Recumbent - Why are recumbents so expensive?

Let's compare two different practical items and their respective price ranges: bikes and wristwatches. A new wristwatch can cost $20 dollars at the low end or $100,000 at the high end. A new upright bike can cost $69 at the low end and $12,000 or more at the high end. I don't hear moans about watches and bikes being "so expensive."

The recumbent bike, however, is perceived as being "so expensive" because the low end price starts higher than it does with conventional bikes. Recumbents are really not "so expensive", rather their price range is not as broad and starts at the low end around $500 to maybe $6,000 at the high end (streamliners and velomobiles excluded).

It's all a matter of perspective.

Basic economics. Producers and consumers set the equilibrium price of any good or service by deciding at what price they are willing and able to produce(and make enough profit to make it worth their while) and purchase goods. I am looking into buying a recumbent at 40 because of comfort and pain issues. So, at what price will i be willing abd able to decide to participate in this market? We'll see. The are bike between 1000-1200 that look very nice to buy new. The used market seems a bit out of it's tree. For example, I found new Rans Formula bikes priced around 1200. New Bacchetta[sic?] Bella for about the same. What accounts for folks selling 10-15 year old Stratus and Tour Easy bikes for what seems way beyond what a new bikes costs? Seems whacked out to me. Incidently if anyone has a used LWB or CLWB for a taller rider and wants to make a fair sale let me know.

Is this 'bent more in your price range? http://www.walmart.com/catalog/product.do?product_id=10983235

Egads, fifty-seven POUNDS??? Anyway, even with the seat it looks more like a pedal-forward design than a bent. I think we're having sarcasm dripped over us on this one...

57 pounds shipping weight. Could be around 45-47 or so out of the box.

It is strongly based upon the old SUN EZ-Rider bent, almost a direct copy. But with a funny looking seat and downgraded components.

Note that Wal-Mart will not be stocking the bike in their stores. It is an on-line item only.

Given our earlier discussions, I find it amazing that W-M is able to offer this bike at $275. But no one is better than W-M at shaving off costs. No bike company would have been able to hit this price.

The frame might use a little more metal, USS is harder to design, it uses a longer chain. BUT I think one of the main reasons is the seat. The seat is 5 times wider than most bike seats, maybe 10 times more comfortable, 15 times the material and just makes all up right bike riders mad at the fact that you can still smile after doing a 50 mile ride.

My wife rides a recumbent, I ride an upright. I can still smile at the end of a 160 mile one day ride. :D It's a tired smile, but my butt doesn't hurt, and i can still move under my own power. It doesn't make me mad that a bent rider can smile at the end of a 50 mile ride, either. ;) I'm just glad we're both having fun. ;)

My wife rides a recumbent, I ride an upright. I can still smile at the end of a 160 mile one day ride. :D It's a tired smile, but my butt doesn't hurt, and i can still move under my own power. It doesn't make me mad that a bent rider can smile at the end of a 50 mile ride, either. ;) I'm just glad we're both having fun. ;)

I fully agree with this sentiment. Loving what you ride and riding what you love is all that matters.

So, who is going to buy one of these WM 'bents and report back to BF?

So, who is going to buy one of these WM 'bents and report back to BF?

Presumably, someone who thinks price is the reason why bents aren't more popular. Of course,the only comparison they'll be able to make is to an *upright* BSO (Bike-Shaped Object.) $275 is an amazing price point for a 'bent, but remember that uprights in the same aisle sell for sub-$100.

Presumably, someone who thinks price is the reason why bents aren't more popular. Of course,the only comparison they'll be able to make is to an *upright* BSO (Bike-Shaped Object.) $275 is an amazing price point for a 'bent, but remember that uprights in the same aisle sell for sub-$100.

In this case a 'Bent-Shaped-Object.

Presumably, someone who thinks price is the reason why bents aren't more popular. Of course,the only comparison they'll be able to make is to an *upright* BSO (Bike-Shaped Object.) $275 is an amazing price point for a 'bent, but remember that uprights in the same aisle sell for sub-$100.

They won't be able to compare them, as at this time, W-M is not planning to display or stock the bike in its stores.

Now if you change "aisle" to "web page" then you've got it.

And in the Far East, folk get paid third world wages - often what we in the 'civilised' world would consider criminally low. We continue to support these by consuming them, and look what happens to our own industries. Britain is just as bad as the US; we have almost no mass production capabilities anymore and look where relying on 'Financial Services' got us!

Support your local manufacturers and save your economy!

Well, buying USA made can be difficult.

Don't buy W-M LWB bent because made in Asia.

Look at ActionBents ... made in Asia

Look at SUN bents, oops, all made in Asia.

Look at Bacchetta bents ... I think all or nearly all are made in Asia.

Look at RANS Stratus ... made in Asia

Not many sub-$2000 LWB options that are made in the USA

I don't care about buying products made in Asia. What I mind is buying products made in communist countries. I will not buy anything made in Communist china. That's just immoral, in my opinion. Dumb, too. (Never mind that the Communist regime buys U.S. securities to keep the U.S. government going.)

Schwalbe tires, for example, are designed in Germany, and made in Indonesia. Both democratic countries. I haven't had Schwalbe tires, but I understand they're great tires. I plan to buy some.

FWIW, I spent just under $700 to buy parts to build my LWB 'bent. (Not including my most valuable commodity, of course, my time.) I recycled a lot of parts from scrapped road bikes and mountain bikes, then replaced the parts that didn't work well with new ones. I've put over 1100 miles on it in the last couple months and it's still going great.

BTW, Taiwan and China output approx. 80% of worldwide bicycles.

What's wrong with items from communist countries?
Have you ever tried living without items made in China?

http://livingwithoutchina.wordpress.com/

http://www.reuters.com/article/reutersEdge/idUSN2425061320070628?sp=true


SEATTLE (Reuters) - Lamps, birthday candles, mouse traps and flip-flops. Such is the stuff that binds the modern American family to the global economy, author Sara Bongiorni discovers during a year of boycotting anything made in China.
In "A Year Without 'Made in China,'" (Wiley, $24.95) Bongiorni tells how she and her family found that such formerly simple acts as finding new shoes, buying a birthday toy and fixing a drawer became ordeals without the Asian giant.
Bongiorni takes pains to say she does not have a protectionist agenda and, despite the occasional worry about the loss of U.S. jobs to overseas factories, she has nothing against China. Her goal was simply to make Americans aware of how deeply tied they are to the international trading system.
"I wanted our story to be a friendly, nonjudgmental look at the ways ordinary people are connected to the global economy," she said in an interview before the book appears in July.
As a business journalist in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Bongiorni wrote about international trade for a decade. "I used to see the Commerce Department trade statistics, the billions of dollars, and think it had nothing to do with me," she said.
The reality was far different.
As the year unfolded, "the boycott made me rethink the distance between China and me. In pushing China out of our lives, I got an eye-popping view of how far China had pushed in," she wrote.
About 15 percent of the $1.7 trillion in goods the United States imported in 2006 came from China, economist Joel Naroff writes in the foreword. Much of that is the manufactured stuff that fills Wal-Mart and other retailers -- the necessities and frivolities sought by lower- and middle-income Americans.
Lower prices have been one benefit of Beijing's rise and make it very hard for consumers to forswear Chinese imports.
LEGOS, LAMPS
And hard it was.
For all of 2005, minor purchases required dogged detective work as Bongiorni scoured catalogues and read labels.
She repeatedly struck out trying to buy inexpensive shoes for her son, and even the chic local boutique that sold fancy European labels had gone out of business. So she shelled out $68 for Italian sneakers from a catalogue.
Broken appliances gathered dust because the spare parts came from China. And, with the Asian country having a near lock on the toy aisles, her 4-year-old son grew tired of taking Danish-made Legos to birthday parties as gifts.
The family resorted to snapping mouse traps when the gentler catch and release kind came from, you guessed it, China.
Bongiorni got a lesson in the global economy after products advertised as Made in USA turned out to have Chinese parts. She decided to keep a lamp with just this problem after speaking to the manufacturer and learning how China is "eating the lunch" of the few U.S lamp producers left.
Since the boycott's end, Bongiorni has chosen a middle ground. Her family seeks alternatives but accepts Chinese products when most practical. But one habit from the boycott remains: It required her to think hard about what she buys.
"Shopping became meaningful," she said.

Bike-E? Oh, wait, they went under. Maybe Soleto will be the first.


I, for one, am still riding my bike-e.

As you say a lot of the customers are older with medical problems.
I have often heard older people saying they got a bike when younger for £15 brand new.
But that was a lot of money then

But surely if the people are unwilling to pay for a £1000 bike, there is a market for a lower priced bike.

Bike-e bents are still popular. They pop up on Craigslist around here and don't last long.

About the cost of building bikes, the key word here is "BUILDING", not "MANUFACTURING", nobody I know of in the recumbent business manufactures bikes, they build them. A friend of mine once took a tour through Trek's factory. At the time one of their products was a carbon fiber bike (not their oclv frame) the frame tubes and lugs were made elsewhere. The frame was glued to gether. The tubes and lugs were placed in a jig that pressed all the tubes into the lugs after they were coated with glue. Approximate time to manufacture a frame, 7 minutes. It took me seven minutes to put a shipping box together. Welding labor cost per frame was $40, seat frame $30, Painting $85. I don't know what the current cost of manufacturers liability insurance is, at the time I was building bikes it was $50 per bike. So before such things as rent, electricity, heat, telephone, argon gas for the tig welding, etc. we had about $900 into the bike including all the components. The cost to build a seat is close to what it costs to build frame and takes almost as much time. Remember, the Idea was to eventually find a company to buy us and MANUFACTURE the bike. But due to all of the problems getting it into the market place, unable to build more than about 150 bikes a year, not making as much money as we would on welfare and just general exhaustion we decided to pack it in. At the last minute Mr. Peek came along and bought the company for short money. He has done a great job building the bikes and has made some good improvements.
But he also can't build the bikes at a low price and has had to raise the retail price of the bike from $1800 to $2600,. Which in my opinion is a BARGAIN.

The bike required a lot more labor because of the additional complexity of the underseat steering and seat. . My typical work day started at about 8am, worked till about 2pm, took a nap for an hour. Worked again till about 11pm, usually standing at the milling machine making parts for the afore mentioned steering and seat stuff. Went to the local watering hole and drank beer and shot pool till 1am.
I should mention that when we sold the company to Mr. Peek part of the agreement was that if he couldn't build and sell as many bikes as we did we would get the company back. Even with their space age facility and six people working they couldn't build as many bikes as we, (my son and I and our part time welder) could. Mr. Peek was no stranger to bicycle building and was building tandems when he bought our company. He was and is a very successful businessman in such diverse fields as manufacturing high tech wheelchairs and dragsters and as I have mentioned before has done a great job with the bikes he is now building. But at the beginning he felt he could successfully build the bike here at a reasonable cost and found that he couldn't.
As I've probably mentioned before the basic Idea was to find a company that could MANUFACTURE the bike. Obviously I failed. Probably because of all that beer drinking and pool shooting I did.
Dick Ryan

About the cost of building bikes, the key word here is "BUILDING", not "MANUFACTURING", . . .
Dick Ryan

Though there's no assurance the poster is he, Dick Ryan (http://ryanownersclub.com/) is a notable person in recumbent history.

Very few of even the more expensive recumbents built in USA or even Europe.

HP Velotechnik: frame from Taiwan
Greenspeed 'value' trikes (GT series): frame from Taiwan
Trice (ICE): boom from Taiwan, frame and bike made in UK
Catrike : US built, about the only one I know of.
Terratrike: I believe frame from Taiwan

I think Bike Friday is US built.

And so it goes. Just don't go into the components....

So now a cheap recumbent is found and the nit-picking starts... Translation: we want a sub-$300 recumbent made in the U.S. (or other 1st world country) with quality parts and a lifetime warranty. Did I miss any details?

For the record, I believe that was THE Dick Ryan. He has been known to peruse both cycling-related forums and even usenet.

Old dudes with beard's and rocket science degrees can afford and appreciate high quality machinery.

It's really that simple.

Find a REAL road bike for a low price. I just payed well over a thousand dollars for a new Trek 2.1 road bike and you don't see me complaining about how expensive they are. You get what you pay for. The quality of expensive bikes is so much higher than departments store wannabe-bikes. But what do I know, I'm just a wedgie bike rider.

For the sake of argument, lets say that the cost of manufacturing each bicycle is roughly the same (and I do believe it could be very close if comparable production numbers could be reached).

As the company owner, you'll need to sell your product. For a normal bicycle, this comes down to comparing your bicycle to the competition and highlighting the benefits of your brand. For a recumbent, you have to compare your product not only with its direct competition, but also with normal bicycles. The average Joe walking into a store to buy a bike generally already has an image of what a bicycle is -- and you'll have to convince him to drop those preconceived notions and try out your funky-looking contraption. So from a sales standpoint -- you're already behind and probably would need to spend quite a bit more on marketing to overcome this.

Now think about your dealers (the bike shops). Lets say your main product is very similar to the BikeE with a fully rigid model, one with rear suspension, and a full suspension model. Each model has two sizes (S/M L/XL). And each model has 2 colors. For a bike shop to carry just one of each possible model means they'll have 12 of them on the floor...

Now think about the floorspace a bike shop has. They usually pack bikes in pretty tight in racks -- and for the width of 1 recumbent (mostly its seat) -- they could fit two or even three regular bikes. And even a small BikeE is longer than a XL mountain bike -- so they'd need to make their rows wider to remain ADA-compliant. The effect is that in order to stock and display your complete line of 12 recumbents, they'd need to remove 36 traditional bikes from the floor.

And lets be optimistic -- Lets say they sell 1 recumbent for every 3 bicycles (LOL if only). That means that the value of the floorspace a recumbent sits in is already 9x more expensive than the floorspace required by a bicycle. A $500 mountain bike probably costs the store a total of $450 (cost of bike+time to build it+"free" tuneups). That's $50 profit. For the bike shop to make as much money from that floorspace, they'd have to sell that $500 recumbent for $950!


And the bike shop also has other hassles in dealing with recumbents. Ever seen a bike work station? How do you attach a bikeE to a stand when there is no seattube... And the backrooms where service bikes are stored are often even more packed than the floor -- try maneuvering a recumbent through there... And now you have a customer who might want to buy a recumbent -- but who's never riden one before. Now you have to give them more attention (spend more time talking about the recumbent advantages in addition to the bike's specific features) plus worry that they might tip-over on the test ride and sue.


Now consider that most recumbent owners don't do they 2-3 year upgrade that is common with bicycles. Sure they may move up to a better model after a few years if they started out with a cheapy -- but if you look at most recumbents on the road you see as many 10 year-old models as you do 2 year old models. The demographic as a whole is older and not as much into the "keeping up with the Jones' " mentality.


So most bike shops aren't going to be particularly keen on carrying your line -- even if the price was attractive. Instead, they may stock 1 or two in an under-used corner somewhere and offer to order in the size/color/model once they find a customer (unfortunately, most customers want to touch/feel and buy their bike the same day so this loses you more sales).

The only upside for the bike shop is that recumbent riders tend to buy far more accessories as a group (and where a bike shop might make 10% profit on a bike, they make 40% on accessories). So bike shops will 'put up' with bents.


So you as a manufacturer are more likely to consider selling direct to consumer. You'll put them on ebay, you'll make youtube promotional videos -- maybe even loan some bikes out to magazines to get some reviews. And you move a few more bikes this way, but alienate any existing dealers you have. In the long-run, you'll end just just another niche bent manufacturer...

All of spdu Comments are accurate, unfortunately they are also pretty much irrelevant. As in any business the employees make or break it. And the bike industry is between a rock and a hard place when it comes to employees. Their only source (for all practical puposes) is from the ranks of the testosterone poisened young bike racer wannabees. They ALL hate recumbents, a lot of the shop owners aren't much different.
A friend of mine works at Wheel and Sprocket, probably the most successful shop in the country. They sell about 5000 bikes a year and about 7-800 recumbents. Trek is located not far from them, they have an annual dealer meeting. According to my friend every year a dozen or so dealers from around the country will stop by to shoot the breeze. Most are astounded by the fact W&S has 50 or 60 recumbents on the floor and often ask WHY. The very fact that they ask "why" should be a good indication of the lack of intelligence on their part. For a few years we had about a dozen dealers around the country. We had a couple of high end very successful shops selling the bikes. Unfortunately they all shared the same problem, they had one employee who was the "recumbent guy" the rest of the employees refused to even discuss the bikes with potential customers. I know this is true because I visited a couple of these shops and didn't identify myself and when I asked about recumbents was told I'd have to wait until the "recumbent guy" was available. When I discussed this problem with the shop owners they all gave me the same answer. Well, I'm sorry, but I can't afford to offend the employees because they are so hard to find. So, the employees were offended by being asked to do their job. I had quite a few calls from potential customers who had driven many miles to look at our bike and had made the mistake of not checking on the availability of the "recumbent" guy. Of course this reaction from the shop people didn't go over very well with the potential customer and they would call us and complain. Eventually we stopped selling through shops altogether, but not so much because of the problem that the employees were such morons but because we couldn't afford to give the shops their margin. The thing about bike shop employees is that just about all of them are young males that are into bike racing. If it isn't a full suspension mountain bike or a 15 lb drop bar road racing bike it isn't a bike. My negative opinion of these people has been reinforced many times. The best example I can give is the time I was invited to a bike shop event, (featuring free beer, thereby guaranteeing a good turnout) given by a well known shop employee in the Boston area, (he is the recumbent guy) at the shop. He asked me to bring a bike to the event. There were about fifty people there, all of them were bike shop employees. And one reporter for a local bike publication. They had a tape of the tour de france playing on a relatively small screen tv. These guys were so into racing they could identify the individual racers on this small screen tv. I was there for about three hours and not a single person asked about the recumbent, it was sitting in the middle of the floor in everyone's way. But as far as they were concerned it was invisible. The magazine guy did ask me what the bike cost. We had a customer who wanted to buy one of our tandems through a local shop. I happened to be there when they were talking to the salesperson, another employee overheard the conversation and interrupted the conversation with the comment "you probably won't find that thing as comfortable as you think" and walked away. All small businesses suffer from employee problems, but it seems to me that the bike business is somewhat unique in having employees who actively discourage customers. When I first got involved in recumbents back in the eighties I naively thought that because the bikes performed so well it was going to be a no-brainer to market them. Wow was I ever wrong, the attitudes of the people in the bike industry may have changed slightly over the last thirty years, but not enough to make recumbents the mainstream products they should be. I doubt it will ever happen.
Dick Ryan

If you think you can produce a quality recumbent at a low price, have at it. You may, however, want to first meet some of the many smart and hard working people who are already in the business.

If you are just wanting a bent for yourself, buy used or home build.

I used to be in the manufacturing business. There is a general rule of thumb that the retail price needs to be roughly five times the manufacturing cost. This odes not go to the manufacturer, but to all the middle men between the manufacturer and the buyer. Everyone who has anything to do with the product as it goes from the manufacturer to the buyer needs to get paid to deal with it. Shippers, distributors, the bike shop that sells and assembles it, the marketing departments of all the above. If a bike costs $2000 retail, you can be pretty sure it's because it cost $400-$500 dollars to produce, A distributor likly paid $1000, shipping cost at least $100, the retailer paid $1500, and you paid $2000 Now the retailer still has to pay for the store, its employees, utilities, insurance. It all adds up.

Now add the economy of scale factor. If they could by a part by buying them in the thousands, that $500 bike would likely cost less than $100 to make, reducing the retail price to $500

This is why recumbents are so much more expensive. Now the numbers I used are all hypothetical, but you should be able to see why the numbers come out as they do. This is why you would pay three to four times the cost of a mass produced item using robots and highly automated systems for something produced one at a time with almost no automation.

If the small manufacturers could afford the assembly lines, it would make a big difference but most of thes companies start out with little more than a dream and a garage to work out of. It takes lots of time and money to build an infrastructure that supports that economy of scale, and of course, you need the sales to get the money to make the bikes to sell to get more money to make more bikes.

By the way, I was a failure in the manufacturing business. The product was first class, but I couldn't in good consience sell it for what it needed to sell for to pay the bills. In this particular case, it was something that cost me $75 to build (parts only) and I was selling it for $150. If I could buy the parts in quantities of 5000, the parts cost would have dropped to around $25 and I could have sold it for $100 and that would have been a fair price at the time. That 5:1 rule is a little flexible but it was worked out long before any of us were born.

I don't think you can use the same formulas for mass marketed diamond frame bikes on recumbents. I haven't read all the posts here so this may have already been covered. My thinking for recumbents, is the buyer will generally already know about them and be looking for what suits him or her best. There will be a small percentage of people who spontaneously switch and decide to give one a try but they will be the exception. The recumbent market is pretty much a "build to order" business from what I've seen. Again there are exceptions but I doubt they are such that there's a factory out there pumping out recumbents on a large scale. Also, at least some of the recumbent companies have a second business to help cover the overhead. For example, RANS makes homebuilt aircraft kits (and will also build the airframe for you). Longbikes has a sister company that makes high end wheelchairs. Beyond this there is still the supply and demand to be factored in.

Personally I'm happy these bikes are not mass produced. In this day and age, mass production usually equates to low quality crap. It's nice to see something where craftmanship is still given the respect it deserves.