Barrettscv 

Electric assist. It's an existing technology and the size of the potential market is huge.

Sully151

Sully151

Elvo

That is typical socal "gravel" and those look pretty tame compared to the rutted rock gardens in the coastal areas.

Sully151

So would you want suspension on a SoCal gravel bike?

Skankingbiker

So .... like steel? also there are a few small companiez selling 'vibration dampening' stems and seatposts

Spoonrobot 

The future of gravel bikes is trending more and more to “mountain bike lite” when it should be “beefy road bike”.

My next gravel bike is going be discs, 1” threadless and maybe even standard tubing if I can get it at the right price point.

Skankingbiker

we we have the opposite going on here to Wisconsin. A lot of the rural roads are so bad and local communities do not have the funds to pave them so they are reverting back to gravel

Marcus_Ti

Only your rural roads?

Up in Omaha Nebraska...a metro area sprawl with over half-a-million people....they got national attention a year ago for turning a residential street where rich dentists/lawyers live into a gravel road:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/07/u...vel-roads.html

That one midwest city has about 5,000 miles of roads in need of work; with an estimated price-tag of $300,000,000USD. Which is about 30% of the annual tax-income of the entire state of Nebraska. Just to temporarily fix the roads in one city. After the dentists/lawyers complained and sued the city--the "reclamation" of roads-not-fit-for-navigation was halted.

unterhausen

I think future gravel bikes will have clearance for bigger tires. Seems like the bulk of them are stuck at 40mm. I am shooting for at least 50mm and 60mm would be nice. Designers just can't break their pointless short chainstay habit. I'm sure more bikes will have suspension, but there will be plenty of full rigid bikes too.

Marcus_Ti

Well 50+mm in 700C tires starts causing lots of problems WRT frame and fork design. You start interfering with the FD clearance, also chainring clearance...as well as needing to get creative about chainstay design.

There's also the reality that if 45mm won't do...you're likely better suited to a fatbike due to pea gravel or otherwise loose surface that a 45-60mm will just sink in to

Spoonrobot 

The marginal difference between 45-55-60 is larger than you're giving credit. ~40mm is only the current max because the institutional knowledge and market experience wasn't present for most gravel bike manufacturers to make their bikes with larger clearance. The tires also weren't/aren't really there yet. There's only a few good 55mm tires that aren't re-purposed mountain bike tires - overly heavy and aggressive tread. There are sections of gravel in the Cohutta Wilderness Area ring roads I had a hard time climbing on 45mm tires that felt normal on 55mm and the difference in descending was obvious as well.

Having the jump be from 45->90+ is kinda silly and doesn't make much sense. Fatbikes are a completely different set of issues, parts and so forth. A gravel bike with 60mm max clearance shares most of it's compatibility with 29er MTBs or regular gravel bikes and is much easier to integrate into a normal bike set-up.

Something like the Rodeo Trail Donkey 3.0 is a good indicator of the design choices required. 57mm for 650b, 50mm for 700c. Bearclaw Thunderhawk is another - marked max as 700x46 (actual is closer to 52 for frame and 60mm for fork) and 650bx60mm. Takes 2x with max 52/36, right chainstay is a plate. I've seen and ridden both bikes in person and they're really complex designs compared to a more normal 45mm max gravel bike. Also eye-wateringly expensive. But I think they're a great look into what people want and what they're buying. The two guys who bought the TD/TH were on regular 40mm gravel bikes and didn't like the ride so they specifically went and found bikes with bigger clearance. I think that's a large portion of people who are interested in or already riding gravel. They like doing it but decide or determine their current bike just doesn't have enough comfort or the narrower tires are making it harder skill wise than it needs to be. Gravel on 55+ tires knocks the skill requirements down a lot, especially when the road gets rough or points downhill.

The Koga beach racer is another interesting bike with huge clearance but designed specifically for one set of 60mm 700c tires.

Lemond1985

I would not think so. In CA, you can mostly get by with an old road bike running 32's, due to the dry climate. Where are you located?

Also, I notice that almost no one who pushes the "widest possible possible gravel bike tires" idea seems to be from California, many seem to be from the south and areas where I would expect a lot of mud. In So Cal, mud is the rare exception rather than the rule.

gus6464

700x40/42/450 rear and 650x2.1 front is where it's at.

Marcus_Ti

How much are TD3 or the Koga like tortoise on stilts in terms of stability? I almost bought the TD2.1, but the square tubing and my old roof racks wouldn't get along and the 65mm BB was too high I figured.

I'd rather have my bb even lower than the 71mm drop my Carver has when running 40mm+ class tires...of course its rating of 45mm max is conservative as well (it too has a yoke-plate like the GR250 and GR270 from Lynskey)--I could probably run 50mm if I wanted but tires being that big start being dedicated non-compacted surface riding use rather than general use.

unterhausen

I see my previous reply was a little too pithy. I think that the current crop of 40mm tired bikes will continue to be available. I think if I was going to buy a carbon road bike, that's what I would look at. I just think that it's going to be more common to see bikes with bigger tires on them.

2.25 knobbies fit on a number of gravel oriented bikes now. That's probably about a 60mm gravel tire with smaller knobs. It's just that designers are stuck with the desire for 420mm stays. Move the rear hub back some and there is no problem. And I think that 1x is going to be more popular, even though I can't make myself use it yet. The fact that small builders are designing with this size tire in mind means that the big bike brands are going to go to NAHBS, see that this is popular and copy it. Granted, it's still going to be a niche within a niche, because I think bikes that take 40mm tires will still be available. That's a really nice tire side if you are living with crummy road surfaces.

Sully151

Spoonrobot 

I'm not sensitive to BB drop, and I haven't ridden the Koga just the TD3 and the TH. They're both higher trail and really just an iteration further from gravel->mtb without being full blown MTB. I like the TD3 a ton and if I had an unlimited budget I'd get one in a heart beat. The TH seemed a little dead but that may have just been the tires and fork. They both seem like really good bikes.

wipekitty

Wisconsin is an interesting case. In theory, the roads are mostly paved to make transport easier for the dairy industry.

In my part of the state (the west side, central to south), a couple of major flood events have wrecked a ton of the rural roads. There's a few I used to ride on that have been closed for two seasons, and others that got wrecked just last fall. Wisconsin somehow ran out of money for normal road repair...these rural roads in the middle of nowhere are kind of a topic of least concern by folks making decisions on the other side of the state (as I understand it anyhow).

Minnesota's got no problem with gravel. It's kind of fun to go on a road ride and magically discover halfway through a descent that it's gone gravel!!! Wisconsin seems to be new to this game.

unterhausen

the county south of here is going gravel on a lot of rural roads. One road I ride on occasionally has 100' of aging asphalt in front of every house, to keep the dust down. More and more roads there are being converted to gravel. I expect any road that mostly has farms on it will be gravel fairly soon. I assume they recycle it for construction projects elsewhere in the county. It's sad, but there is no money there. I figure that my road bike is going to need 38mm tires soon. Which doesn't bother me too much.

Marcus_Ti

I'm kind of surprised they were ever paved in the first place. Then again out here there's even fewer people and money....with the average farmer working 1000+ acres of land, and the population density is sub 1 capita/km^2

Basically, out in Farm country, only the major highways in any county are paved and the city streets in any town...everything else is gravel/dirt and MMR....which is great now that gravel bikes are a thing....but terrible for paved roadie cyclists.

Koyote

I'm not sure that gravel bikes have much future. I suspect that enough of the interested riders already have bought gravel bikes (some have multiple gravel bikes).

Rather, I think the industry will soon move on to pushing the next bike genre that will have us all looking for the n+1.

wipekitty

I think that's right. My SO (from Lincoln) commented on how cutesy the farms were around Wisconsin/Minnesota when we first moved here. It's a bit of a different world from the sprawling farms in Nebraska, or the even more sprawling ranches further west.

unterhausen

there was a big push to pave farm roads in many areas of the country, including Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania can get a lot of rain. There has been a lot of consolidation of farms, which means during harvest there are lots of trucks on the road going from fields to grain storage. Could be bad if the roads were muddy gravel

Happy Feet

I wonder this myself; especially if gravel biking continues the trend towards basically a road bike with off road tires.

It seems there is not enough differentiation to justify a seperate bike when you already have cyclocross as a genre. For myself I would resist buying a whole new bike in favour of tweaking an existing road bike for that.

To justify a new purchase I would need a more rugged design that fills the gap between what I can do with a road bike and what now requires a hardtail trail mtb.