Maelochs

Right? We should be focusing our criticism on what people Wear while they are riding---not on their bikes.

b88

One of the best replies I read on this thread.

Bonzo Banana

One point I would make which I don't think I've seen is in any market where people are prepared to pay X amount a product will be made for that amount of money unless it's not actually possible due to the cost of manufacture etc. So there will always be a wide range of price points. If you go with the tour de france figures (below) for average speed you can see bikes have not massively increased in speed and one small spike upwards could I guess be attributed to use of drugs with Lance Armstrong. There has also been a reduction in distance for the tour de france which I guess may unfairly skew the speeds higher for more recent races.

A budget race bike vs a extremely expensive road bike can vary by only a few seconds over a hour of riding etc. If you add rider weight plus low cost bike weight and rider weight plus expensive bike weight and compare them it's not a huge difference. I.e. 70kg rider plus 11kg (81kg) vs 70kg rider plus 7kg (77kg) if you are not a competitive cyclist you can easily achieve a 4kg weight loss by dieting and save yourself thousands of dollars/pounds etc. There is also the safety factor that many very expensive bikes are much weaker and more likely to fail and cause critical injury. Carbon forks come to mind. If I was looking at bikes trying to find the minimum spec for a great road bike with great safety before diminishing returns set in I might go with an aluminium frame, chromoly forks, claris groupset and perhaps disc brakes possibly around $400-600. I'm sure others might reject Claris and want a higher groupset but Claris is reliable and shifts well. I mean when a lower cost road bike can achieve something like 99.5 to 99.9% of the speed of a high end bike and often offer many practical benefits, higher load capacity, touring, panniers, ease of maintenance etc and less of a magnet to thieves I just feel the sweet spot is definitely sub $1000 or thereabouts. This clearly doesn't work for mountain bikes and wouldn't apply it there though. The sweet spot price point would be somewhere else I'm sure.

I guess the point is unlike a car or motorbike the underlying engine of a bike is still a human of similar power which hasn't improved. It would be like putting in a engine from the 1960's into a modern 2018 car. The majority of bicycle performance is down to the human riding it not the bike. For a low performance human to choose a high performance bike doesn't really achieve a lot you really need to match a very strong human to a very decent bike to actually achieve anything that makes sense. A strong fit 22 year old on a terrible walmart road bike is going to comfortably beat a a weak elderly cyclist on a $20,000 bike. When you get bikes of closer performance you can then get slightly stronger cyclists on budget road bikes beating friends on super expensive road bikes. It's like people vary in power by 400% and bicycles vary in efficiency by 10%.

tagaproject6

I wonder how the bike industry will respond, price-wise, with the new tariffs that will be implemented for bicycles, starting 24 Sep?
https://www.bikeradar.com/news/artic...icycles-52947/

indyfabz

Anyone else remember Crazy Eddie? "His prices are insane!"

tagaproject6

Oh yes! Then there's Fred E. Rated, in Southern CA.

livedarklions

Prices won't be going down, that's for sure. I doubt I'm going to want to pay the taxes on a new bike while this idiotic war is going on.

indyfabz

Eddie, who is not the guy in the commercials, got into a lot of legal trouble over fraud. He fled to Israel but was later brought back to the states and eventually pled guilty to RICO charges. During a period of only three years, the company went from one of the most lucrative retailers to retailers to bankruptcy and insolvency. Eddie died in 2016.

Kapusta

All these years later, I still often think of the line, "Prices so low he's practically GIVING it all away!!"
Was that just a NJ/NY thing?

indyfabz

I believe it was.

squirtdad

yep along with the clear plastic slip covers and cashier training institute

rydabent

Probably a very relevant question is: in terms of labor what if any is the difference between the labor to lay up a $1500 CF bike and a $15,000 bike? And too, is there a difference between the CF mats used on the high price bike and the average priced CF bike?

Koyote

I'm amazed that this thread is still chugging along, given the original premise -- which is "Gosh, I can't believe there are bikes that cost $15k!"

I wonder if car enthusiast forums have threads in which people express amazement over the prices of Ferrari's and Lamborghinis...Or Hifi forums in which people wring their hands over $10k amplifiers...Or watch forums in which people act surprised over $30k wristwatches.

dwolsten

There probably isn't much. However, we should be happy that there's rich people willing to spend $15k on a bike, because it's effectively subsidizing the bikes at the price points the rest of us buy at. Those $15k bikes are mostly pure profit for the manufacturer (not completely, they spend some on marketing and stuff which isn't spread over as many units as the cheaper models) and help pay for stuff like R&D costs for the bikes the rest of us buy. The new technologies found on those $15k bikes ends up being common on the cheaper bikes a few years later. The new technologies in Shimano's Dura-Ace line, for instance, end up being put into their Ultegra and lower lines in subsequent product generations.

124Spider

+!

Yeah, a lot of people seem to have difficulty with how things are priced in a market-driven economy. And, yes, there are people on watch forums who wonder how Patek Philippe can "justify" charging over US$100,000 for a watch.

indyfabz

If I have a $15K bike should I have to share the road with people riding what the rest of you buy?

livedarklions

No, you should buy your own private road.

Maelochs

Posts like this are why I put up with you guys.

indyfabz

What if I cannot afford it since I have spent too much on the bike?

livedarklions

Then you don't deserve to share the road with us.

indyfabz

Replacement value of my road bike is at least $7,500, so I should at least be able to share the road half the time. Let's see your expensive bike.

livedarklions

No, you're being punished for overspending your budget. My bikes are quite inexpensive, thank you.

tagaproject6

Sometimes, socializing with poor people keep you grounded.

indyfabz

I already do that outside my biking world. One of the bar tenders at my local is too broke to own a car. She's an animal lover and has a cat and a dog. When I leave work in a bit I am going to swing by her place and drop off a large bag of kitty litter. I pick her up a bag every month or so when I go to a regular grocery store, but she does pay me for it.

livedarklions

If you get a few really large bags of kitty litter, maybe you could just make your own road.