Cyclist
Opinion: Stop griping about the price of bikes
As Cyclist magazine editor, I receive three main types of letters from readers. Type one begins, ‘Dear Pete, love the magazine, and you might be interested in publishing the story of the time I…’ Type two goes, ‘Love the magazine, but gravel riding is the work of the Devil and should be…’ Type three says, ‘Love the magazine, but how on Earth is anyone supposed to be able to afford the bikes you review?’
Type three is among the most popular (note that no one writes to say they don’t love the magazine, bless you all). And what can I say? It’s true, the bikes we showcase are often really expensive. Recently we have covered a Giant TCR at £12,000, a Colnago C68 Allroad at £14,000 and a Seven Axiom at £14,300. Even our latest issue (available now at the Cyclist Shop) includes an Orbea at £12,000. You can get a good second-hand car for that money. So is this just the bike industry taking us all for a bunch of mugs?
Actually, I would argue that we should all stop getting so hot under the collar whenever we’re presented with a lot of noughts.
Splashing the cash
Bikes are high-tech. Taking something unbelievably light and making it even lighter requires huge investment in materials and moulds, plus months of trying carbon fibre layups and creating and testing prototypes. Then there’s aerodynamics – CFD modelling and testing in wind-tunnels – and developing features such as fully internal cable routing. And that’s all before the costs of manufacturing, marketing, UCI registration, pro team sponsorship, global distribution, retail overheads and ten-year contracts with Mathieu van der Poel are taken into account.
When you compare a top-end race bike to something like an Hermès Birkin handbag – £25,000-plus for a few bits of leather stitched together – then suddenly the bike seems like a bargain. And I’m pretty certain the Hermès Birkin hasn’t been optimised for minimal drag at 12° yaw.
What’s more, comparing a bike to a designer handbag isn’t entirely flippant, because the bikes featured in Cyclist are luxury items. Just like the clothes you wear and the handbag you carry, the bike you ride says a lot about the person you are. Like it or not, road bikes are status symbols, and brands are want their bikes to be highly covetable. They do this partly by looks and performance, partly by association with top pros and partly by price.
An expensive bike is a desirable bike and the most expensive is the most desirable. This is why if brand X prices its top bike at £10,000, brand Y feels the need to price its own at £11,000. Of course, this results in a pricing arms race to the point where the pricetag ceases to have any relation to the intrinsic worth of the bike and everyone sits down to write a letter to the editor of a cycling magazine.
But do you know what? It’s all OK. Why? Because no one is making you buy the top-end bike in any brand’s range.
The top bike (and we usually feature the top model of any line-up) is the shop window, the tease, the drool-worthy lure, built for the pros and bearing that outrageous pricetag. But further down the line-up will be very similar-looking bikes of almost equal performance and at a much more accessible price point. Those are the ones you buy, and they’re worth it because they will boast the tech that has trickled down from the top.
See, the prices aren’t mad. They are like they are for a reason, and it all makes sense if you can just get past the initial rage and incredulity that is generated by all those noughts.
Finishing touches
Having said that, I do have a bone to pick with the big brands and their top-end models. I saw a guy the other day riding a sleek black-and-red Colnago, and stuffed in his bottle cages were a pair of bright yellow PowerBar water bottles. It totally ruined the look.
So come on, bike brands. If you’re going to put a five-figure pricetag on your super-luxury, high-performance race bike, at least give us some matching bidons. I bet Hermès wouldn’t make that mistake.
• This article originally appeared in issue 153 of Cyclist magazine. Click here to subscribe
The post Opinion: Stop griping about the price of bikes appeared first on Cyclist.