Cycle World Ten Best Bikes 2015

There are about 450 different motorcycle models at your pleasure in dealerships right now, in a variety of styles and at a level of excellence that makes it pretty easy to be a new-bike owner if you can afford the price of a couple fancy cups of coffee a day. In 2015, we witnessed the continuation of the trend that sees a splitting of the market between high-end, high-featured machines that dazzle us with amazing performance and those of very low cost and ease of use. While we have always strived to recognize the great motorcycles regardless of capacity or price, we took it a step further this year with a new category: Best Lightweight Streetbike. For the past several years, we found ourselves looking for ways to honor the great bikes of less than 500cc. And now we have it. To make room, since there can be only Ten, we consolidated Sport and Touring into one category to take all bikes with hard bags standard. Our results, after polling the staff, might surprise you. But one thing is for certain: Each of our 2015 Ten Best Bikes is a worthy substitute for caffeine.