Has technology & made in China=name brand obsolete?
 

Given that the same people who make the Big high end stuff for the big boys most likely make the cheaper knock off stuff. Does it really matter anymore, outside of the very new super high end pro level stuff, who's name is on it? I 've seen wheels made of carbon for a fraction of what the big boys get for similar weight products.
Frames same thing......
Why not buy the e-bay stuff.. Most brands/companys today are just registered in the USA with a mailing address and all manufactuing and research done in china.
Your thoughts

Quality schwag=Taiwan. This is well known.
As for what you're paying for?
Othewrwise, check this link out. It's an article written with Raoul Luecher of Luechertecknik..a bloke who knows a fair bit about composites and particularly bikes.

Just like many things today, bikes, in my opinion, have lost their soul. A Colnago made in Taiwan is not a Colnago. It's a good thing Ernesto is still alive or he'd be rolling over in his grave.

Back when bikes were steel they were made by craftsman, or at least made by machines operated by craftsman. Steel, cutting, assembly and the heat of brazing with a torch.

Now bikes are glopped into a mold and stamped out like so much else trivial today, and the lemmings continue to buy them.

my business imports brands and sells open mold commercial refrigeration units from china. branding is becoming less important because the major brands are lowering their standards to meet the new pricing reality that customers expect. and big brand warranty service is regressing in response to the decline in quality.

cool site....He seems to make my point. If all else is equal which indeed it often is, a non branded frame when made by company X who also makes the Name brand frame is as good, just cheaper and less Blingy....wheels as well....quality has always been an issue but My Full Carbon "made in Itlay" sticker said so Bianchi frame cracked after 6 months....it was replaced for free but cost me $100 to have it stripped and rebuilt....no named frames do not warranty...so I guess thats the gig

I hope nobody tells him his bikes are made in Taiwan by Giant then.
No, I'm not kidding. Were you?

FWIW, and it's been said before, to claim something is "Made in Italy" (Fatta in Italia?) you only need to do a certain percentage of the work..e.g. paint and bolt stuff on.

My Dogma frame was made in Taiwan and hand finished in Italy. Still an amazing bike!

Lowering of standards is directly related to lower quality, inferior products, mass produced junk which China is the king at.
Taiwan is much more quality oriented and better than China.

Even Germany with brands like Focus and Canyon have succumbed to China.

It is a Shame indeed

I pay the right brand for RnD, back up, customer service, warranty, quality control, sponsoring the sport I love etc. May seem intangible but to me this is all worth paying for.

I'm sure there are open mold frames that are unbranded and good but I wouldn't want to bet my front teeth on that.

By the way the idea that all of China makes inferior product and all of Taiwan makes a quality product is a little blinkered.

With the exception of the high-end stuff, bikes are commodities, and have been for a long time.

What distinguishes one from another will be things like fit, warranty service, branding, aesthetics, trust in the manufacturer. If you're looking at a $2500 CF bike, it doesn't matter whose name is on it, as long as they are reputable.

I personally would avoid the eBay stuff, but I also don't think it will explode at the slightest provocation.


Bikes don't have souls. They are hunks of metal and rubber that can get you from point A to point B.

I see no particular reason why an Italian factory worker has "more soul" than a Taiwanese worker, and any manufacturer that wants to make more than 10 bikes a year is going to need to automate parts of the process.

Feel free to appreciate fine craftsmanship, but if that's what you're into, it's still around and easy to find.

I've seen that article before. While the points sounds reasonable, he pretty much gives no hard data whatsoever to justify any of his claims and fears.

I could write the exact same article commenting on how dangerous your car is because it has parts sourced from Asia that you have NO idea what the process/manufacturing was.

Far, far more compelling is hard data on injuries and frame failures on generic carbon frames from Asia vs major bike manufacturers (likely from the same place.) Unfortunately he doesn't give them, but it doesn't take a skilled searcher to see that on the bike forums, where you pretty much hear about users griping like crazy on any bike failure, there definitely are not a rash of failures with generic carbon frames, especially compared to standard manufacturers.

Makes most of what he says completely negated, despite the 'solid sounding' reasoning behind it. I run into this all the time at work - arguments that sound rationally very plausible, but when you actually look at the most important numbers, it doesn't pan out to be any more than fearmongering.

(As an aside, physicians in ERs and other places would be quick to pick up on any rash of injuries caused by generic CF frames and would issue an early health alert regarding them if such a problem existed. It would be an easy hi-profile publication that would greatly raise your professional reputation. Alas, this increased incidence of CF failures is a total myth.)

Incorrect.

Just because it comes from the same factory doesn't mean it is the same thing with a different sticker. Does GM only make 1 car?

Incorrect.

China does not do R&D. That is done by the brand. China makes stuff to order.

exactly. The physical manufacturing is only one step in the process of making a bike. Bad manufacturing can ruin a good design, but good manufacturing wont help a bad design. Where the negative "Chinese" element comes in for me is when you have a factory that just rips off other peoples designs. You cant really know for sure the knock-offs are manufactured to the same quality specifications as the real deal spec'd by a company that designed the part.

Uh huh.

:popcorn:
:deadhorse:
:trainwreck:

Well, if company A can make what appears to be the same product as company B by stealing their 'designs' and do it for less than half the price I would scratch my head and wonder how this was possible.

Is company B running at massive margins and company A is willing to make next to nothing for their products?

No...this is the bike industry. No-one is making massive margins.

Has company A developed some new, innovative way of producing the same product for less than half the price?

No..they have copied or stolen all of their processes from their 'strategic partners'. They don't do R&D, they just copy and paste.

Well how can company A do it for so much less? Is it MUCH lower labour?

Not as low as you think and wages are rising VERY quickly as are energy cost and other fixed costs.

Then how can company A pull of this miracle of manufacturing? Could it be a difference in material, the fact that no product gets left behind, no R&D and limited liability?

Golly...you may be on to something there.

i've always thought the same thing, but my cousin gets on my ass for not buy high end stuff (being that i'm on a budge) and says i'll regret it once it fails on me...

Great article brad

As long as people care about fashion and what others think they will buy the latest bling bike. I'll admit that I'm guilty of this.

I guess what I'd like to see, instead of a bunch of speculation and scare tactics of "you just don't know" would be somebody taking these frames and tearing them apart to see what they're made of. Until somebody does that, all the discussion in the world is pretty much useless.

And why doesn't Japan manufacture bikes? Or Germany? I have been asked this a few times, to which I answer; It would cost double or triple the price.
Why? Because you are paying for competent skilled craftsman who know exactly what their doing.

I have a 1990 Schwinn KOM S9 MTB, top-o-line for its day and it was made entirely in Japan and it shows.
You do get what you pay for.

Did name brand really matter when it was all just Reynolds 531 anyway?

Yup, that 1990 bike is so good that pros would prefer it over current-gen CF bikes because it was 'handmade' in Japan. Right.....

There's a few factors.
1. No R&D means much lower overhead costs to recoup.
2. Cutting corners - if you talk to anyone who has worked with Chinese manufacturing they will tell you about how they are constantly trying to cut corners, substitute materials and do things cheaper. You have to constantly inspect and watch them like a hawk. Take out the party constantly holding the manufacturing company to the agreed standard and guess what happens to quality.

Sure, you may end up with a product that is still "good enough", or you may not...

While these comments about Chinese manufacturing I do agree with and there are definitely egregious cases of bad manufacturing, I do think that it's different when it comes to CF frame bikes.

- You can't just 'swap out' stuff for carbon that easily. It takes a billion dollarish factory to crank out the frames from the molds. There are zero 'basement builders' in the CF business. If we were talking steel bikes, there would be a far greater margin for cheap substitutions, but CF has a very high barrier to entry, sufficiently that the carbon bike factories are pretty much in China + Taiwan, and that's it. That alone gives you a fairly respectable level of quality.

- Forces required to destroy a carbon frame outside of a crash are extremely rare, if not nonexistent. If cycling involved regular hi-speed collisions that tested the full integrity of the frame day in and out, you'd see a LOT more problems. Truth is, you're rarely involved in anything more than a spill, and if you do wipe out at speeds higher than 15mph and especially if you collide with something, there is NO CF bike manufacturer that will say that the frame failed due to their CF failure and not your user error (and thus will not honor a warrantee in a crash situation.) I think this is the single biggest point people ignore about generic CF frames - we don't subjective them to extremely high forces compared to aviation and other CF applications.

- There are remakably few (less than rare) 'spontaneous catastrophic failures' of these generic frames. In over 4 years of living on multiple forums, I can't think of a single vendor that was singled out as having CF frames that were 'dangerous' or 'faulty' that required mass avoidance. People tried to make BD that enemy, but they've pretty much been silenced in the past 2 years with the quality of the products coming out from there. If anything, generic CF frames are now becoming even more widely accepted - companies like Pedal Force pretty much sell generic CF frames - while they offer more of an identity if anything goes wrong, it's a 99.9999% chance that they'll never need to worry about frame failures given the reasons above.

Or Columbus? Not very much. It's always been a matter of fashion and being fashionable.

Why are bikes different than any other manufactured product in the world. Resistance is futile...