China Has A Bizarre Policy That Demands All Motorcycles Be Scrapped When They Reach 13 Years Old

The motorcycle is one of the oldest forms of motorized personal transportation. People around the world swing a leg over something with two wheels for fun, adventure, or as their everyday family vehicle. China is a dominating force in motorcycling with millions of two-wheelers sold in its country and others spreading far and wide across the world. But not often talked about is how China seems to view the machines. A recent report has revealed that China has a bizarre policy that forces motorcycles into the scrap heap at just 13 years old, regardless of their actual condition. Somehow, it gets even worse from there.

We cover a lot of Chinese vehicles here because we, just like a lot of you, are fascinated with all of the different technologies coming out of a different part of the world. China is really hitting a stride with its motorcycles, too, as it’s producing bikes with spectacular designs that you just aren’t going to see anywhere else.

That’s why I was shocked to see a viral video circulating the internet claiming to show 13-year-old motorcycles getting crushed in China. Here’s the video making rounds around places like Facebook and Reddit, but with overlays in Chinese:

Now, if you look closely, you’ll see motorcycles that haven’t been around for 13 years, like the Yamaha Bolt, and Harley-Davidsons with Milwaukee Eight engines, which also aren’t even close to 13 years old. The video also shows very American vehicles in the background like a Dodge Ram and a Freightliner Cascadia. So, it’s almost certainly not a video that was taken in China.

But what about this whole 13-year thing? Does China really crush motorcycles after they reach 13?

Motorcycles And China

I’ve been following the Chinese motorcycle industry for a while and it has been a wild ride.

It wasn’t even two decades ago when bigger Chinese brands like CFMoto happily built low-quality clones of popular Hondas. I owned one of these clones, a CFMoto Fashion 250, and it was shocking how close this scooter was to a Honda Helix from the 1980s. It was as if CFMoto didn’t just take a peek at Honda’s homework, but it straight up took the pages and put them through a copier. CFMoto’s cloning was so good that parts between the scoots were interchangeable.

Even China’s homebrew motorcycles were often pretty awful back then. The CFMoto CF250T-V5 wasn’t a clone of a Japanese motorcycle, but it was really just a scooter that was trying its absolute hardest to pretend to be a real motorcycle.

Yet, China has come such a long way since then. CFMoto quit it with the clones and instead, it’s now building motorcycles that you might buy on their own merits, not just because of a lower cost. Much of the Chinese motorcycle industry is like this today as so many companies have decided to create their own identity rather than just copying what Japan did in the 1980s. China’s motorcycle industry has gotten properly nutty, too, and the country’s brands are now selling weirdo V4s, flat eights, and bikes bringing back century-old ideas. I’m someone who loves choice, so I’m excited that motorcyclists have so many cool machines to choose from.

This is important to note because a lot of Chinese motorcycles from not too long ago were powered by slow, unreliable, and polluting two-stroke engines. That’s bad for places already known for high pollution like China’s cities. According to Chinese news sources, something like 14 million gas-powered motorcycles and 4.8 million electric motorcycles are sold in China a year. That’s a lot!

Despite this advancement, the Chinese government appears to be behind the times.

One thing I did not expect to see is the fact that many cities in China outright ban motorcycles. According to a 2021 paper by Jingjing Chen, Qian Wang, and Jie Huang and published in the Journal of Advanced Transportation, a number of Chinese cities banned motorcycles due to the high rates of death in motorcycle crashes, from the paper:

The proportion of motorcycle-related traffic accidents in all traffic accidents (in terms of times, deaths, injuries, and property losses) had been on the rise until 2000, and the motorcycle-related deaths rate per 100 accidents reached 35 persons in 1996, which is much higher than the average. With the implementation of the motorcycle bans since early 1990s, the proportion of motorcycle-related accidents and the deaths per 100 accidents began to decrease.

Therefore, in order to alleviate the traffic safety problems caused by motorcycles, some local governments have formulated relevant regulations to restrict or prohibit motorcycles from being registered with license plates and running in certain prescribed areas or the whole urban roads. As the motorcycle bans impair part of the road rights of motorcycle owners to some extent, there are many studies on such regulations’ legitimacy [3]; meanwhile, there are statistics on the improvement of traffic safety after implementation of the motorcycle bans, as shown in many local governments’ reports. However, there is still a lack of research on the causal relationship between such bans and traffic safety.

The paper says the first city to ban motorcycles was Beijing in the year 1985. Beijing has influence as China’s capital city and in the 1990s, several other cities banned motorcycles to follow Beijing’s lead. As of 2021, the researchers in the paper noted that 185 Chinese cities had banned motorcycles from their roads. Additionally, there were 19 provinces that banned motorcycles from being on the freeway, too.

Banning motorcycles has made a strong impact. As Ultimate Motorcycling wrote in 2014, motorcycles used to sell much better in China. Remember how I said that roughly 20 million motorcycles a year are sold in China right now? Motorcycle sales hit a high of 19 million units in 2009. Then, as cities continued to ban motorcycles, sales fell to 13,880,000 units by 2013. By 2015, even more cities announced motorcycle bans.

That time around, the government didn’t claim it was because of safety, but because the two-stroke motorcycles sold in the country were polluting the air.

Reportedly, Chinese motorcycle buyers responded by buying e-bikes. Unfortunately, China found that clogging up the streets with e-bikes traded one problem for another. As Chinese publication Global Times wrote in 2016, more than a dozen Chinese cities banned e-bikes. The Global Times gives an example of Beijing, where in 2015, 21,423 people were injured in 31,404 crashes allegedly caused by e-bikes. Reportedly, these crashes represented 36.7 percent of traffic injuries in Beijing. Sadly, 113 other people lost their lives in these crashes.

Interestingly, the Global Times article suggests that people and businesses found a way around the ban by just riding their e-bikes when most police officers are off-duty.

So, China is absolutely a huge motorcycle market and player in the global motorcycle industry, yet the city governments in the country aren’t always that happy with them. Still, it’s hard to believe that China, which bans motorcycles in the name of being eco-friendly, also demands motorcycles to be crushed at a certain age regardless of actual condition.

The Scrappage Scheme

Research on the 13-year rule led me to a recent article by RideApart, which sources UK motorcycle news publication Bennetts BikeSocial. Over there, motorcycle reporter Ben Purvis published an article in 2020 detailing the rise of the Chinese motorcycle industry.

The important part for us is the 13-year rule. In the article, Purvis says:

The idea of Chinese motorcycles is often tied to a concept of low-quality, old-fashioned components and designs. To many, they’re throwaway bikes that aren’t worth repairing.

It’s not a completely unwarranted reputation, but the cheap-and-cheerful Chinese machines built to those standards don’t necessarily represent an inability to build bigger, more expensive or higher-quality bikes. Instead they’re a response to very specific Chinese rules that demand bikes are scrapped after 13 years or 120,000km.

Purvis then says that bikes are scrapped if they fail three inspections in a row. Mind you, 74,564 miles is barely broken in for a big Harley or a Honda Gold Wing. Now, BikeSocial didn’t provide any sources, so I decided to look for myself.

My first stop was at iMedia, a Chinese publication covering viral topics in the country. This article is dated August 2nd, so it would seem like even this writer found the same viral posts I did. The article is in broken English, but agrees with what BikeSocial said in 2020. The iMedia piece also claims that Chinese regulators may be changing the policy in the future.

That wasn’t satisfying enough for me, so I kept searching. I also found a 2023 post by Sungo, the brand name of Chinese company Xiamen Sunshine Trade Co, LTD. This company is a supplier of motorcycle and car parts. In the post, Sungo says:

With the popularity of large and medium-sized motorcycles and the transformation of motorcycles into entertainment, the motorcycle 13-year compulsory scrapping system is becoming more and more unsuitable for the construction of a thrift-oriented society, and the majority of motorcycle friends are increasingly calling for the cancellation of the 13-year compulsory scrapping system. Although China Motorcycle Chamber of Commerce is still making active efforts to coordinate with government departments for the cancellation of the compulsory scrapping system, Perhaps the cancellation of the motorcycle compulsory scrapping system is not far away, but before the cancellation of the compulsory scrapping system, all parts of the country or according to the “road Traffic Safety Law” and “Compulsory scrapping standard Provisions of Motor vehicles” fourth, fifth, seven motorcycle scrapping standards to implement the 2023 motorcycle annual review, scrapping matters.

In Sungo’s review of the law, it’s noted that there isn’t a mandatory scrapping age for cars, but trikes are to be destroyed after 12 years while standard motorcycles are to be scrapped after 13 years.

Additionally, Sungo notes that per the law, a motorcycle can be scrapped if it fails to meet national standards after repair, if it cannot meet emissions standards after repair, or if it fails its vehicle inspection three times in a row.

As for that mileage thing, Sungo says that trikes can be scrapped after 100,000 km (62,137 miles) while motorcycles get to go 120,000 km (74,564 miles). Sungo points out that the important word there is “can,” meaning the scrapping of these high mileage motorcycles is voluntary, at least until they hit 12 or 13 years, respectively.

Finally, I found what is allegedly the law itself translated into English. That is the “Compulsory Motor Vehicle Scrap Standards” which is said to have been published on December 27, 2012 and it backs up everything Sungo reported.

The law then goes on to say that local municipalities may pass more stringent regulations, but that they cannot require trikes younger than 10 years old to be scrapped or motorcycles younger than 11 years old.

So it would appear that China’s scrappage policy is real. On one hand, I can see why it was passed in the first place. Chinese motorcycles used to be polluting machines and honestly, you’d be lucky if it even lasted long enough to hit 13 years of age or 74,564 miles in the first place. My CFMoto Fashion 250 was worn out at under 10,000 miles. On the other hand, Chinese motorcycle manufacturers are working on quality and now I can see one of these bikes lasting a long time. Perhaps that’s why even these companies are saying that they’re fighting back against the policy.

I should note that it’s also unclear how this policy is enforced or how it impacts classic motorcycles. David Tracy’s brother recently found a 1965 Harley Davidson Electra Glide abandoned in Hong Kong. I haven’t found anything suggesting how this policy impacts Hong Kong, which is a special administrative region in China. I also wonder if there are any loopholes or exemptions, which I also haven’t found. What I have found is someone living in China showing the registration to their brand new motorcycle, which has a mandatory retirement date 13 years past first registration.

I reached out to our Chinese market contributor Tycho for more information and will update this if he gives me further details.

The fascinating thing in all of this is that China’s motorcycles are spreading all over the world, but China’s own people cannot ride their own home market motorcycles in certain places and, apparently, they’re not allowed to get too old. As China’s motorcycle industry continues to improve its quality and longevity, it’ll be interesting to see how this rule evolves.