Colombia’s Motorcycle Industry Faces New Rules as Electric Production Grows
Colombia’s motorcycle industry, now the tenth-largest market in the world, could soon face its biggest regulatory change in more than three decades. During a meeting in Cartagena hosted at Auteco SAS’s plant, government officials and representatives from the country’s nine motorcycle assemblers reviewed a draft decree that would redefine how Colombia measures domestic production and local content in assembled motorcycles.
The proposal arrives as the Colombia motorcycle industry experiences record growth. The country sold more than 1.1 million motorcycles in 2025, a 34.8% increase from the previous year, and Bancolombia projects sales could reach 1.36 million units in 2026. Behind that expansion stand approximately 45,000 direct and indirect jobs, nine assembly plants, and a network of local suppliers whose future could depend on the new rules.
How Colombia’s new motorcycle industry rules would work
The current framework, which dates back more than 30 years, allows authorized assemblers to import CKD kits (Completely Knocked Down, meaning motorcycle parts shipped from abroad in pieces and then assembled locally) under reduced tariff conditions in exchange for incorporating a minimum share of Colombian-made components, but it never defined this obligation in the granular, category-by-category way that industry specialists say a diversified market requires.
The draft decree introduces the PIN (Porcentaje de Integración Nacional), a formal metric that calculates the ratio of nationally produced materials against the total value of imported components for each bike assembled, and applies different minimum PIN thresholds across three categories.
Category 1 covers motorcycles up to 250cc, Category 2 covers those above 250cc, and Category 3 covers electric motorcycles and other vehicles not falling into the previous two groups, an architecture that reflects the reality of a market where commuter bikes, high-displacement motorcycles, and electric vehicles each involve different supply chains and sourcing possibilities.
How electric motorcycle incentives could transform the industry
The most consequential element of the draft decree for the industry’s long-term direction is an electric-vehicle provision that works as a multiplier rather than a simple category rule: any assembler that produces at least 20% of its total locally assembled units as electric motorcycles earns a 0% tariff rate on its entire domestic production, not just the electric units, which means the incentive grows in value precisely as a company scales its electric output and creates a direct financial case for converting production lines ahead of regulatory deadlines.
That provision arrives as Colombia grapples with a structural problem in the electric segment: nine out of every ten electric motorcycles entering the market in 2026 lack registration in the RUNT (Registro Único Nacional de Tránsito, the national vehicle registry that tracks ownership, insurance, and technical compliance), suggesting that a large share of electric units currently move through informal channels outside the assembly framework the decree seeks to regulate.
Bringing electric motorcycles formally inside the PIN system would make registration a prerequisite for accessing the tariff benefit and push assemblers toward the kind of documented, auditable production that the country needs if it intends to build a credible domestic electric vehicle industry rather than a parallel import economy.
Why Colombia wants more locally made motorcycle parts
The broader economic context that gives the Cartagena meeting its urgency is that the motorcycle sector, valued at US$2.72 billion in 2025 and forecast to grow at 8% annually through the end of the decade, already assembles approximately 90% of the bikes it sells domestically, but the local component share within those assembled bikes remains relatively low, fluctuating between 12% and 21% depending on the company.
Raising that share through the PIN mechanism would deepen the supply chain linking assemblers like Incolmotos-Yamaha, Suzuki Motor, AKT Motos, HMCL-Hero Motos, Auteco Mobility, Fanalca-Honda, and Grupo UMA to Colombian parts manufacturers, and the meeting in Cartagena opened the formal consultation period during which those companies can submit technical objections or proposed adjustments before the decree reaches final publication.