Over the last 124 years, the car has undergone a complete transformation in safety, reliability, and technology, while the two-wheeler sector has practically failed to keep pace with this movement. Even today, some of the best-selling motorcycles in Brazil leave the factory with drum brakes, according to manufacturers' technical specifications. This is the same technology that Louis Renault patented in 1902, when cars and motorcycles braked in exactly the same way. Both started from the same point, but what happened next separated their trajectories in a way that few people stop to question.

The path of evolution

The transformation of the automobile happened in two distinct phases. The first was driven by regulation: governments began to demand seat belts, then airbags and anti-lock brakes (ABS), until these items became a basic part of any new car.

"The car evolved because it was pushed by regulation, by competition between manufacturers, and by companies that understood that raising the safety standard was an obligation," says Silvio Rotilli, CEO and co-founder of Auper and PhD in Electrical Engineering from McMaster University, where he was part of the McMaster Automotive Resource Centre, a global reference in transport electrification research.

The second phase came from the market itself, when manufacturers began competing with each other by offering safety as a differentiator long before any law made it mandatory. In 1934, General Motors conducted the first crash test with a concrete barrier, starting a testing culture in the four-wheel world that has never stopped. Twenty-five years later, Nils Bohlin, a Volvo engineer, invented the three-point seat belt and shared the patent for free with the entire industry.

Rearview cameras, blind spot monitoring, and automatic emergency braking became standard features before any legislation required them. In 2022, the European Union only formalized what a large part of the market was already delivering, making the complete package of advanced driver-assistance systems, ADAS, mandatory.

Even with all these advancements, there is a popular belief that cars were sturdier and more durable than they are today, but it is actually the exact opposite: more and more, the automobile is designed to protect the life of the driver, and maintenance intervals have increased, proving higher quality and durability of the components. A popular car that once required an oil change every 3,000 kilometers now supports 15,000 kilometers without this maintenance, for example.

A delay that became standard

With motorcycles, this logic was not repeated with the same intensity. ABS arrived on two wheels ten years after cars, in 1988, on a high-displacement BMW accessible to few consumers. In Brazil, it only became required by law in 2016, and only on motorcycles over 300cc, while the best-selling models in the country are below that; for them, the requirement is only CBS, a combined braking system that is less effective than ABS.

Electronic fuel injection became mandatory in 2009, fourteen years after it was already required in cars. The standard that the automotive industry consolidated reached two wheels with a delay, in expensive versions, for a small slice of buyers; for a large part of the market, it simply never arrived. Even electrification has not broken this cycle: most electric motorcycles sold in Brazil were developed for other markets and do not bring a significant advancement in safety, reliability, and technology.

Part of this delay has a technical explanation: combustion motorcycles require much more frequent maintenance than cars, which limits the space to incorporate other technologies without making the vehicle even more expensive. While a popular car goes for service every 10,000 kilometers, the best-selling motorcycle in Brazil needs to undergo its first service in the initial 1,000 kilometers and then every 6,000 kilometers traveled, accumulating a considerable cost in basic services required to maintain the consumer's right to the warranty. This results in an inversion that is rarely questioned: how can it cost more and be more troublesome to maintain a motorcycle than a car?

Lives saved

"When you look at the timeline of motorcycles, the pattern repeats itself," Rotilli observes. "The technology exists, studies prove that it saves lives, and yet the market takes years to make it accessible to those who need it most. Even so, in 2026, the best-selling motorcycles in Brazil do not have ABS as standard, and several are still sold with drum brakes. At some point, we started to accept that riding a motorcycle is dangerous, and that's it. But that is not an immutable fact; it is a choice that the sector makes every day."

The largest study ever done on the topic, published by the IIHS (Insurance Institute for Highway Safety) in 2021 based on 65 models from 10 different motorcycle categories, found a 22% reduction in fatal crashes associated with ABS use. Eric Teoh, director of statistical services at the IIHS and author of the study, compares the decision to use ABS to using a helmet: "it is on the same level of importance."

Working as an app delivery driver for about four years, riding between ten and twelve hours a day through the city of São Paulo, Paulo Barbosa da Silva learned in practice the importance of more advanced equipment. "It was on a rainy day, on my first motorcycle, which had a drum brake. I had to brake suddenly and the wheel locked immediately. The motorcycle didn't stop, it kept going until it crashed, and I fell. It could have cost my life. If it had ABS, the wheel wouldn't have locked, and I would have managed to brake in time," he reports.

Who supports urban delivery in Brazil

The paradox is that, while the motorcycle accumulates this delay, it has become an essential infrastructure of the Brazilian urban economy. A survey by the Brazilian Center for Analysis and Planning (Cebrap) reports more than 455,000 workers acting as app delivery drivers in the country, in a market that registered 2.19 million units in 2025, the best result in history. Hundreds of thousands of professionals today operate a vehicle that was not designed for the intensity of the work they perform.

For Rotilli, this combination reveals a gap that the sector has not yet clearly addressed.

"The car we drive today is the result of decades of decisions that prioritized occupant safety. These decisions did not come by chance; they came because someone demanded, regulated, and supervised them. The motorcycle is still waiting for an equivalent process. And while it doesn't happen, the person paying this bill is the worker who depends on the motorcycle to generate income every single day," concludes the specialist.