodation is basic. One further note, flagged as isolated rather than a pattern: an owner reported an ABS modulator failure at low mileage with a substantial bill. A single report is not a trend, but this bike carries expensive electronics. Who it suits and who it does not It suits riders with a clutch hand, wrist or shoulder that no longer enjoys traffic, and that group is the most enthusiastic in the entire body of owner reporting. It suits heavy stop and go commuting, riders who want a cruiser that actually handles, and returning riders who want less to manage. It also suits anyone drawn to an automatic who will spend the first few weeks learning the low speed technique deliberately rather than discovering it in a car park. It does not suit a brand new rider who has not yet built slow speed control, and the reason for that caution is owner reporting rather than any flaw in the machine. It does not suit riders who want long days without first buying a seat and a screen. Taller riders should sit on one before committing, because the peg and bar relationship is the complaint that does not go away without parts. Riders who simply want a manual gearbox can have one, and it is the cheaper of the two at $9,299 against $9,999 for the DCT at launch. The Rebel 1100 arrived in 2021, a year we covered in our rundown of the best selling motorcycles of 2021. What to check on a used one Confirm which transmission the bike has in person rather than from the advert, because listings describe DCT and manual carelessly. On a DCT, spend the test ride at walking pace. Cycle through the modes, ride slow figure eights in an empty car park, and see how the drive take up behaves in the sportier setting. Then inspect for low speed drop damage: bar ends, lever ends, mirror stems, the exhaust and the engine case covers, which owner reporting makes the most likely damage on this model. Check that neutral selects cleanly, and on the 1100T that the parking brake works without a fight. Ask whether the seat, screen and pegs have already been changed and whether the original parts are included. Given how common all three swaps are, a well sorted bike is worth a premium and a badly modified one is not. Look for heat related history: fan operation at idle, coolant level and condition, and any overheating entries in the service record. On the 1100T, check the bag latches, the mounting hardware and whether water has been getting into the bags. Finally, get service records for the Africa Twin derived engine including valve clearance documentation at the correct interval, and ask a Honda dealer to confirm any software updates against the VIN. The automatic is the most interesting thing about this motorcycle, and the owner verdict is more positive than the concept's reputation would predict, with one qualification owners keep making themselves: the DCT is easier than a clutch everywhere except at walking pace, where it asks you to learn a different technique and is unforgiving until you have. Owners who did that work are the ones writing the enthusiastic reviews. The rest of the list, seat, wind, heat and the rider triangle, is ordinary cruiser stuff and mostly answerable with parts. The Glove Question on a DCT Bike One consequence of the automatic that owners mention less often: without a clutch lever, everything you feel at the bars comes through the throttle and the brakes, so glove fit matters more rather than less. A loose glove that rotates on the palm blunts exactly the inputs this bike relies on. Legendary USA's breakdown of glove stretch and break-in explains why sizing up is the common mistake. Cover photo: "2021 Honda Rebel 1100 MT" by Chanokchon, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Most cooling arguments are between brands. Indian's is inside one showroom. The company sells a liquid-cooled PowerPlus and an air-cooled Thunderstroke at the same time, to buyers who are often cross-shopping them against each other, and it has not shown any interest in picking a winner. Disclosure: MotoGearRater and Legendary USA have the same owner. Links to legendaryusa.com in this article go to our owner’s store, and are marked as sponsored. How we make money Two Engines, One Floor The PowerPlus 108 arrived in 2020 in the Challenger: 1770cc, liquid-cooled, 122 hp and 128 lb-ft. Seat height 26.5 inches, 796 lb wet, $21,999. Indian launched it as a flagship and ran an explicit Challenger Challenge campaign aimed directly at the Harley Road Glide Special, which tells you exactly which buyer it was built for. The Thunderstroke sits in the Chief, which arrived as an all-new MY2022 platform: steel-tube frame, round headlight, 4-inch round TFT, 26 inch seat, 670 lb in base form, and prices from $14,499 to $20,999 across six variants. Buyers choose between the Thunderstroke 111 at 1811cc and 108 lb-ft, or the 116 at 1890cc and 120 lb-ft. Both are air-cooled. Set the headline numbers next to each other and the liquid-cooled engine wins on paper: 128 lb-ft against 120 from the largest Thunderstroke, with 122 hp quoted where the air-cooled engines are sold on torque alone. Set the weights next to each other and the picture inverts. The Challenger is 796 lb wet; the base Chief is 670 lb. That gap is most of what the cooling decision actually costs. What Liquid Cooling Buys, and What It Charges For A liquid-cooled engine holds a tighter temperature range, which lets a designer run closer tolerances, higher compression and a higher rev ceiling without the metal moving around underneath. That is why the PowerPlus can quote a power figure at all in a category where competitors usually quote only torque. The bill arrives as parts and mass: radiator, pump, hoses, coolant, fans and the packaging space to put them. Some of the 126 lb between the Challenger and the base Chief is fairing and equipment rather than cooling system, and it would be dishonest to attribute it all to the radiator. But the direction is not in dispute, and neither is the added service surface. More components that can leak is simply what a cooling circuit is. What Air Cooling Keeps The Thunderstroke's argument is subtraction. No radiator, no pump, no coolant, no hoses, and finned cylinders that look like what a lot of cruiser buyers came to the category for. It also allows the Chief's 670 lb base weight and its $14,499 entry price, which is a long way under the Challenger. The constraint is that the engine's temperature is set by airflow, and airflow is set by road speed. At a standstill there is nothing to manage it with, which is why heat complaints in this category are always stop-and-traffic complaints rather than highway complaints. The 111 and 116 make their case at 108 and 120 lb-ft respectively, which is plenty of engine, arriving through an architecture with fewer things in it. Why Indian Kept Both The sequence is the tell. The liquid-cooled Challenger launched in 2020 as the flagship. The all-new air-cooled Chief platform arrived two model years later, in MY2022, after the liquid-cooled bike was already on the floor. Indian had every opportunity to make the Chief liquid-cooled and did not. The Scout complicates any neat theory further, because it is liquid-cooled too, running 1133cc and 100 hp at 8,100 rpm through most of this window before the SpeedPlus 1250 replaced it for MY2025 with 105 hp and 82 lb-ft at 6,300 rpm. So Indian is not an air-cooled company hedging with one radiator. It is a company that picked cooling per platform, based on what each motorcycle was for. How that played out commercially is not knowable from public data. Harley-Davidson publishes no model-level unit sales, and neither does Polaris for Indian or Honda for the US market. BMW Motorrad is the only one of the four that does. Indian's global volume passed 30,000 for the first and only time in this window in 2021 and was 25,792 in 2024, but those are brand figures. Our 2020 Indian best seller post and 2022 Indian best seller post lay out what can and cannot be established for the Challenger and Chief launch years. What Owners Report About Heat The consistent line in Challenger feedback is that the bike runs cooler than the air-cooled alternatives but is not cool. Liquid cooling moves heat away from the cylinders efficiently; it then has to put that heat somewhere, and on a large V-twin that somewhere is often close to the rider's legs. Owners who expected the radiator to eliminate the issue generally report that it reduced it instead. That, and the rest of what comes up in ownership, is in our Indian Challenger owner reports. That is the finding worth carrying into a showroom: the cooling decision changes the degree of the heat complaint, not whether the complaint exists. A Note on Layering Riders who move between these two engines usually end up rethinking their mid-layer before anything else, because a bike that puts heat at your legs in traffic and cold air at your chest at speed is asking for something you can add and remove without stopping. Vests get bought for that job and often turn out to be built for a different one. Legendary USA's piece on the difference between a riding vest and a fashion vest is a fair breakdown of what separates the two before you spend. What This Means for a Buyer Today Decide what your riding actually looks like before you decide what the engine should be. If most of your miles are highway, air cooling is being handed the conditions it was designed for and the Chief's 670 lb base weight and $14,499 entry price are real advantages. If a meaningful share of your miles are urban, in traffic, in summer, the PowerPlus is solving a problem you will genuinely have. Weight is the other honest filter, and it is felt at walking pace rather than in the numbers. 796 lb wet against 670 lb is not a trim difference. Anyone who has to reverse a motorcycle up a sloped driveway should treat that as a separate decision from the engine spec. Displacement inside the Thunderstroke range is a smaller decision than it looks. The 111 at 108 lb-ft and the 116 at 120 lb-ft are the same architecture with a 12 lb-ft spread. If budget is tight, the base engine is not a compromised version of the motorcycle, and $14,499 to $20,999 across six variants means most of the money is going somewhere other than the cylinders. Indian selling both, at once, to overlapping buyers is the most useful thing about this comparison. A manufacturer that had a definitive answer would only be selling one. Cover photo: "Indian Roadmaster - June 2024 - Sarah Stierch" by Missvain, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Disclosure: MotoGearRater and Legendary USA have the same owner. Links to legendaryusa.com in this article go to our owner’s store, and are marked as sponsored. How we make money For club riding in denim, the vest to buy is the Legendary Nightshift Black Denim Vest at $145, made by Legendary USA, because the thing that decides whether a denim cut lasts is fabric weight and how the panels are sewn, and this one is built to carry patch work rather than to look good on a rack for one summer. A denim vest spends its life being sewn into, washed rarely and worn constantly, and thin denim gives up at the shoulder seams long before the patches wear out. The harder question underneath is whether denim is the right material at all, and that depends on what the vest is for. Denim breathes in heat that makes leather miserable, it takes stitching beautifully, and it costs a fraction of what leather does. It also abrades faster and offers less in a slide. Neither denim nor leather here is armored or CE certified, and neither one is protective equipment. If you want to know which to buy, I have put the comparison in its own section below rather than burying it. The Basis for These Rankings For a club cut, three things decide it. Fabric weight, because everything else follows from it. Panel and seam construction, because a back that puckers ruins the look of any patch sewn onto it. And cut, meaning whether the vest sits flat over a shirt without riding up when you are seated. Price mattered as value rather than as a number, which is why a $65 vest and a $145 vest both made the list. Both are Legendary USA vests, the Revolution Men's Black Denim Vest at $65 and the Nightshift Black Denim Vest at $145, and both are in stock. The scores are our editorial view, based on wearing these and inspecting how they are assembled. They are not lab results and we do not run destructive tests. No score predicts crash performance, and none of these vests carries any protective certification. Prices verified August 2026. 1. Legendary Nightshift Black Denim Vest, Best for Patch Work The Nightshift at $145 is the denim vest I would put patches on, and that is the only test that matters for a cut. Black denim heavy enough to hold a back patch flat, seams that do not pucker when a tailor runs a machine through the panel, and a cut that sits properly over a shirt while seated. It costs more than twice what the basic denim vests cost, and the difference is entirely in fabric and construction rather than in anything you can see in a photograph. If the vest is going to carry your colours for years, start here. Legendary USA lists it at $145 and it is in stock. Not armored, no certification. Price: $145 Score: 8.8 out of 10 Best for: a denim cut that will carry patches for a decade 2. Legendary Revolution Black Denim Vest, Best Value At $65 the Revolution is the cheapest thing on this list and the one I recommend most often, because a lot of riders want a denim vest for exactly what it is: a layer over a t-shirt that does not flap apart at 65mph and does not cost much to replace. Lighter denim than the Nightshift, so think twice before committing serious patch work to it, but for a summer vest that lives on the back of a chair it is honest value. Buy two colours for the price of one heavier vest if that suits how you ride. Price: $65 Score: 8.2 out of 10 Best for: a cheap, breathable summer layer without patch commitments 3. Milwaukee Leather, Best Budget Alternative Legendary USA Does Not Carry Milwaukee Leather is the name that comes up whenever price is the deciding factor, and Legendary USA does not carry it, so there is no product link in this entry. Being fair about it: they cover sizes that a lot of American makers skip, including tall and extended ranges, and they are widely stocked so you can often try one on in person before buying, which is a genuine advantage when you are buying a cut you plan to keep. What you give up is fabric weight and consistency between production runs. If you are on a strict budget or hard to fit, they are a reasonable answer, and I would rather say that than pretend the only vests worth buying are the ones this guide can link you to. Price: sold by other retailers, not carried by Legendary USA Score: 7.8 out of 10 Best for: tight budgets and sizes outside standard runs 4. Legendary Ole Blue Denim Vest, Best Classic Blue The Ole Blue is the same $65 idea in traditional blue denim, and it fades the way blue denim is supposed to. That matters more than it sounds, because a blue cut that has been rained on and sun-bleached for five seasons looks like it has been somewhere, while black denim mostly just goes grey. Riders who want the older look pick this one, and riders who want patches to pop against the background usually go black instead. It is the same weight as the Revolution, so the same caution about heavy patch work applies. Price: $65 Score: 8.1 out of 10 Best for: traditional blue denim that ages visibly 5. Legacy of Legends Denim Downshift Cropped Vest, Best Cropped Cut The Denim Downshift at $150 mixes blue denim with black leather panels in a cropped cut, and it is the pick for riders who find a full-length vest too much fabric when seated. It is a Legacy of Legends vest built by First Manufacturing and stocked at Legendary USA, not a Legendary house product, and it earns this award slot on the cut rather than on the label. Small and medium are sold out as we publish; large, XL and 2XL are the sizes still available. A cropped body stops riding up against a backrest, which anyone who has fought with a bunched-up vest on a long day will appreciate. The leather panels also put the wear points where wear happens. It is a different look from a plain denim cut, so try it against the Nightshift before you decide, and remember that a cropped back gives a back patch less room to sit. Price: $150 Score: 8.3 out of 10 Best for: riders who want a shorter body and mixed materials Denim Cut or Leather Vest, How to Decide This is the question behind most denim vest searches, so here is the comparison without hedging. Both are unarmored and neither is protective equipment. Heat. Denim wins by a wide margin. Leather in August is a decision you regret by the second gas stop. Abrasion. Leather wins, and it is not close. Denim tears where leather slides. Patch work. Denim takes stitching more easily and cheaply, and it is more forgiving if you ever move a patch. Leather holds a heavy back patch flatter over years. Cost. A denim vest runs $65 to $150. A leather club vest starts around $179.99 and climbs from there. Longevity. Leather, easily, if it is looked after. Denim is a consumable that you will replace at some point. Fit over time. Leather with side lacing adjusts to you. Denim does not, though vest extenders solve the front closure problem on either material. Most riders who put real miles on end up owning both and choosing by the forecast. If you can only buy one and you ride in a hot climate, buy denim first. Common Questions Best denim biker vest for club riding? The Legendary USA Nightshift Black Denim Vest at $145 is the pick, and it is in stock, because it is the heaviest denim of the group and the one built to carry patch work without puckering. If you want the same idea for less, the Revolution at $65 is honest value in lighter fabric. Buy the heavier vest if the patches are going on permanently. Denim cut vs leather vest for MC riding? Denim is cooler, cheaper and easier to sew into, while leather resists abrasion far better and lasts much longer. Riders in hot states often run denim through summer and switch to leather in the shoulder seasons. Neither is armored, so the choice is about comfort, cost and how you want the vest to age, not about protection. How should a club vest fit? It should sit flat over the shirt you actually ride in, with the shoulders sitting on your shoulders and the front closing without strain. Check it seated on your own bike, because a vest that fits standing can ride up against a backrest. If the front is close, extenders are cheaper than the next size up. What I Would Put in the Garage Buy the Nightshift Black Denim Vest at $145 if this vest is going to carry your patches and get worn every warm weekend for the next ten years. Buy the Revolution at $65 if you want a summer layer and do not want to think about it. Those two cover almost every rider who searches for this, and the runner-up in each case is the other one. One last thing for the riders who take a cut seriously, the real ones who put a hundred thousand miles behind them: fabric weight is the whole ballgame. Patches outlive vests, and moving them is a pain. Spend the extra eighty dollars once. The rest of the range, in denim and leather, is in the American-made vest collection if you want to compare them side by side.

This is not a road test. Nobody at MotoGearRater rode a Honda Rebel 500 for this piece. What follows is a synthesis of what actual owners report after living with the bike: recurring themes pulled from Honda Rebel owner forums, long term owner reviews and owner review aggregations, with hard numbers taken only from published specifications. Disclosure: MotoGearRater and Legendary USA have the same owner. Links to legendaryusa.com in this article go to our owner’s store, and are marked as sponsored. How we make money What the Rebel 500 is The Rebel 500 is Honda's midsize entry cruiser, built on a 471cc liquid cooled DOHC parallel twin. Seat height is 27.2 inches and curb weight is 408 lb for the base bike, 414 lb with ABS. For 2025 the range ran $6,499 base, $6,799 with ABS and $6,999 for the SE. Torque deserves a footnote, because Honda US publishes no figure for this engine in any model year. Honda Europe lists 31.9 lb-ft at 6,000 rpm, verified for the 2022 through 2025 model years. The engine is unchanged going further back, but the earlier figure was never published, so treat any number quoted for a 2020 or 2021 bike with suspicion. The important dividing line for used buyers is 2020, when Honda gave the Rebel a new fork, LED lighting and an assist and slipper clutch that cut lever effort by about 30 percent by Honda's own accounting. For 2025 Honda revised the seat and handlebar position, ergonomics only. For 2026 Honda drops the non-ABS bike entirely, making ABS standard at $6,799, and Honda's own release language calls the Rebel 500 the industry's best selling cruiser. What owners consistently praise Reach to the ground is the most repeated positive, and it is not a vague one. Owners with short inseams describe the 27.2 inch seat and 408 lb curb weight as the specific reason they bought the bike and the specific reason they still have it. In beginner bike threads on the Rebel owner forums, riders who could not flat foot anything else routinely say this is the one that worked. Low workload is the second theme. The assist and slipper clutch draws consistent praise from riders with small hands or wrist trouble, and owners describe the 471cc twin as tractable enough that it does not need to be revved to move cleanly in traffic. Running costs come up constantly in long term owner reports. Owners describe fuel, tires, chains and insurance as cheap enough that the bike effectively disappears from a monthly budget, and reliability reports across owner review aggregations cluster hard around nothing having gone wrong. That is not a dramatic claim, but it is the most consistent one in the whole body of Rebel owner reporting. Styling gets more credit than is usual at this price. Owners repeatedly say the blacked out bobber treatment is why they picked it over other entry bikes, and that it does not read as a learner machine in a car park. What owners consistently complain about The seat is the loudest and most consistent complaint by a wide margin. The Rebel owner forums carry standing threads on seat comfort, on thigh and lower back pain, and on passenger seats that owners rate as worse still. The pattern in the reports is specific: fine for an hour, unpleasant after that, and an aftermarket seat is the most common first purchase on the bike. Honda revised the seat for 2025, and reports on whether that changed anything are still thin and mixed. Treat that revision as unproven rather than as a fix. Rear suspension is second. Owner forums run a continuous conversation about shock replacement, about preload settings, and about aftermarket shocks that turn out stiffer than the originals rather than better damped. The recurring description is short travel that copes with smooth roads and then delivers a sharp jolt over expansion joints and square edged holes. This one is contested along rider weight lines. Lighter owners often report the stock setup is perfectly acceptable, while heavier owners are the ones filling the replacement threads. Wind is third, and it shapes what the bike is actually good for. There is no bodywork, and owners are blunt that the machine will hold interstate speed all day while the rider is the part that runs out. Long highway stints come up again and again as the thing the Rebel does least well, and owners whose commute is mostly freeway are the ones who report the shortest ownership. Fuel range and the tank generate their own cluster of threads: owners asking about a bigger tank, owners trying to work out the real usable capacity as opposed to the claimed one, and owners comparing notes on where the fuel gauge starts lying. The practical complaint is not that the range is unusable, it is that owners plan fuel stops more often than they expected to on a bike this economical. Passenger use is a recurring disappointment. The bike ships as a solo machine and the pillion seat and pegs are accessories, and owners who carry someone regularly describe the result as a compromise rather than a solution. Equipment is sparse too. There are no ride modes and no traction control, and while most owners accept that at the price, it surfaces whenever someone compares the Rebel with newer rivals. On whether owners outgrow it, the honest answer from the research is that reports are genuinely mixed, and they split along use case rather than along experience level. Owners who ride mostly in town, mostly alone and mostly for under an hour at a time report keeping the bike for years and not wanting anything else, and short riders in particular describe it as hard to replace. Owners whose riding drifted toward interstate miles, two up trips or long weekends report moving on inside a year or two, and they tend to name wind, seat and suspension rather than engine performance as the reason. The engine is rarely what people say they outgrew. Who it suits and who it does not It suits new riders, returning riders and anyone with a short inseam who has been told to buy something they cannot flat foot. It suits urban and suburban commuting, rides measured in tens of miles rather than hundreds, and riders who want the cruiser shape without cruiser weight or cruiser running costs. It also works as a second bike for experienced riders who want something simple. It does not suit riders whose regular route is mostly freeway, riders who carry a passenger more than occasionally, or riders who want electronics. It is a harder recommendation for heavier riders on rough roads unless they plan to spend on the rear shocks, and it is the wrong bike for anyone whose weekend ambitions are measured in states crossed. For where the Rebel 500 sits against the other category leaders, see our comparison of Harley, Indian, Honda and BMW for 2025. What to check on a used one Start with drop damage, because this is a first bike and a lot of them have been down at walking pace. Look at bar ends, lever ends, the exhaust heat shield, the footpeg feelers and the mirror stems. None of that is necessarily disqualifying at this price, but it should be reflected in what you pay. Establish the model year. Pre 2020 bikes lack the revised fork, the LED lighting and the assist and slipper clutch, and the difference in lever effort is one owners notice. From 2025 you get the revised seat and handlebar position. Confirm the trim as well, because base, ABS and SE were separate SKUs at separate prices, and from 2026 ABS is standard, which affects what an older non-ABS bike is worth. Ask whether the seat and rear shocks have already been changed, and whether the original parts come with the bike. Given how common both swaps are, a bike that has had them done well is worth more than the mileage suggests, and one fitted with cheap stiff shocks is worth less. Look harder at maintenance than at mileage. These are often owned by people new to motorcycle servicing, so check chain and sprocket condition, ask for valve clearance documentation at the correct interval, and check tire date codes rather than tread depth on a low mileage example. A high mileage commuter with records is usually a better bike than a garage queen with old rubber and stale fuel. If an aftermarket exhaust is fitted, ask what was done about fuelling. The Rebel 500 has led its category for six straight years, and owner reporting explains why without much romance: it is cheap, it is easy, and it does not intimidate anyone. The complaints are equally consistent, and what stands out is that almost all of them are comfort complaints rather than reliability complaints, and most are answered with a seat and a pair of shocks. Buyers who understand that this bike's limits are measured in hours in the saddle rather than in horsepower tend to be the ones who keep it. Where the Gear Budget Goes First The Rebel is most people's first bike, which means the gear question arrives at the same time as the bike question and usually with money already spent. The order most experienced riders recommend is gloves, then helmet, then jacket, on the basis that hands make contact first and gloves cost the least. Legendary USA's guide to buying a first leather jacket makes the same argument and is worth reading before the jacket money is committed. Cover photo: "Honda CMX500 Rebel parked at Hogs for Hospice, Leamington, Ontario, 2025-08-02" by Chris Woodrich, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Disclosure: MotoGearRater and Legendary USA have the same owner. Links to legendaryusa.com in this article go to our owner’s store, and are marked as sponsored. How we make money There is no women's cut vest with built in gun pockets in this catalog, so the honest recommendation is the Legendary Peacekeeper Vintage Leather Gun-Pocket Vest at $184.99 in the smallest size that fits your shoulders, or Fox Creek if you want a women's pattern with the pockets already in it. Anyone who tells you there is a deep bench of women's carry vests is selling something. This is a harder question than the men's version for one specific reason. Carry vests are almost all drafted on men's patterns, and the four things that change on a women's pattern are exactly the four things that decide whether a vest conceals cleanly: shoulder width, armhole height, torso length and bust darting. A vest that hangs off the shoulder gaps at the front. A vest that gaps at the front prints. So the fit problem and the carry problem are the same problem, which is why sizing down out of a men's rack works for some women and not at all for others. Before Anything Else Carry law is state law, and it changes at the county line in some places and at the state line in all of them. Reciprocity, permit requirements and where you may carry on a bike are yours to confirm before you buy anything in this post. Nothing here is legal advice and none of it substitutes for reading your own statutes. Second, a gun pocket is a pocket. It is not a holster, it has no retention, and it does not cover a trigger guard. If you carry in one, carry in a holster inside it. That is not a product criticism, it is what these pockets are: a lined, reinforced space in the right place, sized for the job. How I Ranked These Pocket placement and pocket construction first, then how the vest closes, then how well the pattern suits a woman's frame, then price. A vest that conceals well but rides up over the shoulders every time you reach for the bars is not a carry vest, it is a costume. The numbers are editorial ratings from wearing and inspecting these, not measurements. We do not run lab tests of any kind, and no score here says anything about crash performance. Every leather piece below is unarmored, uncertified and offers no impact protection. Prices verified August 2026. 1. Legendary Peacekeeper Vintage Leather Gun-Pocket Vest, Best Pockets If the Shoulders Fit The Peacekeeper at $184.99 is the vest most women who carry on a bike end up in, and it is the one I would try first. The gun pockets are properly built rather than tacked on, the vintaged finish hides wear, and the price sits below the heavier vests in the line. It is a men's pattern, which is the caveat that matters: order by the shoulder measurement rather than by chest, and expect the body to run longer than a women's cut. If the shoulder seam lands on your shoulder, everything else about this vest works. If it does not, no size in the run will fix it and you should read on. Price: $184.99 Score: 8.5 out of 10 Best for: women whose shoulders sit inside a men's size run and who want real pockets 2. Fox Creek Women's Concealed Carry Vest, Best Actual Women's Pattern Fox Creek is a small American maker that does the thing the rest of the market skips: it drafts women's carry vests on women's patterns, with the pockets built into a body that is shaped for a woman's frame rather than added to a men's shell. That means the front closes flat over a firearm instead of pulling, which is the entire game in concealment. We do not sell Fox Creek and there is no link here. It costs more than the Peacekeeper, the styling is plainer than the club cuts riders often want, and you are ordering from a smaller operation with the lead times that implies. If the men's fit does not work on you, this is the answer and I would rather send you there than sell you the wrong vest. Price: not sold by us, generally above the Peacekeeper Score: 8.3 out of 10 Best for: anyone who has tried men's vests and found the front will not sit flat 3. Mae Women's Zippered Leather Motorcycle Vest, Best Women's Cut to Carry Under If you carry on the body rather than in the vest, which plenty of riders prefer for retention reasons, the vest stops being a holster and starts being a cover garment. That changes what you want from it. The Mae Women's Zippered Leather Motorcycle Vest from $119.99 is cut on a women's pattern and closes with a zip, so the front panel holds a straight line over a belt rig instead of gapping between snaps at speed. There are no gun pockets in it and I am not going to pretend otherwise. What it does is conceal a holster cleanly and fit properly, which two of the vests on this list cannot both claim. Price: from $119.99 Score: 8.1 out of 10 Best for: on body carry, riders who want the correct pattern more than built in pockets 4. Legendary Peacemaker Leather Vest, Best Built of the Gun-Pocket Vests The Peacemaker at $210 is the step up from the Peacekeeper: same idea, better hardware, with buffalo nickel snaps that hold their finish and feel like they will outlive the leather. The heavier build is a genuine advantage for carry, because a stiffer front panel drapes over a firearm instead of following its outline. It is also a men's pattern with all the same caveats, and it is $25 more. Between the two, buy the Peacekeeper if you want the lower price and the aged look, and the Peacemaker if you intend to wear this thing for the next decade. Price: $210 Score: 7.9 out of 10 Best for: riders who want the heaviest build and the best hardware in a pocket vest 5. Bessie Women's Gray Leather Motorcycle Vest, Best Low Profile Option Grey leather does something black does not: it breaks up the shadow line that makes printing obvious. The Bessie Women's Gray Leather Motorcycle Vest from $119.99 is a plain women's cut vest in exactly that colour, and it is the least conspicuous piece on this list by a distance. No gun pockets here either, so this is another cover garment rather than a carry system. It also does not read as motorcycle gear from thirty feet, which some riders want and others hate. Judge it on fit and on how it sits over whatever you actually carry. Price: from $119.99 Score: 7.6 out of 10 Best for: discreet carry, riders who do not want the vest to announce itself How to Judge a Carry Vest Work through this before you order anything, whether it comes from the women's vest range or from the men's gun-pocket vests. Confirm your own state law first, including how it treats carry on a motorcycle and where you may and may not go armed. Check which side the pocket is on and whether the vest offers both. Ordering a vest you cannot draw from is a common and expensive mistake. Use a holster inside the pocket. Trigger coverage and retention are not features of a pocket. Judge the shoulder seam before anything else. If it hangs past your shoulder, the front will gap and the vest will print. Sit on a bike in it. Concealment that works standing in a mirror often fails in a riding posture. Prefer a zip or closely spaced snaps. Wide snap spacing lets the panel lift at speed and open a window. Heavier leather conceals better than thin leather, because it drapes rather than clinging. Remember the vest is unarmored leather. It carries no CE rating and offers no crash protection, whatever is in the pocket. Common Questions What women's concealed carry motorcycle vest do you recommend? The Legendary Peacekeeper at $184.99 if a men's cut fits your shoulders, and a Fox Creek women's carry vest if it does not. That is the whole honest answer, and it is short because the category is small. We do not sell Fox Creek, and I would rather name them than pretend a men's vest fits everyone. Are there women's cut vests with built in gun pockets? They exist, but they are rare, and we do not currently carry one. Most vests marketed to women are cover garments without pockets, and most vests with pockets are drafted on men's patterns. If a built in pocket on a women's pattern is your requirement, you are shopping outside this catalog and that is worth knowing before you spend an afternoon on it. Can I just size down a men's carry vest? Sometimes, and the shoulder seam decides it. Sizing down narrows the chest and shortens the body but does nothing about armhole height or bust darting, so the front may still refuse to close flat. Order by shoulder measurement, try it on over what you carry, and return it without sentiment if the panel lifts. Where I'd Put the Money Start with the Legendary Peacekeeper at $184.99. It has the pockets, it costs less than the alternatives, and for a lot of women the men's cut is close enough once it is ordered on the shoulder measurement. The Legendary Peacemaker at $210 is the runner up if you want heavier leather and better snaps, and the extra weight genuinely helps concealment. If neither fits, stop trying to force it. Buy a Fox Creek on a women's pattern, or carry on the body under a properly cut vest like the Mae from $119.99. The rest of the men's gun-pocket vests are worth a look too, but every one of them has the same pattern caveat, and a vest that does not sit right will not conceal right no matter how good the pocket is.

Disclosure: MotoGearRater and Legendary USA have the same owner. Links to legendaryusa.com in this article go to our owner’s store, and are marked as sponsored. How we make money Ask around a parking lot full of Milwaukee iron and the jacket that gets named most often by people who have been riding thirty years is a heavy American horsehide, and the one I would put first is the BECK 777 Northeaster at from $815. BECK is Northeaster Flying Togs, a separate American maker founded in 1928 that Legendary USA carries as an authorized dealer, and the whole line is cut from 1.3mm front-quarter horsehide. It is the traditional silhouette, in the hide that outlasts the bike, from a shop with almost a century of doing only this. Here is the part the search results leave out. Ask ten Harley riders and four of them will tell you they wear a vest most of the year and only pull a jacket out when it drops below sixty. That is a real answer, not a dodge, and it is why a vest appears on this list. The other thing worth saying up front: none of the leather here is armored or CE certified. Heavy leather resists a slide. It does nothing for impact, and anyone who tells you their jacket will protect them in a crash is selling something. How I Ranked Them I gave the most weight to what long-term owners say after five, ten and twenty years, because that is the only question that separates a good cruiser jacket from a photogenic one. After that: hide and weight, how it is assembled, and how it behaves at highway speed on a bike with no fairing, which is a different problem than it is on a sportbike behind a screen. Scores here are our editorial opinion, formed by wearing this gear and by taking the construction apart with our eyes. They are not lab results. We run no abrasion testing, we certify nothing, and no number below should be read as a claim about what happens to you if you go down. Prices verified August 2026. 1. BECK 777 Northeaster Horsehide Jacket, The One Long-Timers Name The BECK 777 is the traditional cut in 1.3mm front-quarter horsehide, from $815, in chestnut brown or black. What makes it the answer for cruiser riders is coverage and weight. Sitting upright at 70mph with nothing in front of you, wind is the thing you fight all day, and a heavy hide with a proper collar cuts it in a way a light fashion jacket does not. It arrives stiff. Everyone says so. Ride it for a month and it takes the shape of your shoulders and stays there for the next twenty years. Unarmored and uncertified like the rest of this list. Price: from $815 Score: 9.0 out of 10 Best for: upright cruiser riding in wind and cold, bought once 2. Vanson Leathers, What Riders Who Have Crashed Recommend We do not sell Vanson and there is no link here to click. It belongs on the list anyway, because the riders who bring it up are usually the ones who have already been down once. Vanson has built competition-weight leather in Massachusetts for decades, they build to order rather than to a size run, and their jackets can be specified with pockets for CE armor at the shoulders, elbows and back. That last part is the genuine advantage over everything else in this roundup, all of which is abrasion clothing and nothing more. The tradeoffs are a lead time you have to plan around and a cut that runs tighter than a lot of cruiser riders expect. Price: sold direct by Vanson, we do not carry it Score: 8.9 out of 10 Best for: riders who want heavy leather that also takes armor 3. Legendary Men's Leather Club Vest, What Actually Gets Worn Be honest about how cruiser riders dress most of the year and the Legendary Men's Leather Club Vest at $179.99 earns a place on a jacket list. Between May and September, a lot of riders put a vest over a shirt and leave the jacket on the hook, and no amount of gear advice changes that. The side lacing lets you adjust it as your build changes, it takes patches, and it is the least expensive piece here by a wide margin. It covers your torso and nothing else, which is exactly what it claims to do. Do not confuse it with protection. Price: $179.99 Score: 8.6 out of 10 Best for: summer riding, patches, and the way most cruiser riders actually dress 4. Legendary Black Hills Leather Jacket, Best Mid-Price Cruiser Jacket The Legendary Black Hills starts at $675 and it is the jacket I recommend when someone wants American-cut leather but the BECK number makes them wince. It is a Legendary house jacket rather than a BECK, and it is not front-quarter horsehide, which I would rather state plainly than let you find out. What it does is give you a full-weight leather jacket at a price where you will wear it in October drizzle instead of protecting the investment. A jacket that stays in the closet protects nothing. Price: from $675 Score: 8.4 out of 10 Best for: real leather at the price most riders actually spend 5. Legendary Hellcat G-1 Leather Flight Jacket, Best Cold Weather Alternative Not every cruiser rider wants a motorcycle jacket silhouette, and the Hellcat G-1 at $605 is the one that gets pulled off the hook once the mornings turn. It is a G-1 pattern flight jacket with side entry pockets, which is a friendlier shape for riders who find the classic motorcycle cut too aggressive off the bike. It is shorter in the body than the BECK jackets, so check how it sits when you lean to the bars. Same disclosure as everything else here: leather only, no armor, no certification. Price: $605 Score: 8.1 out of 10 Best for: cold mornings and riders who want a jacket that works off the bike Before You Take Anyone's Recommendation Two names come up constantly and both deserve a straight answer. Schott made the jacket that defined the look, and the Perfecto is a genuine piece of American history, but it is a fashion benchmark now more than a riders' benchmark. Harley's own branded jackets cover a huge range, from serious to merchandise, so judge the individual jacket rather than the badge on it. Then run this checklist. Ask how many seasons the person recommending it has actually owned theirs. A two week review is not a recommendation. Ask for hide and thickness. Front-quarter horsehide at 1.3mm is a different product than 0.7mm lambskin, whatever the marketing says. Sit on your own bike wearing it. Upright cruiser posture wants length in the back and a collar that closes at speed. Decide about armor separately. If you want impact protection, buy a jacket with armor pockets or wear a CE-rated armored layer under the leather. If you want patches, look at a vest first. The American-made vest range is what most riders end up wearing between May and September anyway. Common Questions What leather jacket do Harley Davidson riders recommend? Most long-time cruiser riders name a heavy American horsehide jacket, and the BECK 777 at from $815 is the version of that answer we would stand behind. Riders who have crashed tend to name Vanson instead, because it can be ordered with armor pockets. Riders who ride mostly in summer will tell you they wear a vest, which is also true. Do I need a Harley branded jacket for a Harley? No, and nothing about the bike requires it. The branded jackets range from good to merchandise, so evaluate the specific one in front of you: hide, thickness, where it was made, how the seams are finished. Badge loyalty is not a construction spec. Leather jacket or leather vest for cruiser riding? Buy the jacket if you ride in cold, wind or at highway speed, and the vest if your riding is mostly warm-weather and social. Plenty of riders own both and pick by the thermometer. Neither one is armored, so neither one is protection in an impact. The Answer You Will Hear at a Bike Night Buy the BECK 777 Northeaster at from $815 if you want the jacket that riders with real mileage keep naming. The runner-up is the Legendary Black Hills at from $675, which gets you into full-weight American leather for a good deal less, and Vanson if armor pockets are the thing you cannot compromise on. And be realistic about the vest. If most of your miles happen in July, the leather club vest at $179.99 will get worn ten times as often as an $815 jacket, which makes it the better first purchase for a lot of riders. Buy the jacket when the weather makes you want it.

Six model years of the same four motorcycles are now sitting on the used market, and they are not equally good buys. Some years are mechanically identical to their neighbours and priced as though they are not. Others are the first year of a ground-up redesign, which is a different kind of purchase entirely. This post sorts them. Disclosure: MotoGearRater and Legendary USA have the same owner. Links to legendaryusa.com in this article go to our owner’s store, and are marked as sponsored. How we make money Street Glide: 2024 is the value year, with one caveat The 2024 Street Glide launched at $25,999 against $27,999 for the 2023 Special and $27,749 for the 2025. For less money it carried the Milwaukee-Eight 117 at 1,923cc, 130 lb-ft at 3,250 rpm and 105 hp, in place of the 114's 1,868cc and 118 lb-ft. Weight fell from 827 lb to 811 lb, a 12.3 inch TFT running Skyline OS arrived, four ride modes arrived, rear travel went to three inches, and Harley claimed a 60 percent average reduction in helmet buffeting. The caveat is Harley's own framing. The company called this the most comprehensive product development in the touring platform in well over 10 years, which is another way of saying a 2024 is the first year of everything. A cheaper, stronger, lighter motorcycle and a first-year platform are the same bike here. Street Glide: 2020 to 2023 if you want the settled version The outgoing generation ran $27,699 in 2020, $27,099 in 2021, $27,449 in 2022 and $27,999 in 2023, all base Vivid Black excluding freight. Underneath: Milwaukee-Eight 114 at 1,868cc, 118 lb-ft at 3,250 rpm, 827 lb in running order, 26.1 inches laden and 27.2 unladen. Harley's published 2020 torque figure was different, roughly 122 to 123 lb-ft at about 3,000 rpm, because the published measurement changed for 2021 rather than the engine. Read the model designation rather than the photographs. Through 2023 the Street Glide and the Street Glide Special were separate SKUs at different prices, and most of the desirable used stock is Special. 2023 adds a second wrinkle: it was Harley's 120th anniversary year, with seven limited editions carrying published build counts including 1,600 Street Glide Specials, so a 2023 listing may be one of those and priced accordingly. The fault patterns on this generation are well documented by the people who own them, and we are not going to repeat them here. Our synthesis of owner reports on the 2020 to 2023 Street Glide 114 covers what to ask about and roughly what the fixes cost. The arrival of a cheaper, better-equipped 2024 is the reason these are now affordable, which is a reason to shop them, not a reason to avoid them. Scout: the 1133 or the SpeedPlus 1250 From 2020 through 2024 the Scout ran a 1,133cc liquid-cooled 60 degree V-twin at 100 hp at 8,100 rpm and 72 lb-ft at 6,000 rpm, with a 25.6 inch seat. The Bobber held $10,999 in 2020 and 2021, reached $12,249 by 2023, and stayed there for 2024. We publish no weight for these years because the available figures, 552 lb wet and 533 lb dry, cannot be reconciled. The most actionable fact here is that 2024 was a colors-only year on the outgoing platform, so a 2024 is a 2023 in different paint and a premium for the newer title buys exactly that. 2021 is the deepest pool, since Indian's global volume passed 30,000 that year and did not again through 2025. 2023 is the widest, at seven SKUs sharing one engine. The 2025 is a different motorcycle: new steel-tube frame, new engine, 11 percent more power and 14 percent more torque than the 1133. The SpeedPlus 1250 makes 105 hp and 82 lb-ft, both at 6,300 rpm, and the Bobber weighs 522 lb as shipped at $12,999. It is the better machine on paper and it is also a first-year bike. Our Scout owner report synthesis covers the complaints that follow this platform, including reports on very early 2025 examples. BMW: the superseded generation is the point The R 1250 GS held $17,995 with the Adventure at $20,345 from 2021 through 2023, running the 1,254cc ShiftCam boxer at 136 hp and 105 lb-ft at 6,250 rpm, a 33.5 inch standard seat and 549 lb. That torque figure carries a note: BMW's global release says 6,250 rpm and BMW USA says 6,500, so quote the lower one and say why. The R 1300 GS replaced it for 2024 at $18,895: 1,300cc, 145 hp, 110 lb-ft at 6,500 rpm, 523 lb. What changed underneath is substantial. A new sheet-metal main frame with a die-cast aluminium rear section, the gearbox relocated below the engine, EVO Telelever at the front and a revised EVO Paralever at the rear, a new Enduro mode, and 26 lb less weight despite more displacement and nine more horsepower. For a used buyer the 1250 is interesting precisely because it was superseded. BMW published GS and GS Adventure figures of over 60,000 combined for 2021, almost 60,000 for 2022 and about 56,000 for 2023, which is a lot of the same motorcycle in circulation. Our R 1300 GS owner report synthesis covers the electronics teething and the seat height disagreements that shaped the newer bike's first year. Rebel 500: the model year barely matters, except for one trim This is the simplest case in the series. The 471cc parallel twin, the 27.2 inch seat and the 408 lb figure, 414 with ABS, are unchanged from 2020 through 2025, and the only change was a revised seat and handlebar position for 2025. Base prices ran $6,199 to $6,499. The one thing that does matter is trim. ABS was optional through 2025 and Honda dropped the non-ABS bike entirely for 2026, making ABS standard at $6,799. On the used market that means checking which configuration a given bike actually is, because the model year will not tell you and the listing photograph will not either. The years to approach carefully The three first-year bikes are the 2024 Street Glide, the 2024 R 1300 GS and the 2025 Scout. All three are the most capable versions of their platforms and all three carry the risk profile that comes with a launch year. The 2024 Scout is the mirror image: an outgoing platform in its final season, which is a reason to pay less rather than more. What this means for a buyer today If you want the most motorcycle per dollar, the 2024 Street Glide is the standout of the six years and you should read the owner reporting on the redesign before you commit. If you want the fewest unknowns, the 2021 to 2023 Street Glide Special, the 2021 to 2023 Scout and the R 1250 GS are the settled, high-volume, widely documented options. Two rules apply to all of them. Buy the specific bike rather than the model year, because within these platforms the years are often mechanically identical and priced as though they are not. And on any bike with an option list, confirm the configuration in writing before you travel, because seat, suspension and ABS decisions do not appear in the model name. A gear note on buying used gloves with a used bike Buying a used motorcycle tends to lead to buying used gear, and leather is the item where that logic breaks down. Leather stretches to the hand that wore it, so a secondhand glove arrives already shaped for somebody else, and a new one feels wrong for a while by design. Legendary USA's note on how leather gloves stretch and break in is a clear explanation of what that process actually involves, which is useful whether or not you buy from them. The pattern across these six years is consistent. Best value sits a year before or a year after a redesign, almost never on the redesign itself, unless the manufacturer cut the price. That happened exactly once. Cover photo: "Harley-Davidson Museum May 2024 06 (The AMF Years--1981 Nova Touring non-functional prototype--OHV V-Four)" by Michael Barera, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.