🏍️ Dealers Are Dropping Like Flies Post-COVID

By Ben Grayson – Get Ben Riding

Say what you want about COVID — it was a brutal time for most people — but it wasn’t bad for bike sales.

During lockdown, bikes were flying out of showrooms faster than dealers could uncrate them. Suddenly, everyone wanted two wheels and freedom. As a result, loads of small dealers popped up overnight, Chinese manufacturers flooded in, and the used bike market went absolutely nuts.

The irony, of course, was that if you did get caught out riding, you had to pretend you were taking your Panigale to Tesco to buy a loaf of bread for your sick granny.

I know it was a dark time for many, but bloody hell — the Northamptonshire roads were empty and begging for bikes!

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🏦 The Great COVID Boom

The government was handing out loans to anyone with a pulse, and for a while, everyone was living in this weird sunshine bubble. We were working from home, earning the same money, and spending less. It wasn’t normal — but it felt good.

And the motorcycle industry rode that wave. Registrations kept climbing, electric bikes were getting serious, and everyone thought the future looked bright.

Then one day, someone flipped a switch — and everything doubled in price.

Fuel, food, bikes, interest rates — you name it. Everything except wages.

The other night I went to Tesco for “essentials.” One carrier bag later, £50 gone. That’s the last time I buy aged whisky from Tesco.

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💀 The Domino Effect Begins

There are loads of reasons why the motorcycle trade has gone tits-up over the last few years, but from where I’m standing (and I’ve been there in the thick of it), the main culprits are:

• The cost of living and national debt

• Interest rates and tightening finance

• Licensing laws

• Insurance costs

• Fuel prices

• Too many brands and models

• Irresponsible manufacturers

• Irresponsible lending

  
  

Let’s dive in.

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💰 The Cost-of-Living Squeeze

We all know everything’s expensive right now. The government’s got debt to pay and — surprise — it’s the working class footing the bill.

If you want my take on licensing or insurance, I’ve ranted about both already. Go check those blogs.

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⛽ Fuel Prices – The Never-Ending Con

Fuel prices are a farce. I remember my dad moaning when petrol hit 69p a litre. I remember it smashing £2.00 and people filling buckets at petrol stations like it was the apocalypse.

Now it hovers around £1.40 a litre and the government says: “Don’t worry, we’ll all be on EVs by 2024.”

So along come all these shiny new electric bikes — Zero, Energica, Damon — all backed by subsidies, tax breaks, and cheap finance. Dealers piled in, ordered stock, invested in training…

Then the government quietly back-pedalled on EV policy and the market crashed.

One dealer I know had £300,000 of unsellable electric stock sitting in a warehouse. The manufacturer wouldn’t take it back, and selling below cost just destroyed the remaining dealers’ margins.

New electric start-ups folded almost overnight.

You have to ask — why don’t manufacturers step in and buy that stock back to stabilise the market? Because they can’t afford to. They know it won’t sell.

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🇨🇳 The Chinese Invasion

Then there’s the rise of the Chinese brands: CFMOTO, VOGE, Benelli, Kove, Moto Morini, Lexmoto, Keeway — and a dozen more.

They’ve genuinely improved. The bikes are good, the prices are brilliant, but the parts networks? Not so much.

Still, in a world where people are skint, brand loyalty goes out the window. Why spend £4,999 on a Japanese bike when you can buy a near-identical Chinese one for £2,999?

It’s not the bikes that are the problem — it’s the distributors.

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🏭 How Manufacturers and Distributors Choke Dealers

Manufacturers:

Big brands set insane sales targets with the promise of huge bonuses. Miss the target? You lose tens of thousands in support.

So if you’re 10 bikes short, what do you do?

• If you’ve got the cash, you pre-register them.

• If not, you discount them to death to shift them before deadline.

Either way, the result is the same: loads of registrations for the manufacturer, zero profit for the dealer.

It’s the same nonsense the car world’s been doing for years.

Distributors:

Distributors don’t have the financial muscle of big manufacturers, so they chase volume instead of stability.

They’ll offer a better deal to the biggest dealer groups, who then undercut everyone else online to shift units. Great for headline numbers, terrible for profitability.

They rarely invest in marketing, parts, or training — they rely on dealers to carry that cost.

Handled badly, distributors can nuke an entire brand.

Take Royal Enfield as an example: when they took back UK distribution, the outgoing distributor had thousands of unsold bikes. No deal was reached to buy them back, so those bikes got dumped into the market cheap — wrecking residual values for years.

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💸 The Cost of Stock

Here’s what most people don’t realise:Dealers don’t own 90% of the bikes on their showroom floors.

They’re on stocking finance — usually 180-day terms.

So if you’ve got 20 bikes in at £5,000 each, that’s £100,000 sat in the warehouse. After 180 days, the manufacturer or bank wants paying, whether the bikes are sold or not.

So what happens?You discount. You register bikes early. You kill your margin.

It’s the same for used bikes — they’re financed through companies like DF Capital, Close Brothers, or MotoNovo.

If you’ve got £100,000 on stocking plans, the interest alone can cripple you.

Come winter, when sales drop, dealers dump bikes to clear debt — just when they need profit the most.

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⚙️ Euro 5.2 – The Straw That Broke the Camel’s Back

Euro 5.2 (sometimes misquoted as V5) was the final kick in the teeth last year.

Many manufacturers couldn’t get bikes certified in time, so entire model lines vanished. Dealers were forced to pre-register non-compliant stock before January 2025 or lose the lot.

Thousands of bikes hit the market at once — crushing residuals and wrecking cash flow.

Those who ran out of compliant stock were left high and dry over winter with no financial support.

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🏚️ Dealers Falling Like Dominoes

Running a dealership has always been a balancing act — but in 2025, it’s become a survival game.

We’ve seen iconic names go under — M&P Direct, Blade Swindon, and countless independents across the country.

Margins are paper-thin. Bikes are a luxury. Finance is tighter. Overheads are up.

It’s brutal.

When you see KTM’s UK operations hitting the wall, you realise how fragile the whole ecosystem really is.

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🔮 Can the Industry Recover?

I actually think it can — but it’ll take work.

We need:

• A government that understands the real-world cost of living.

• Manufacturers and distributors that think long-term, not just about quarterly bonuses.

• And riders who understand that the guy behind the counter is probably making £400 on your bike, not £4,000.

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So next time you’re about to ask for a discount — think of that.

That £400 might be what keeps his lights on.

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💬 Final Thought

The motorcycle trade isn’t dying — it’s resetting.

But if we don’t start fixing the way manufacturers, lenders, and governments treat dealers, there won’t be many left to rebuild it.

What do you think?