The 2025 Dirt Bike Landscape: Tech, Trails, and Legislation

The 2025 Dirt Bike Landscape: Tech, Trails, and Legislation

Dirt bikes are one of the vehicles that formed Dirt Legal. They were the inspiration for the services and the name. We love dirt bikes, and if the mood catches us right, you might just find us ripping up the asphalt on one of our bikes, including an e-bike or two. 

While some parts of the dirt bike industry and movement have remained remarkably static over the years, it has also grown and changed a lot over the years. As 2024 comes to a close, we want to take a look at some of the industry trends and topics that will affect dirt biking for 2025. 

The State of Gas-Powered Dirt Bikes in 2025

There are a lot of great electric dirt bikes on the market now and this is a trend that will most certainly continue. And why not? No more messing around with fussy ignitions, carbs, or other problem areas that give you fits with a gas bike. You just unplug and go. But like the trend of electric tools like chainsaw and lawn mowers, electric is not going to dethrone gas anytime soon. 

Gas bikes are better than ever because every advancing year brings innovations that make them more reliable and just overall better. 

There is an old expression that goes “there is nothing new under the sun,” and it probably bears some weight here. Unlike automobiles which go through an entire redesign every few years, dirt bikes are more or less the same as they were a decade ago. Now, this doesn’t mean that all the major players haven’t been constantly improving and tweaking because they certainly have. But we are talking about steps to perfect proven designs here. 

A few months ago, I wrote about how cool it would be if dirt bike manufacturers had spent the last 40 years constantly improving on 2-stroke bikes. Well, they would probably be awesome. But 2-strokes definitely fell out of favor with the EPA. 

In short, 2025 doesn’t really bring anything radical to the gas-powered dirt biking community. What you can expect are more updates and advances that will produce an ever-increasingly reliable machine. That is the boring stuff that makes dirt biking exciting; I don’t mind wrenching on my ORVs but I’d rather be riding them. 

Electric Dirt Bikes: Charging Ahead

"Electric dirt bike pluged into a charger" by Ivan Radic is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Gas bikes are kind of at the top of their power curve if you will. The advances you will see in them will be gradual, incremental improvements because they are already so good. Honda, Yamaha, Kawasaki, and all the others have been making them for so long now and they are largely the same thing as they were a couple of decades ago, so it is just the little things that are constantly being improved. 

Electric bikes are another matter completely. 

E-bikes are just beginning to come up the torque curve, metaphorically speaking. Unlike gas bikes which are still chugging along using the same proven tech, e-bikes are in a stage of rapid evolution. Industry powerhouse KTM has released a completely new version of their e-bike, and it makes sense why they sat on it.

Not to whip a dead horse, but gas bikes are about the same as they were a decade ago. But e-bikes are not. Hardware is much lighter now, electric motors are lighter and create more power and torque, batteries are lighter and last longer. And the odds are pretty good that the e-bikes a decade from now will blow today’s away. 

So, we can say with a fairly high level of confidence that the major upgrades in dirt biking over the next decade or more will be in electric dirt bikes. They will keep getting faster and having ridiculous torque (one of the best features of electric motors, and that is not lost on the dirt biking community). Their run times will get much longer, and their recharge cycles will get shorter. Electric dirt bikes are going to be incredible. 

Right to Repair: A New Era for DIY Riders

This legislative action is really interesting to me, and to be honest, I had no idea this was even a problem. 

House Resolution 906 was introduced last year and earlier this year for the sake of preserving the right of vehicle owners to repair their own vehicles. Basically, the gist of it is that it serves to protect consumers by ensuring that technical information is no longer gated and protected by manufacturers for the sake of pushing repairs to designated shops and techs. 

There are some lobbyists who oppose it, stating it is overly broad. We aren’t going to delve into that, but this bill is very interesting and is a good one to bookmark. You should definitely keep tabs on this, and outside of any formal regulation, we definitely believe that dirt bike owners should be able to conduct their own maintenance and repairs. 

The Future of Dirt Bike Culture

If interest in our services, online forums and social media is any indication, the future of dirt biking and dirt bike culture is strong. 

According to Statista, off-road motorcycle sales should reach about 136k units annually by 2029, so whether the states like it or not, the people want to ride. If their home states won’t support it, people will probably either migrate to those that will, travel across state lines to ride legally if their restrictive state happens to sit next to a less restrictive one, or people will continue to register OHVs to street-legal status. We highly recommend the Montana LLC process for the sake of reciprocity. 

I won’t cover it all here because we have talked about it a lot, but you have resident status in Montana proven by the LLC, and it is the LLC that actually owns the dirt bike, not you. This way, you have a perfectly street legal dirt bike to cruise around your home state, and you are covered by the umbrella of an LLC owning it out-of-state.  

Riding into the Future

Dirt Legal is proud to support the dirt biking community like we have done since our humble beginning. For 2025, expect to see modest improvements in gas bikes that are consistent with the updates we’ve seen over the past few years. Electric dirt bikes, on the other hand, will be getting pretty spicy. They will get lighter, faster, hold a charge longer, and be even more reliable with constant improvements in software design. 

From the regulatory side of things, don’t look to states that have been somewhat unfriendly to improve their position and stance on things because they probably won’t. You’ll either have to move elsewhere, travel elsewhere to ride, or make your OHVs street legal. Finally, the DIY bill in the House is interesting and it’ll be cool to see how it all unfolds.