A
motorcycle, also known as a
motorbike,
bike,
cycle, or
trike if it has three wheels, is a
two-or
three-
wheeled motor vehicle with two or three wheels. Motorcycles are designed for a variety of uses, including long-distance
travel,
transit,
cruising,
sport, and
off-
road racing. Riding a
motorcycle
and participating in other related social activities such as joining a motorcycle club and attending bike rallies are all examples of motorcycling.
The first internal combustion, the petroleum-fueled motorbike was the Daimler Reitwagen, which was built in
Germany by Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach in 1885.
Hildebrand & Wolfmüller introduced the first series production motorbike in
1894.
Honda
(28 percent),
Yamaha (17 percent), and
Hero MotoCorp (all from Japan) were the top three motorcycle manufacturers in the world by volume in
2014. Motorcycles are considered utilitarian in poor countries due to reduced pricing and better fuel economy. Except for car-centric
Japan, the
Asia-Pacific and
Southern and
Eastern Asia regions account for
58 percent of all motorbikes in the world.
Motorcycles
had
37 times the amount of fatalities per vehicle mile traveled than cars, according to the
US Department of Transportation.
There are three types of
motorcycles:
street, off-road, and the dual purposed cycle. There are numerous sub-types of motorcycles for various uses within these categories. Each type of
motorcycle
has a racing counterpart, such as road racing and
street bikes, or
MX and
dirt bikes.
Cruisers, sportbikes, scooters, and mopeds are among the various forms of street bikes. Many varieties of off-road motorcycles are built for dirt-oriented racing classes like motocross, and therefore are not street legal in most locations. Dual-purpose bikes, such as the double model, are built to go off-road while still being legal and comfortable on the road.