Eric F 

That's valid, IMO. We've seen an evolution of the hybrid category into sub-categories like "fitness" which tends to lean more towards the road bike end of the spectrum with a tighter gear range and narrower tires.

mstateglfr 

I dont know how the Specialized Vita should be categorized as a model, but I would say that this specific bike should be categorized as 'questionable fit'.

msu2001la

Agree. If you look at Specialized, they have an "Active" category that includes "Fitness", "Transport" and "Comfort" bikes. These encompass all of their flat-bar bikes that aren't specifically designed/marketed for off-road use.

It was alluded to earlier in this thread, but the old Road/Hybrid/MTB categorization hasn't worked for a while. Road has many subsets within it. Is it an "encurance" bike? An Aero bike? A lightweight climbing bike? On the MTB side we've got trail, enduro, freeride, cross-country, downhill, etc. It's not hard to envision that gravel could also be similarly subset into "adventure", "endurance", "race", etc.

LesterOfPuppets

I don't think anything sold with a drop bar should be called a hybrid. Flat bar, riser bar, swept flat/riser bars, some alt bars.

Eric F 

Don't forget about "downcountry". I'm still not sure what it is, however.

Schweinhund

It's me how I trail ride that bike, "get that dang seat out of the way" BMX style, lol.
That's just one out of an embarrassing number of bikes.

unterhausen

I always liked high-end hybrids. Never enough to buy one though.

Schweinhund

Build one. It's easy and the investment isn't so abrupt

Trakhak

Don't know about that. I did a search by copying your sentence above and sticking "Do" at the beginning to turn it into a question. First thing that popped up:

"In short: Hybrid bikes have a more relaxed frame geometry and use smooth, wide tires. Mountain bikes also have a relatively relaxed frame geometry but typically use wider, knobby tires. They also have front and rear suspension, making them better suited for rough terrain."

Manufacturers are constantly tweaking their gravel designs, but the broadest accurate definition might be the following: gravel bikes are road bike/mountain bike hybrids that usually feature drop bars and moderately wider and moderately knobbier tires than the traditional hybrid bike.

Eric F 

This was put together by a LBS for one of their customers...


I'd love to have something like this in my stable, but I really don't have anywhere I would actually ride it.

mr,grumpy 

gcn?

prj71

Pretty Simple.

Downhill bikes have slacker head tube angles and 140mm or more suspension travel

Cross Country Bikes have a steeper head tube angle and 100-120 mm of suspension travel.

So Downcountry is a combination of both...Slack head tube angle with ~120mm of suspension.

Transition Spur or Spot Ryve is a perfect example of this.

https://www.transitionbikes.com/Bikes_Spur.cfm

https://spotbikes.com/products/ryve-...40982835331106

LesterOfPuppets

What about Downcountry vs All Mountain and Enduro?

XC and DH bikes are pretty easy to define, but Downcountry, AM, Enduro and Trail...

Trail just makes me think cheaper, heavier XC bike with maybe 20mm more travel

Downcountry I figured was a slightly easier to pedal DH bike.
I'm not sure which between AM and Enduro is easier to pedal. Maybe Enduro is basically AM, but less of a pig? I dunno.

So I decided to look at some downcountry bikes. Looks like they're more XC than trail bikes, aren't as cheap or heavy as a trail bike?

tyrion

Downcountry is a hybrid of trail and XC.

Eric F 

Hybrid?? Wait…that’s a totally different category. 🤪

Dino_Sore

The voices inside my head.

prj71

Correction...hybrid of downhill and XC.

Jeff Neese

I have a '91 Trek 750 that was sold as a hybrid. It's essentially a 520 touring bike with upright bars. I've since put drop bars on it, but in either configuration it's a great bike. If I somehow had to get down to just one bike, that might be the one.

bikemig 

The Bridgestone XO series was one of the early attempts to build a bike for gravel road though the marketing material wrote about "fire" roads. Unlike the hybrids of the day, some of the XO series had road bike geometry and were built around 26 inch wheels. In the early 90s, if you wanted a bike with fat tires, 26 inch wheels were a good choice. This is my 1993 Bridgestone XO 2. The bars (a nicely flared out Nitto handlebars) and stem (a Nitto dynamic which holds the bars a bit higher than many quill stems) are original to the bike.

msu2001la

Is the owner's other bike a drop bar fat bike?

This looks like the kind of bike that gets hung on a wall of a downtown C-suite office. I can imagine someone ripping through traffic on this while wearing a suit, or terrorizing the local MUP on weekends. In reality those tires and carbon rim-brake wheels would compromise it as a commuter, and the flat bar compromises it as a go-fast road bike.

It's the perfect road bike for people who don't want to look like a road cyclist, and also don't really ride that much.

LesterOfPuppets

That's what I thought 'til last night. Nothing DH at all about 'em. I think what threw me is having "down" in the name.

They're basically just slightly less racy than XC bikes, more racy than Trail bikes, as far as I can tell.

Eric F 

This isn't the owner's bike. It was built for a customer. I don't know anything more about it. This particular LBS sells a lot of high-end Euro bikes (Pinarello, Colnago, BMC, Time...), and has a lot of customers with money to spend on whatever they want. Personally, I find the configuration intriguing. I could see this as a bike for making a short ride to a local coffee shop where I don't want to go through all the business of putting on a kit and bike shoes. If that was any part of the routine of my life, I would totally build something along these lines.

msu2001la

Yeah, sorry - my comment wasn't very clear. I was thinking the bike's owner, not the shop's owner. This is easily an $8k+ bike with a very narrow use range, so I was definitely thinking it is probably owned by a CEO, or maybe a dentist.

Eric F 

Reading your comment again, I misinterpreted what you meant by "owner". My mistake.

Yeah. This is a bike for someone with a large amount of disposable income, who probably has a stable full of other high-end machines. A few of my bike-riding friends fit that category. I could easily see this as a bike they would have at a vacation home.

cellery

It's not a new trend. Bike makers, including the Big-3 were calling these flat bar gravel bikes as far back as 2013. Mfgr's had build options that included flat bars for a lot of frames going back 10 years under the gravel banner and not hybrid banner. Do y'all not remember this very specific marketing scheme going back at least a decade? What's are we considering "new", time-frame wise here? The more budget friendly and mass market Poseidon had flat bar options for years. It was never marketed as a hybrid.

EDIT: It just occurs to me that I've been riding a Specialized AWOL "gravel touring bike" since 2016. Between 2021 until early 2023, it had flat bars on it. Otherwise, I ran drop bars. Through all of its life it has been ridden on the following: good paved roads, bad paved roads, gravel roads, jeep roads, paved bike paths, unpaved bike paths, doubletrack, singletrack - technical and non-technical actual cross country open desert terrain with no "track" to speak of. Open washes, literally all terrains. It fits at best 2.2" mtb tires. I call it an ATB, and I think that's a better term than either hybrid or gravel. And that's my opinion.