Originally Posted by Pizza Man
If Walmart can make a road bike for $150, why can't someone mass produce a decent 15 pound Ti racing bike for under $1,000? It's not like titanium is a precious metal like gold, or even silver. The amount of titanium needed for a frame costs about $20, yet bike makers charge $2K - $5K for a high end Ti frame alone. Is it really that much more expensive than aluminum to make the tubes & put them together?
High end bikes can easily cost $5K or more. Heck, you can get 2,000 pounds of metal, glass & plastic with an engine in a new car for $10K. I imagine that the raw materials and labor involved in building a car would be at least 10X that of a bicycle.
And bike tires are like $40-$50 for a half pound of rubber? That's about the same price as a steel belted car tire. How can that be?
Someone is making a lot of money off of us suckers and it's not the LBS.
I'm just ranting because I've been drooling over cool new bikes I can't afford.
I hear the frustration in your post and sympathize with it. Unfortunately, as you know, companies exists to MAXIMIZE profits. So even if they could sell one for <$1,000, why would they when they can create the marketing hype and get customers to pay $5,000? When something is new, the early adopters will pay big bucks for it. Then, as the technology gets older and moves into the mass market, prices will drop. The early adopters will then overpay for the next "big thing". The cycle continues (no pun intended). Aluminum used to be the new technology, then carbon, then Ti, next is Boron or something like that. If you want to buy a sub 15lb Ti bike for <$1,000, just wait a few years.