These Are The 8 Bikes To Get Fox Live Valve First For 2019

After years of speculation and rumour, Fox finally announced Live Valve this week. If you want to know what Live Valve is and what it does we have a full write up here, or you can watch our video explanation below. Basically though, the system senses the position of the bike and the forces acting upon the suspension to determine if your shocks should be locked out or not.

The sophisticated box of tricks and related suspension gubbins isn’t cheap and if you were planning on upgrading your current bike to Fox Live Valve you’ll be looking at a bill of around £3000.

To be honest, we don’t expect many people to choose the upgrade route when moving to Live Valve, but rather choose a whole bike fitted with the system out of the box.

Currently, only a handful of manufacturers have confirmed Fox Live Valve equipped bikes, so we’ve gathered the details of each model and listed them below. Where possible we’ve added pricing, but we don’t expect any of these bikes to ship for under £5000!

Rocky Mountain Altitude Carbon

• Travel: 160mm
• Wheelsize: 27.5in
• Fork: Fox 36
• Price: TBC

The Altitude is a 160mm travel enduro bike from Canadian brand Rocky Mountain. A Live Valve equipped Fox 36 is the fork give the front end ample travel to get rowdy, but even with all this squish on tap, the Altitidue is a sprightly ride.

The current top of the range Rocky Mountain Altitude Carbon 90 costs a cool £6999.99 without Fox Live Valve, we can’t wait to see pricing of the new flagship bike.

• Read our review of the Rocky Mountain Altitude without Fox Live Valve here.

Rocky Mountain Instinct Carbon

• Travel: 140mm
• Wheelsize: 29in
• Fork: Fox 34
• Price: TBC

The Instinct gets larger 29in wheels to roll on but slightly less front end travel when compared to the rock gobbling Altitude. A Fox live valve equipped 34 runs up front with 140mm of travel while the rear Live Valve damper controls the matching 140mm of rear wheel travel.

• Read our Rocky Mountain Instinct Carbon review here.

Rocky Mountain Thunderbolt Carbon

• Travel: 130mm
• Wheelsize: 27.5in
• Fork: Fox 34
• Price: TBC

With the least amount of travel of the 3 Rocky Mountain models listed, you would think that the Thunderbolt is the XC race baby, but this isn’t really the case.

While the Live Valve equipped bike has just 130mm of travel, the geometry and build of the Thunderbolt allow it to handle a lot more than the figures suggest. The Thunderbolt, like the Instinct and Altitude, also comes with Rocky Mountain’s Ride9 feature allowing the rider to fine tune geometry.

• Read our Rocky Mountain Thunderbolt review here.

Giant Reign Advanced 27.5

• Travel: 160mm
• Wheelsize: 27.5in
• Fork: Fox 36
• Price: TBC

The Giant Reign Advanced is already available, but for 2019 this carbon enduro bike will get a Live Valve option. It’s interesting that Giant will offer a Fox equipped flagship especially when its own race team is running forks and shocks from rival DVO.

Giant Anthem Advanced Pro 29

• Travel: 100mm
• Wheelsize: 29in
• Fork: Fox 32 Step-Cast
• Price: £7999.00

The 2019 Giant Anthem Advanced claims to have the most up-to-date Maestro suspension platform available paired with Fox Live Valve, meaning an already efficient cross-country race bike might be even faster. Giant hasn’t skimped on the build kit of its pure XC race machine which boasts carbon wheels, a full Shimano XTR drivetrain and a Live Valve equipped Fox 32.

To feel the benefit of Live Valve on the Anthem you’ll need to hand over $11,500 in the U.S or £7,999 here in the UK.

• See the Giant Anthem in more detail with our first look at the 2018 Advanced Pro 29er 1 article.

Scott Spark

• Travel: 120mm
• Wheelsize: 29in
• Fork: Fox 34 Step-cast
• Price: TBC

Earlier in the year Wil reviewed the Scott Spark and commented that normally he isn’t a fan of using lockout levers, but the Spark had changed his mind. We wonder what he would think of a Spark which offers the same versatility and efficiency but automatically switched between suspension settings on the fly?

The current top of the range Scott Spark RC 900 SL costs a cool £9499.00, a lottery win might be needed for us to afford the Fox Live Valve equipped variant.

• Read our review of the Scott Spark here.

Scott Genius

• Travel: 150mm
• Wheelsize: 29in
• Fork: Fox 36
• Price: TBC

Although Fox only officially released Live Valve this week, the cat was already out of the bag at Eurobike 2018 where Wil managed to track it down on a Genius over on the Scott booth. The Scott Genius has long been known to be one of the most efficient big travel bikes on the market, but with this latest suspension wizardry expect it to move to a whole new level both in performance and pricing.

• Read our long-term review of the Scott Genius 900 Tuned here. 

Pivot Mach 5.5

• Travel: 160mm
• Wheelsize: 27.5in
• Fork: Fox 36
• Price: $11,099

The Pivot Mach 5.5 gets 140mm of rear wheel travel mated to a 160mm fork. The carbon framed bike uses a DW link suspension system and a huge 148mm wide rear hub for maximum rear end stiffness. When we attended the launch of the Mach 5.5 last year we spotted the frame had various, unusual mounting points and ports, now we know what they were for.

• Read all about the Pivot Cycles Mach 5.5 here.

Will You Be An Early Adopter?

How likely are you to buy a Fox Live Valve equipped bike in the next couple of months? Are you planning to jump on the new technology bandwagon out of the gates? or do you plan on waiting for the technology to trickle down to lower prices? Let us know in the comments section below.

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