Originally Posted by
Atlas Shrugged
Top-tier bike prices have increased more than inflation. It was interesting to learn about the reasons behind these costs. Firstly, the newer component groups are more complex and have tight tolerances, which increases research, development and manufacturing costs exponentially. Secondly, high-end frames are expensive to manufacture and come with significant development and tooling costs that need to be incorporated into the final price. Finally, modern top-tier bikes are much more advanced than their predecessors, with increased customization and complexity. Therefore, it's unfair to compare them with their equivalents from decades ago, just like comparing an original 911 to a modern GT3/RS.
On the surface, those sound like legitimate reasons for the price increases far outpacing inflation. The issue is that it basically assumes no research, development or manufacturing costs were involved for the baseline bikes. The fact is that those were at the cutting edge of technology at their time and it took just as much R&D to get to that point and to manufacture. The lessons learned from the previously incurred R&D cost is used to build upon with new R&D. The whole idea is that things continually improve and become better because all these incremental improvements over time compound. Their excuse is basically saying that engineering and manufacturing is not improving, so none of those processes have been made more efficient and the new processes are extremely inefficient to add miniscule improvements for high costs. Improving upon existing carbon frame design to improve aero/compliance/weight should not be more time consuming and resource intensive than it was to develop carbon bike manufacturing from scratch. Even aero advancements and wind tunnel testing of tube shapes was being done before the recent drastic acceleration of price increases. Adding an 11th and 12th cog to the cassette didn't require exotic materials or breakthroughs in design or manufacturing.
They've been seeing how much they could raise prices before consumers responded by not purchasing. It seems we have or are reaching that point. Maybe they've been able to get away with wasting tons of money on cost ineffective methods to chase minimal improvements because people were still buying the bikes, and for a while supply was reduced due to all the Covid supply chain issues. That may have hidden the fact that there were less people willing to pay the high prices, because there were still enough to buy what was being made available. Now that the supply chain is allowing them to produce more, they're sitting because there aren't more buyers willing to drop 10-15k on a top end bike, or 7-10k on a mid tier bike.