Honda opens its 38th factory in Turkey with room to build 200,000 bikes a year
Honda has opened a brand-new motorcycle factory in Aliağa, Izmir, and it’s already been churning out bikes since April 2026. That’s not a soft launch. Production was running before the ribbon was cut.
The plant is Honda’s 38th motorcycle factory worldwide, which is a number worth sitting with for a second. Thirty-eight. It starts life with a 100,000-unit annual capacity, but Honda has built it with expansion in mind, if demand keeps climbing, that figure could reach 200,000 bikes a year. The facility covers 100,000 square metres in total, with 45,000 square metres of that given over to indoor production space.
Turkey isn’t a market Honda stumbled into. The brand topped the country’s motorcycle sales charts for the eleventh consecutive year in 2025. That’s not luck, that’s infrastructure, product fit, and a population with a genuine appetite for affordable personal transport and commercial delivery bikes. The PCX125 is a prime example of what’s driving those numbers.
Around 300 people will be employed at the site directly. Honda says the factory is designed to shorten supply chains, improve manufacturing flexibility, and increase local production, sensible priorities when a market is moving this fast.
Hans de Jaeger, President and Director of Honda Motor Europe, called the factory “a strong expression of our confidence in the market,” and said it would feed into both Honda’s global production plans and Turkey’s own industrial development. Honda Türkiye President Satoru Yamada described it as part of Honda’s “long-term vision” for the country, and made a point of saying success wouldn’t just be measured in sales figures, but in the value it brings to local communities.
On that note, the site has been developed with Honda’s environmental targets in mind, and local initiatives – traffic education programmes and reforestation projects among them, will continue alongside the factory’s day-to-day operations.
Whether that translates to any ripple effect in European availability or pricing further down the line remains to be seen. But Honda planting a flag this size doesn’t happen quietly.
