I was looking on Google for an answer to that question, and I found an earlier thread on this forum, (I can't remember what date it was from), but none of the answers given were particularly convincing to me.

Let's look at the average sub £100 mountain bike in the U.K.:
https://www.halfords.com/webapp/wcs/s...egoryId_165499

(Sorry for the long URL)
That is one of the cheapest bikes you can buy in 2009. Now, I'm sure the components must be the bottom of the range, in order to sell the bike at such a low price, but look at what you get for your money, in terms of all the individual components that go into a bicycle, plus the labour to build it up.

Now look at the frame, which is virtually all that is different between a conventional bicycle and a recumbent (apart from the seat and handlebars.) Look at that frame. It isn't made from bog standard tubing, it's made from customised, variable thickness material, with lots and lots of welds. Not a walk in the park, and certainly nothing that anything homebuilder could make.

Now look at the new Easy Racer frame:
https://www.bentrideronline.com/?attachment_id=1277

and

https://www.bentrideronline.com/?attachment_id=1273

How much does that frame cost to make, compared to the Halfords bike? Would it not be possible to get a similar frame, maybe not as high quality, but perfectly functionable, and only a little heavier, for £100?

When somebody asked this question previously, somebody else replied and said that the frames were handbuilt in the U.S. (not just Easy Racers, but they were suggesting that that was the reason for all the recumbents made in the U.S. being so expensive) - the topic starter replied that almost all recumbent manufacturers have their frames made in Taiwan, and just assemble the bikes in the U.S.
Cycle Genius, for example, which clearly state on their bikes 'Assembled in Texas. Frame made in Taiwan' or words to that effect. I cannot imagine that a recumbent frame can cost more than £150 tops in quantites of at least 100, from Taiwan. A complex mountain bike frame can be bought for £35, for a good quality one.

Now, if you've spent over $1,500 on your recumbent, you have a psychological vested interest in disliking this topic. I haven't got a recumbent at the moment, I have a Dahon 'Jack' folding mountain bike, the frame is harder to make than an Easy Racer one, due to the fact that it has a fold and is in two pieces, and uses non-standard aluminium tubing, not conventional round tubing like the Easy Racer frame. My Dahon cost me £200. So the frame can't have cost more than £30 - £40 for Dahon to buy (from Taiwan or some other part of China, no doubt. They don't build the frames themselves.)

How are recumbents EVER going to take off, when they are so expensive, and there appears to be no competition in the market, with regard to price?

There are even FWD recumbents whose frames are just a single bar of aluminium, so there is hardly any welding involved, thus hugely reducing labour costs for the manufacture of the frame, and even they cost a fortune.

Now, recumbent owners will often make out that spending $2,000 on an Easy Racer is justified because you can also buy $2,000 conventional racing bikes, and the like. But the BIG difference is that you can also buy perfectly usable $140 racing bikes. You cannot buy $140 recumbents.

It's a vicious circle that needs to be stopped as soon as possible. If recumbents came down in price, a lot of people who simply can't use normal bikes, might start using recumbents instead, to commute, and that would save a huge amount of our precious oil.

Also in the previous thread about this subject, somebody made out that recumbents use different components to conventional bikes, when this is untrue. The only different parts are the frame, seat and handlebars (or handlebar stem, depending on the type of recumbent). Everything else is just bog standard, off the shelf - that's the whole point!

Even if you built your own Easy Racer style frames in the U.S., how much could it possibly cost to build one frame? $200 if I'm being generous? All it requires is one jig, no special extrusion machinery, nothing like that, just normal tubing.

supply and demand. Most people want upright bikes.

My guess that the increase in price of a recumbent is due to two factors: economies of scale and the seat.

Most recumbent manufacturers are very small to small outfits and as such they won't be buying enough frames, parts or materials to get the big discounts the large bike companies can. Also because they are small and sell in relatively tiny volume, any R&D, overheads and other costs have to be spread at a higher rate over the very small numbers produced than for a firm making tens of thousands of upright bikes.

The seats on recumbents are often one of the most expensive parts to make and add significantly to the cost over a regular bike.

Rather than comparing the price of an Easy Racer or other recumbent against large volume manufacturers/distributors such as Halfords or Dahon a better price comparison would be with a smaller company such as Mercian.

I realise there are economies of scale, but I don't think they are that high.
For example, if a full suspension mountain bike frame, like the one shown in the Halfords website, can be manufactured for, say, £25 in quantities of 5,000 (I'm guessing here), how much would it cost in quantities of 100? £250? £1,000?
Then look at the Easy Racer frame, which isn't using custom sized tubing, just normal tubes - how much would that cost to be made in China in lots of 100? £500? I don't think so.

Re the seats - I don't understand why they would be so expensive. They don't require exact tolerances, don't require any special welding (just normal welding), etc.etc.

The bit about recumbent companies selling in tiny volumes - don't you think the incredibly high prices could be the cause of this? It's a huge outlay for most people, to spend $2,000 on a bicycle - nobody I have ever known would ever consider spending even half of that on a bicycle - you could get a quality second hand car for that amount of money.

You assume that lower prices would make people buy them, however most people learn to ride an upright when they are young and don't even know about recumbents.

I don't assume that lower prices would make people who didn't even know recumbents existed, buy them, but there are plenty of cyclists like myself who would love to own a recumbent, but can't afford the high prices.

Are there any examples of recumbent bikes which were available at, say, $500, which didn't sell well?

You can buy a Trek, for instance, for less money that the parts groupo costs by itself, and that means the whole bike including frame is cheaper than the main group of components. Trek can do that because their volume sales let them negotiate much lower prices from their suppliers. Recumbent manufacturers are too small to get those kinds of deals, even when they farm out the manufacturing to Taiwan. Volume makes a HUGE difference.

The other factor, as mentioned, is the custom parts required. Instead of a saddle that costs less than $5 to manufacture, a recumbent has a full seat that costs $200+. A recumbent needs 2 or 3 lengths of chain. Most also have extra idlers to help manage the long chains. Custom steering components, extra lengths of cable housing and tandem-length cables... it adds up. Besides, it's not fair to compare a recumbent to a POS department store bicycle, which barely qualifies as a bicycle. In fact, I refer to them as BSOs, or Bicycle-Shaped Objects. Compared to a BSO, even the cheapest bents are of an order of magnitude better quality.

Huffy sold a semi-recumbent model, the Venice. It went for $159 USD. I thought it looked like a GREAT kid's recumbent. It was discontinued due to poor sales. CCM likewise sold several semi-recumbents in the $200-500 range. All are gone now; nobody wanted them.

People always want stuff to be cheaper, but price isn't the only, or even main, reason why recumbents aren't more popular. The main reason is their image. Recumbents are ridden by eccentrics. Riding one requires a submissive body position. And of course, as everyone knows, recumbents CAN'T climb hills! There are probably a few dozen other reasons, some real and some imagined; and price is somewhere below all of them on the list of why recumbents aren't more popular.

I would not be surprised if 20% of the cost of a bent is insurance. The courts have not done this country a good service.

China does not have to worry about insurance. If the plant manager screws up they just hang the offender and appoint an new boss. Quick and cheap

I went on a club ride today with, hmmm, maybe 100 cyclists. I would guess that at least half the bikes cost at least $1000. I noticed a few that cost well more than $2000. I noticed 3 'bents. Average price perhaps a bit less than $2000.
A good used car for $1000? Not around here.
Even an expensive bicycle is generally well less than a motorcycle and a heck of a lot less than a cheap car.

Prices don't drive sales volume, but increase in sales volume will drive down price.

Volume, volume, volume. If the numbers are small, the cost of each unit is high. That's just basic production economics. Example:If recumbents are allowed to compete in major events and everyone who sees them wants one, production will ramp up, cost per unit will drop and consumers will see the difference in lower prices.

Let me know where I can find those $2000 cars. My old Caprice is going on the market in a couple months. It's 22 years old, rusty, needs brakes, the radio's broken and I'll easily get $1000 for it.

It is really just economy of scale, nothing more than that. Even if you have a factory in Taiwan manufacture your frames you have to come up with a large sum of money to get them interested.
These factories are often the same ones vying for contracts with larger companies like Trek et al, so you have to come up with a large sum to attract their attention.
In order to get that money to get the contract you need a bank loan or investors, and they are going to want a quick return on their investment. If you don't they won't invest in you again.
This drives the price per unit way up. The parts and the labor are not the biggest cost of most simple looking design, its the debt that the company starts off in.
The way around these start up costs is to do all work in-house with a small staff. This will also drive the cost up since the rate of production is so low.
I might point out that some simple looking designs aren't as simple as they look. Such as the Bacchetta steel and aluminum bikes. They just look like a simple tube with a few fittings welded on but they are not. The tube is actually teardrop shaped. You can't just buy that anywhere. You have to pay a steel (or aluminum) mill to custom draw those tubes. That costs a huge amount of money.
Even though some companies have been in business for awhile their sales are still hurt by the UCI who don't consider recumbents bikes and won't allow them to race. Most bikes bought by adults are bought by people who want the type of bike they see winning races. Since recumbents aren't seen racing young people won't buy them, and older people too often see bikes as toys.
Right now people buying 'bents are really just "early adopters" and as such are paying the financial penalty.

I guess that makes me a "single-celled amoeba adopter". I was building recumbent trikes back in the early '80's- we had to invent/adapt/build just about everything. We sold a couple at about $1500 each. (Full story at https://home.comcast.net/~jeff_wills/aerocoupe/index.htm.) Nowadays you can get a much better designed & equipped recumbent trike... for $1500: https://hostelshoppe.com/cgi-bin/read...ike=1139431294 . So much for "inflation".


Gnome's comment about the seat is important. Upright bike seats are made in the tens of thousands, and I'll bet that none of them costs more than $20 each to manufacture. That's materials for materials and labor. The rest is shipping, warehousing, and profit at each point of the supply chain. A recumbent seat, on the other hand, is at least as complex to manufacture as the rest of the bike, if no more so. Even the simplest molded fiberglass designs require several molds (for different sizes), dedicated jigs, odd materials (seat mesh? breathable foam padding?), none of which is available through the "normal" bicycle channels.

Rebike. It was heavy, had cheap parts and was slow. Some people liked 'em, though.

I know how much the components cost, they don't cost $1500 on an Easy Racer. Even retail, let alone cost.

Who says? I can get a Chinese manufacturer to build me a recumbent seat for about $20.
It doesn't add up to more than about $50.
Let's compare recumbents to a £200 mountain bike then - my Dahon is perfectly good quality and I've been riding it for over two years. Why should a recumbent with the same components cost £1,000 or more? The only difference is the frame, seat, and handlebars. None of these are rocket science.

Have you any more information on those? I'd be very interested to have a look at them.
I agree about the submissive body position, but how do we know that price isn't a factor? It's certainly a factor for me - I can't afford one!

https://www.amazon.com/Huffy-Venice-R.../dp/B000A33AX6

Read the reviews. The bicycle's price point wasn't the problem, per se, the company seems to be the problem in this case.
First off, it isn't a very good design. A good design of frame costs no more to design or manufacture than a bad design. The wheels are only 20" and 16" - I would use 26" front and rear. The fact remains - this bike was available at a very low price, it had a longer chain, longer rear cables, was designed from scratch, etc.etc., but was badly designed, and badly presented to the customers.

None of the problems are inherent in producing a cheap recumbent...
I can get a Chinese manufacturer to produce me a recumbent frame for little more or even the same price as a full suspension mountain bike frame (custom designed) in units of 200.
Everything else is artificial price inflation, and keeps the recumbent market where it is today - which is where it was 20 years ago.

Okay, any examples of recumbents at $500 that weren't heavy, didn't have cheap parts, and weren't slow?

I don't understand this part. How can a seat be at least as complex to manufacture as the rest of the bike?
Look at the Linear seat. (I used to own a Linear). It's hardly rocket science. A foam base, $2, a mesh back and its frame, $25? I realise that you can't just buy one off the shelf, but if you get a Chinese manufacturer to make them for you, I'm sure the prices I've just listed are what you would be looking at.
If you went to a Chinese manufacturer and asked them to build you a recumbent exercise bike, how much do you think they would charge you for the seat? $300? Of course not!

Like I said, the people I know would never spend that on a bike. Go into bike shops, go into Halfords and other shops where the majority of bikes are bought, and you'll see huge numbers from £100 to £200/£300 tops. Those are the majority of sales.
If you were to take all of the bikes in the U.K. and find out what they cost to buy, I would bet that 90% were under £250.

In other words - what is the markup on an Easy Racer at $2,000?
How difficult is it to import a frame from Taiwan and to assemble a bicycle? I can do it in an hour and a half.

I haven't found that to be the case at all. All the Chinese manufacturers I've contacted about anything at all, in the past, have been more than keen to get my business and to produce what I want.

What sort of money are you talking about? $20,000? $100,000? Some of us have enough to get frames made in bulk.

It depends how you start up your company.
I wouldn't start a recumbent company by borrowing a huge amount of money, I would save up beforehand and then use that money to buy a number of frames, then assemble the bikes and sell them. What else is there to it?

No it won't.
If you sell, say, one bike a day, and you make £150 profit per bike, that's £4,500 a month profit. Since it only takes an hour and a half to assemble a bike, you are working for about two and a half hours a day, so don't need any staff.

If you sell five bikes a day, and you make £150 profit per bike, that's £22,500 profit a month. You can employ just one person and pay them £2,000 a month if you wanted, to assemble all of the bikes. What else is there to it?

If you buy the frames for £150 and the components for £150, you can sell a bike for £450 and make £150 profit. Then take off your overheads per month, which wouldn't amount to more than £200. (Presuming you build the bikes at home - if you are selling so many that you need a factory, then you are bound to be making so much profit that you can easily pay for the rent.)

So where do the costs in a $2,000 Easy Racer come from? Assembly is the same - there's nothing special about an Easy Racer, I can build one up in an hour and a half. The frames are made in bulk in Taiwan, and aren't made of gold, so can't cost more than £150. They use conventional tubing, so don't need special, customised tubes to be made.

That's their problem, and doesn't apply to Easy Racers or Cycle Genius.
I don't think that's true at all. Are you talking about really expensive bikes, or just the majority of bikes? Because the majority of people who buy bikes, buy them to go somewhere, nothing more. Go to a big store like Halfords and look at the bikes they sell, and the prices.


As somebody else has said, recumbents have been around for 30 years. There should be no financial penalty.

You seem to know a great deal about manufacturing and price points that I don't. One item has been left out of every discussion so far. Overhead or the more common term today, resources. Put simply, if you need 5 people to run the company and you only sell 500 bikes a year then you will need to charge more for the bike. I also have to disagree that the $400.00 bike that you can buy at the local store offers the same level of quality, components as my $ 2,300.00 Bacchetta, Corsa. But they are different machines intended for different purposes. Recumbents have been around for years but don't seem to be able to break into the main stream, it isn't because of the UCI, or the price of the bike or the submissive position. It is because they are a small market like the 5,000 to 10,000 upright bike market is a small market. To take the recumbent market main stream like the mountain bike market, it will take a visionary and great entrepeneur. I am not that guy but you might be.

Bacchetta just came out with a new CA 2.0 for $ 4,500.00, it is a beautiful bike and I hope will sell well as I want them to stay in business. It is Carbon Fibre, the Trek, Madonne series in carbon fibre start at about 2,200.00 and go up to 6,900.00. Are any or all over priced? I believe that what I paid for my Corsa was a fair price, isn't that what it is all about?

I believe Sun sells recumbents that are MSRP around $700. With the equivalent components on a department store bike the price comes in around $300 for a DF. The $400 difference is easily in the seat and frame, especially at the quantities involved.

Take the $100 Walmart bike. Bottom level components and the cheapest mass-produced frame. The same bike can be had at any number of stores for up to $200. This bike probably sell 10-20X the quantity of the Sun. And that's only from Walmart. Take into account all the LBS, sporting goods and department stores that sell this bike and you are looking at 100X the volume of the least expensive Sun.

Now, if Sun managed to strike a deal with Walmart....

:)ensen.

The real reason that recumbents are expensive is that the manufacturers have huge mansions, private jets, and spend exorbitant sums on monocle polish and mustache wax.

They would go out of business if only a hard-working entrepreneur would apply sound business, marketing, and manufacturing principles to the market to sell a $300 'bent. Put your energy into providing a solution instead of blaming existing mfgs for failing you.

I had a $590 EZ1-sx. It had decent components, complex seatback frame, cheap & heavy steel frame. Even the cheap frame required approx. twice the linear length of tubing and 3x the welds of a conventional bike. I rode it about 1000 miles before upgrading, and now my wife rides it. Other than being a bit heavy, it's a quality bike, with components equivalent of what I've seen on $400 conventional bikes.

In my personal experience cheap bikes don't last me long at all. My cheapest bike cost $600USD. Its a cruiser with 3 speed IGH and coaster brake. Yes, I ride it often and I do like it. This is the only style of bike I would buy at a department store and expect to service me well. The last 2 bikes I bought at a department store years ago cost $150 or less. They were 21 speed mountain bike style. They were made by large well known manufacturers. The gear shifting components constantly needed to be fiddled with. These components were made by Shimano and shouldn't have been so problematic even if they were low-end components. The problem I learned was caused by the frames. Weak frames bend and cause the derailleurs to go out of adjustment or auto shift. I could literally cause the frame bend to a visible degree in my hands. Nobody believed I could do those until I showed them. Yea I am strong but not that strong. A few others opined it was supposed to do that. That was disproven when they both broke even though they were only used on the street.
I imagine that the price will come down when people start seeing more of them and wanting them at lower prices. Many people here in the US still have never even seen a 'bent as judged by the amount of attention I draw with mine. Right now the only ones interested in them are enthusiasts, and they are willing to pay more.
It would be nice to see some 'bents in department stores but hopefully they will be of better quality than the DF's I have bought. And I hope they will supply them with simple components, single speed or IGHs. This will make them easier for the casual rider to use since they will probably not want to spend part of their day maintaining another piece of equipment.

I went on the Bacchetta forum and posted this question
https://www.bacchettabikes.com/forum2/tm.asp?m=53043
I hoped to get one of the owners who frequent the forum to respond. According to John Schlitter the seat is one big kicker at $100 a pop. A normal DF costs around $10 to manufacture. Doesn't account for all of the price difference but some.
I think the biggest cost difference is because 'bents are marketed to enthusiasts who would normally spend a lot on the bikes anyway (like me).
After listening further discussion it seems to be that one reason that cheaper 'bents aren't available is because no has tried to startup a company with this goal in mind, 'bents for the masses. Or at least no one has been successful yet. Once someone does make a successful one I am sure many will follow.

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