There are some brands of bicycles that can cost more than the down payment on a car. Why? Surely making a bike lightweight and reliable isn’t so difficult that it warrants that price? Is it just the brand name or maybe it has to do with customization options?
Something I haven’t seen mentioned in these threads is economies of scale. Most cars are kind of engineering and machining marvels especially for their price, with a huge amount of their manufacturing being automated to a very high level. Fancy bikes probably do not have the production volume to justify that kind of automation. Their price represents their actual production being less efficient, not being able to amortize the R&D costs over as many units, and general luxury premium.
I can only on road bikes as that’s what I ride. But it seems like the biggest factor that drives up prices is a combination of weight and aerodynamics.
For just regular people, If you know where to look you can get a high end bike that was unfinished at the factory and didn’t get painted/stickered/branded and pay a fraction of the price. A lot of time the branding is what really drives up prices.
But in the very high end it’s really all about weight and aero. Professional racers will pay a hefty premium to knock a few grams off of their bikes total weight, or to get parts that are more aerodynamic and thus give you better power transfer between your bike and the road.
And then the lighter you want to get, you start getting diminished returns, and exponentially higher prices. Like if you compare a 3 pound saddle to a 1 pound saddle it might be a little bit more expensive. But then if you have a 150 gram saddle and want to get a 100 gram saddle that might be 20x the price.
Lighter parts also have to sustain the same amount of forces (and sometimes much much more) as their heavy duty steel counterparts so finding things that can undergo this amount of stress and not break plays into it as well.
And this doesn’t even go into materials. The big new thing is titanium bikes which are ridiculously expensive but will last several lifetimes if taken care of. And then carbon fiber is difficult to make and even more difficult to make well. Much lighter and than other materials but really only flexes in one direction and can be really fragile if under the wrong type of stress.
If you know where to look you can get a high end bike that was unfinished at the factory and didn’t get painted/stickered/branded and pay a fraction of the price.
This is for the US, not sure about elsewhere, but…
The easy and reliable way for most people is probably just bikesdirect.com
I’ll fully admit that their website looks like you’re immediately gonna get scammed, but it’s legit and I’ve ordered from them. Don’t just trust me though, search around and find people who have posted and can verify that they’ve ordered and it’s legit.
They’re importers who sell branded and off/non branded bikes direct from the manufacturers at a heavy discount. Shipping is free, but it takes a pretty long time since they’re shipping it from China
The hard and less reliable way is to ask around. I got to be good friends with the owner of my local bike shop, and he’s the type of person who organizes races and does a lot of custom work, so he knows a couple people who run small bike factories/workshops in the US. They sometimes have bikes that have some marks on the down tube or a slightly messy weld etc. but otherwise perfectly great bikes that they can’t sell. So it’s definitely a long shot and more likely in cities with a big biking scene, but this is where you get the best deal. I got a frame for $300 and they would have sold it for over $1500 but didn’t because the holes for a water bottle cage were milled slightly off center.
For a lot of people the point of a hobby seems to be as an outlet for their unhealthy relationship with money and purchasing, and markets find ways to take advantage of that.
You can buy good used bikes for cheap though, and maintain them cheaply also, so it isn’t a problem for people who are not stupidly rich or insane.
The bike that's in my price range is the Walmart Huffy intended to be sold to ten year olds. The cheapest adult bike I found for sale new in my area was $1,500.
So I just don't have a bike. I might buy a used one someday.
Though to be fair I last looked a few years ago. Situations may have changed by now. But when I was in the market for a cheap bike none of them seemed reasonably priced to me.
Learn how to do bicycle maintenance and find a good second hand bike that needs a little love.
I have a Giant hard tail that was €1200 new, but I got it used for about €100. Serviced the brakes, put on a new chain, cleaned/oiled/greased everything mechanical and it’s like a new bike.
I wouldn’t even have guessed Big Lots or Dick’s actually have bikes, since they don’t sell them at any of their locations in my area that I’ve seen. However, my city has a straight up bicycle store and they also carry low-end, cheap bikes.
The corrrect answer is massive profiteering off of suckers.
There’s some engineering expense, that makes real bikes that last years and perform reliably, which makes it more expensive than a Walmart bike, but after that it’s rip off city.
Easiest measure to illustrate this, is the price of motorcycles. You can drop £10k on road bike or mountain bike, and still not really get top of the range. Look up what kind of motorcycle you can get for that money and then make a value judgement .
10k mountain bike is like 95% the same bike as what a professional mountain biker would use in a competition. 10k motorbike is consumer grade junk that would probably break within minutes if you abuse it like you do a pro bike.
I somehow doubt that’s anywhere compareable to the bikes they use on motoGP or such. A quick google seems to put those anywhere from 1 to 4 million USD.
True, but there are grades of racing. I don’t know what the current class structure is, but a 7k CBR is spitting distance of super street or whatever that AMA class is called now. I think the point being made is still valid. I can’t go out and buy a motogp bike, and the manufacturer isn’t pretending to sell me one.
Yeah, I’m just trying to illustrate that many people don’t quite seem to appreciate the level on engineering that is put into these things. What your average weekend warrior is doing with their mountain bike is not that far away from what a pro enduro racer would do in a competition. That’s why you need pro level gear too and that comes with a cost. A walmart bike simply just can’t handle the abuse and there’s plenty of videos on YouTube demonstrating that.
Warranty will often mention that it's void if you race it. But I don't think the comparison's fair.
Even in circumstances where it isn't literally illegal to ride even a 'budget' motorbike anywhere near full potential, it's still incredibly dangerous for an amateur. You literally can't abuse it like a pro, without likely killing yourself.
Pro-level bicycle? Often no problem. You're less likely to get into trouble at 20mph/30kmh than 120mph/200kmh on a cheap motorbike. Forget about motogp bikes which IRC do 0-300kmh(190mph?) in under 10 seconds.
Poor camparison, Superbike championship and the TT etc use the frame and engine (and quite a few other bits too). A stock bike in the right hands can get reasonably close to their lap times, and one with light mods (say, €1000 extra and a bit of elbow grease) can be halfway between the two.
No… That’s my point. 10k mountain bike basically is that rally subaru. That’s why it’s not fair to compare a bike like that to consumer level motorbikes. That mountain bike is pro-level.
In around 2012 the costs of Tour the France bikes ranged somewhere around 4k to 8k (with a rumoured 12K€ bike). Source: French TV :-)
Training bikes was about half (source my lil bro^^), but as the frame were mostly carbon and glue, they were actually quite used at the end of the season.
Not just marketing. Carbon fibre and weight reduction can get very expensive.
Of course, you pretty quickly hit diminishing returns, and most people don't actually need that for a short weekend trip.
But it can make sense to spend a few thousand on a bike, if you're using it to commute or you use it for work (deliveries, etc.).
price of motorcycles. You can drop £10k on road bike or mountain bike, and still not really get top of the range. Look up what kind of motorcycle you can get for that money and then make a value judgement .
Don't know much about bikes, but I remember reading the story of someone who had bought something insane. Think a high end ducati. Anyway, he was complaining about how it overheated and/or got to hot at traffic lights. Someone pointed out it wasn't designed to idle at a traffic light or cruise highway speeds. He was driving it too slowly for it to cool the engine properly. He'd bought a bike that was designed to go fast, only to find out it wasn't actually that good at riding around at relatively slow speeds.
Don't know if that's true, but it does illustrate that more expensive isn't always necessarily a better choice for an individual user.
Yeah, nah, Ducatis are like the carbon road bikes of the motorcycle world - all about dick waving. A little while back one of the larger YouTube channels took the latest Ducati to a track and put it up against a cheap 7 year old Suzuki, and the Suzuki was still faster … and if you buy a Japanese sport bike it’s not going to have the mechanical problems of a Ducati either.
Source: I have owned, ridden, repaired and raced a lot of motorbikes, including some fast-ish ones.
I think I watched that video. Ducati Panigale vs a GSX-R?
Not just about dick waving. The Ducati was prettier and Italian.
From what I know of cars, that means it was more reliable than something Japanese, because they replaced breakdowns and technical issues with temparement and character. Because humans are irrational, that's not unlikely to cause the user to anthropomorphise their overpriced but technically flawed vehicle. ("She sometimes gets stuck in 3rd, you need to be gentle.")
It’s all just horseshit, if you want a motorbike with character, get a classic one. Hell, even my '82 Montesa manages to be reliable, yet has character out the wazoo.
Let’s be honest, in the “regular” bike area there hasn’t been a meaningful innovation in the last 15-20 years. Bike chains are literally the same for what? 30 years? Yet, this extremely simple stamped metal in oil costs 20€. For what?
I mean, even a normal, reasonable bike costs easily 800€. That’s as much as a baseline MacBook Air. The pinnacle of engineering costs as much as a product that’s literally 19th century technology and easily mass-produceable .
I see no evidence that these bike manufacturers are super profitable, so I doubt there is much “massive profiteering”. Good bicycles are a high tech but low volume industry.
I spent 1.2k on a lower-end-good-bike 11 years ago. It’s the best fun per dollar purchase I’ve made in my 60ish year life. I wish I’d spent a few hundred more for an Ultegra group set.
Mountain bikes have to be lightweight and strong, and production volume is low. Suspension design takes R&D, and adds moving parts. Start pricing components and you hit $5000 easy for a full-suspension bike. For hardtails, you are making a lot of compromises at $1500, but $2500 gets you a nice bike.
For road/gravel bikes, once you get over $2000, you are paying a lot of money for tiny weight savings, negligible aerodynamic improvements, and electronic gizmos.
For either mountain or road, if you want a custom/hand-made frame and parts made in the developed world paying living wages, you are going to spend a lot more. Taiwan makes a lot of great frames, but if you want a frame made buy a dude in Denver who names all his bikes after craft beers, add several grand.
For city/commuter bikes, you can get something perfectly good for under $1000, but if you can swing $2000, get a Brompton.
Everyone saw a convenient economic scapegoat and just "forgot" to lower the prices again after the crisis was over. Now, everyone has been paying these new and improved prices for 3 years, so they're never going to go down again.
As people dive deeper into a hobby they have very particular desires. That means two things: (1) specialty parts with very low sales volumes, and (2) people are willing to pay extra to get exactly what they want. If I just want two wheels and a set of pedals and don’t really care about the details then I can grab any $200 bike from a department store. But if I want, say, a very particular drivetrain, carbon fiber parts to shave weight, maybe a specific suspension design, mounting points for niche accessories, etc., then I’m shopping for very specific items from boutique brands. That’s why a very small number of hardcore riders do crazy stuff like pay over $4k for a set of wheels.
You’ll see the same thing in other hobbies, too. I can’t imagine what some people spend on their gaming PCs.
$1500 gets you a pretty kickass gaming PC, even if it’s not absolute top of the line.
In mountain biking, $1500 gets you a solid hard tail or an entry-level full suspension from a direct-to-consumer brand like Polygon if you’re buying new.
Right, but that’s top of the line stuff. You can easily build a PC with a 70 tier GPU for less than $1500 and you’ll still have a kickass gaming PC.
The XX70 tier equivalent mountain bikes cost like $3000-$3500. I’m thinking along the lines of a Trek Remedy 7 (which is what I have), a base Santa Cruz Bronson, or a base Specialized Stumpjumper. There are plenty more but those are just 3 from some big brands.
The amount you spend also scales with how much you want to use the device, and the quality. It’s similar with power tools.
£100 combi drill? For the average DIY user, exactly the same functionality as a £500 one.
For a tradesman using it 7 hours a day, 240 days a year, the more comfortable/reliable one may well pay for itself.
This does sum it up pretty well, but bike pricing in general has gotten out of hand and pretty much everyone in the biking (specifically mountain biking) community agrees. Of course, volumes are pretty low for these products.
Just the frames for many of the higher end models can be $3000-5000. A fork is another $600-$1600. Shock is $500-1000. Carbon wheels are like $1500-2500 (alloy more like $500-800). Tires cost as much as cheap car tires, around $100 each. Pedals can be anywhere from $20 to $250. The new wireless drivetrains (made up of fragile derailleurs, crank arms, and cassettes/chains which importantly are consumable wear items) from Sram are just absolutely insane at like $1000-2500, Shimano has much more reasonable options from like $300-$1500 at the high end. Brakes (more expensive usually means more powerful) range anywhere from $200 a set at the low end, to $1000+ at the high end. Then there’s handlebar, stem, spacers, tire sealant, valve stems, and other misc bits.
For some more extreme riders, they need bikes that are designed way stronger than any average bike. Imagine jumping a 50 foot ramp on a common bicycle, you’ll straight up break the frame in half.
I had met a retired rider from m.pinkbike.com and had a chance to ride his ~$8000 bicycle, that thing was built like a friggin’ tank with some of the most advanced mechanical features I’ve ever seen, including adjustable hydraulic shocks.
As far as lightweight, that bike was anything but lightweight, it was rather heavy actually, but when frame and fork strength is way more important, that’s just a necessary tradeoff for safety in extreme riding.
Although this YouTube video is about motorbikes and high-end mountain bikes, much of the context is applicable to bicycles at large. And is also within the ballpark of an automobile down payment.
Borrowing some of the points from that video, a high-end bicycle – let’s say a road bike – is very close to what could actually be used in competitive road cycling, with all the technological and material sciences advances included. Whereas a standard car like a Toyota Corolla would need substantial further investment to bring it to competition grade (eg rallying). And a high-end, track-inspired road-legal car would be exceeding $100,000 easily.
Certainly, in the average quality range, the price of your average road bike and your average automobile will be a chasm away. But I figured your question is focusing on the high end of bicycles.
In fact, in a few certain situations you can actually purchase higher-end hardware than the pros use. UCI has restrictions on shape and weight that need not apply to non sanctioned riders, and there are improvements that are available in both aero and weight. Notably, Triathlon specific bikes are often markedly faster than UCI compliant bikes due to the aggressive aerodynamic optimization.
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