Rolla

You mean the business model under which bike manufacturers build frames and then put components on them that are made by parts manufacturers? Yeah, that's not the "majority" of the industry, it's the entirety.

BTW, Specialized makes saddles, tires, pedals, handlebars, and stems, but I'm sure there's some reason why this doesn't count.

Eric F 

Ummm....What?

big john

Because that's what high end bike buyers are thinking about when they shop for a bike.

tomato coupe

That, and whether the bike will still be rideable in 120 years.

Eric F 

The same way that Ferrari buyers consider towing capacity and cargo space.

big john

I've broken 3 steel frames and an aluminum one. Also rust damaged a steel frame with my caustic sweat. So those frames didn't make it to 120 years.

Eric F 

But did they asplode like crabon fiber does after the paint get scuffed?

big john

lol, no, but the aluminum one almost broke in half.

Lombard

Huh? What are you doing to these bikes that your frames are breaking? Did you crash them?

big john

Nope. I just break things. Not so much now that I'm old.

Lombard

Or............

Lombard

Don't feel bad. I doubt any of us do.

wolfchild

Have you ever broken a carbon frame ?

Rolla

Fatigue life, stress risers, and weld weakness can all contribute to failure; it's not always an impact. I've had two Gary Fishers (both steel) and a custom-built steel frame break at the drive-side chainstay just behind the bottom bracket. A friend's Dean titanium frame cracked under the downtube, just behind the head tube. None of these bikes had been crashed; all were covered by their manufacturer's warranty.

big john

No but all my road bikes have been metal. I do have a full carbon enduro bike and I haven't broken it yet. It will be 5 years old in a couple months.

Kontact 

That's almost always where steel bikes fail if there isn't impact or rust involved.

Keefusb

There are many GCN videos on YouTube where they compare state of the art carbon bikes with steel, aluminium, and titanium bikes of the past. In most cases, the only areas where the new bikes are clearly superior is reduced weight that results in easier climbing, and easier acceleration. Other areas such as descending speed and stability, ride quality, handling, etc. are generally just as good and sometimes better than the new bikes.

My age and overall ability at this stage of my life make it difficult for me to justify a new $14k bicycle. Plus, I'm pretty happy with my steel Eddy Merckx and my steel Paramount. I won't be winning any crits or hill climbs, but a top of the line vintage steel bike has a place in many people's bike stable.

PeteHski

I don't think anyone would argue otherwise. But a certain sub-set of riders with older bikes like to state how clever they are and how dumb other people are for choosing newer tech, especially if it's expensive. These are their favourite self-justification threads. The OP's list of bikes says it all.

Eric F 

The best-handling bike I've ever ridden is my 2003 Time. It's quick handling, but very predictable and sure-footed when cornering at high speed. Time got it absolutely right for a high-performance bike, and it would be my template if I was to have a custom bike built for myself. By contrast my 2018 Storck is twitchy and nervous, but it's 2 lbs lighter, and feels quicker to respond to power. My Storck is my #1 road bike because it excites me - ride and appearance.

Keefusb

Back in the racing days, I rode a Cannondale R900 2.8 with a Profile carbon fork. It was light, and you could feel the power from your legs going right down to the rear tire, but those cantilevered seat stays and the overall stiffness of the frame made for a chattery, non-compliant ride, even at a 60cm frame size.

My son now has the Cannondale as a city bike (Baltimore). My tired old bones prefer the snappy comfort of lugged steel nowadays. I hear modern carbon bikes are compliant yet stiff and have much better ride characteristics than they used to, I'm just not ready to plunk down the big coin for an expensive new carbon ride.

Eric F 

If you shop carefully, you can get a hot CF bike from a few years ago for medium coin. Over the past 2 years, I've done exactly that for road, gravel, and MTBs, and am very happy with my current stable.

Jughed

My old road bike was a CADD 3 Cannondale R800. It was everything you said. You could feel the power going to wheel, felt like no power was lost. But the thing would rattle the fillings out of your head.

My new road bike is a modern aluminum version of that bike, Trek ALR 5. The frames are worlds apart - in comparison, the Trek is smoother/more "compliant", but is also stiff & has decent power transfer.

PeteHski

The ironic thing here is that power was actually lost in rattling your fillings. Very little power is ever lost in transferring power through the frame to the wheel, but plenty is lost in vibration from the road surface and worse still you have to absorb that lost energy in your body - increasing your fatigue over a ride.

Maelochs

This proves that either you are disingenuous or unable to comprehend your own posts.

WHY will a Rolex gain value? Why does a Rolex cost so much to begin with? How can a Rolex be "worth the price" if most people only wear watches as fashion accessories and tell time with their phones? I have a $3 Timex which is far more accurate than any Rolex. The Rolex is therefore hideously overpriced .... yet you are defending it because ....

Because you inherently understand that "value" is not defined by the things you Pretend it is defined by in you considerations of bicycle value. Because you understand that "value" is indeed "what people are willing to pay." You prove this by using the rising price of the Rolex as an example. You are not suggesting that people are going to sell their Rolexes to recoup the sale price. You ar3e simply saying that the imaginary value (just as with stocks you don't sell which "gain" and "lose" value depending on the market, unrealized watch sale profits are purely imaginary) of that Rolex justifies paying a huge amount of money for an inferior product.

So ... you understand that value is determined by the people who care about---who Value---that item. To you the Rolex is "worth the price" because to You, personally, it is worth the price. The unrealized potential resale value isn't an issue because you are not talking about resale. And the Appraised value, which you mention, rises Not because the watch gets better with time, but because people Value it more. The appraised value is a measure not of the parts and pieces or the labor to assemble the watch, it is a measure of how much people Want the watch. So clearly you understand why a Rolex costs so much, and equally, you understand why a $14,000 (which isn't even that expensive any more) costs so much.

Yet you Pretend not to understand when it comes to the bicycle.

Either you are a sub-bridge resident, or just not a very honest person. I hope you improve either your humor or your character---or both.

Trakhak

Another unappreciated factor in the equation, at least for the U.S. bike market, is that for many decades, bikes were ridden almost exclusively by children and were therefore part of the toy market. Margins were thin for manufacturers and retailers alike, but costs were low at the point of sale, since the three or four models of single-speed balloon-tire bikes that dominated the market took only a few minutes for low-paid staffers in department stores and hardware stores to assemble.

Sales of more-sophisticated bikes to adults in the U.S. began to increase slowly in the 1960s but really took off during the early-'70s bike boom. Unfortunately for the specialty bike shops that began springing up, the costs of assembly and warranty work went way up (to say nothing of the cost of maintaining sufficient inventory in all the brands and models and sizes and colors of bikes and all their components or of all the other costs of doing business), but the profit margins remained the same. (Ironically, profit margins elsewhere in the toy industry increased dramatically over the same time period.)

Margins in the bike industry stayed essentially the same until carbon bikes started to be a real presence. Love carbon bikes or hate them, people regard them as representing a paradigm shift in technology in the industry. They enabled manufacturers and retailers to begin to pull prices up from the toy industry profit margins that bike buyers had enjoyed and industry professionals had suffered from for decades. (Compare what happened during the couple of years when CDs were supplanting vinyl records. Once the machinery was in place, CDs were far cheaper to manufacture and distribute than LPs, but the CD prices were much higher.)

So, as a former bike store manager, I'm happy to see the prices that higher-end bikes have reached, especially since they've enabled a more general (if more modest) increase in margins that applies to other bikes and equipment. It's about time prices got to where bike store owners could afford to make a decent living.

Too bad the even more recent changes, including ever-expanding consolidation of formerly independent bike shops into networks of company-owned stores, have ensured that most of those store owners won't be able to survive in the bike industry for much longer.