Surely this is nothing new? High end has always been just that.

I remember bikes in the early nineties carbon and titanium hard tails at £3k plus – that was 20+ years ago!

With road bikes at well over that price, something with suspension front and back seems quite good value really

That money gets you an all singing all dancing MX bike that would happily sit on the start gate at a GP and have a chance of winning.

If you want light, stiff and strong then it’ll cost big. If there’s a market for that then why wouldn’t you make it?

Don’t wish to sound like a socialist with a chip on my shoulder, but couldn’t agree more with binners!

Evolution will push the price of bikes up to a point, as will increasing costs of raw materials, shipping etc. But the biggest factor determining RRP’s of bikes, bearing in mind that this is a hobby/passtime not something that is necessary to live with, is simply “how much someone is willing to pay for it”. An as binners says, get yourself up to Llandegla on a weekend, and clearly you’ll see lots of people who are very cash rich, and probably quite time poor, who are prepared to spend several times what you or I would decree is a “decent” amount for a bike.

You can still get an exceptionally good MTB these days for less than £1k if you’re savvy and not a brand snob, and certainly £2k can buy you more than you’d ever need unless you’re on the cutting edge of competition.

There are also plenty of middle income mincers with medium amounts of disposable income. Why would being well paid and affluent make you any more of a target for ridicule?

I like to think of myself as not being a mincer and having a wife with a well paid job. Should I also be castigated for having an expensive bike?

Should I also be castigated for having an expensive bike?

Well, in your case, there’s such a wealth of material that we can leave the bike out of it 🙂

£1,000,000 for a Veyron, what a rip off! You could get like 50 top end Mondeos for that!

There’s always going to be someone happy to pay top dollar, so there’s always going to be companies selling things at that price. I can’t think of a market in which this doesn’t apply.

Besides, sounds cheap to me, you could buy the top end model of every major brand for less than the price of this toilet.

Well, in your case, there’s such a wealth of material that we can leave the bike out of it

Good job I’m sat on the loo. Just pissed myself laughing at that!

Binners knock yourself out. Don’t stop with the poor either. Those bloody immigrants should be next.

Always love it when these threads come up. Apparently if you’ve got yourself into a situation where you can afford to buy the best bit of kit, whether your riding ability warrants it or not, in the view of the STW socialist massive you are a ‘mug’. To be honest it generally smacks of nothing more than jealousy.

It’d get you an off the shelf bike. Built in far bigger numbers than any mountainbike.

http://www.honda.co.uk/motorcycles/offroad/#!/crf450r/

You could buy a £6k bike 10 years ago, why is this news?

Infact throw any combination of Fox Fit kashima coated forks, a carbon frame, carbon finishing kit, XTR and some nice wheels together and it’d be over £6k. Comparably, have you seen what you can get for £400-£500 these days, damped forks, disk brakes, 3×10 gears etc, you can even get all-mountain suspension bikes that actualy work for under a grand, a few years ago the giant VT was hailed for bringing loads of suspension tot he mass market for £1400 when the cheepest spesh was £2k!

Back in 2005 I went for a ‘money is almost no object do it all bike’ I ended up with an SX trail, which cost about £2650 iirc. I’m still riding it.

Prices have indeed gone mental.

I reckon anyone who says wouldn’t buy the very best kit that they could afford is either a liar, or a bit odd

Its just supply and demand innit? As the popularity of cycling has increased, demand for bikes has, thus prices. You certainly don’t see discounted bikes, frames of kit like you did a few years back.

If the manufacturers/retailers can shift kit at full RRP, then they will. If they then sell out the stuff they’re listing at full RRP, then the RRP is going to get bumped up the subsequent year

You can buy a Team GB Olympic track bike for about £20k……

is that in jest? my stiffee cost £3K in 2002.. oooerr

edit – that wasn’t willy waving – just a point that a lot of bikes cost far more in times gone past.

When it comes to these prices bear in mind import duties, VAT etc
I speak as a middle aged man who could build his SC Blur TRc up for around 3k GBP due to a complete lack of import duties or sales taxes where I live.

You could say the same thing about cars. Some people will spend 500k on their car. If they want it and can afford it, so what.

Just out of interest, the cost price between the lowest spec Porsche Boxter and the most expensive 911 you can buy is £8k. So a 911 GT3 RS has got a hell of a mark up…

other way round, surely?

I like my sub £200, eBay parts built singlespeeds. Perhaps it’s because I’m a frugal Yorkshireman. More likely it’s because no amount of money spent on a bike will have as big an effect as getting fitter. That said, if you can afford one and want one then the quality of parts available to me in a couple of years on eBay. 😀